THE HIPPOGRIFF

Nescio; sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I do not know ... but I feel it happening to me and am racked by it.

Catullus, 85

PART ONE

Scoronconcolo, bring me my cloak of light. I want to stroll in a garden, where the shade will open wide my eyes. But above all, no work - at any price!

On the way to Bagatelle we shall stop by the lakes to see the animals there. Animals we love, because they never lie. That was why man reduced them to slavery: they reminded him of truth.

Happy is the life that begins with ambition and ends with no other aspiration than to throw bread to ducks! Here they come, trailing long triangles in their wake, each with its individual geometry that intersects the geometries traced by the others, while the water swells gently beneath the pressure of their plump breasts. Some have little green lanterns in place of heads. How beautiful they are when they feel an impluse to be gay, when they rise up, and balancing themselves on their tails, flap their wings enthusiastically: they remind one of Members of Parliament putting on a show of indignation. Suddenly they dive, leaving only a quizzical rump in the air. This position is slightly indecent when swans adopt it. But with ducks it scarcely matters, because ducks are so much smaller.

Which reminds me, by the way, of the scoter-ducks on the Lake of Tunis. They perform a little pirouette as they float on the light swell. One feels what fun it is for them to let themselves go, just as one guesses the idea at the back of their heads, which is to imitate those celluloid ducks that are the pride of every well-bred bathroom.

But I haven't yet finished with the ducks. How charming they are when they fly! How can a man (unless he is starving) bring himself to aim a gun at them? The sight of their happy freedom would cure us of the pangs of love, if we suffered from them, but luckily we don't. How swiftly they fly, striving to catch up with the leader ducks, who have chosen and imposed a direction on the flight: I fancy they must be bringing good news to someone. Then, having caught up, they all fly in line abreast. Clearly they are proud of their impeccable alignment. They have too much sense to want to overtake one another. They leave that to men....

Bagatelle. These long hours in a garden are perhaps the best thing in our lives; there at least is something that takes the weight off your eyelids. And let me hear no more about adorable creatures; dream-land for me at present is to be rid of them. Today I abandon myself to the flowers and the foliage - they have the decency not to love me - and the milk of the day is warm in my mouth. It is that precious moment when the soul, having had its fill, dreams of the time when it will thirst again.

Such is evidently not the frame of mind of my dear confrère, Pierre Costals - the devil take him! I see him walking there, flanked by an extremely pretty girl in deep mourning. This young person has apparently just lost her father or her mother, a godsend for a gigolo: under such circumstances, what woman would not need some relaxation? Costals is holding forth, as though he were giving a lecture. And she walks on (what a ravishing gait! - long-legged, and so natural ...), with her eyes glued to the toes of her shoes. Here I am, three yards behind them; it would be nice to overhear a remark that I could use against him some day. But they stop under an archway of rocks. Embrace. I hear: 'Cloc ... cloc ... cloc....' I remember that line from a youthful poem of Costals':

The lovers' kisses like the sound of dropping turds.

The resemblance had never struck me before. Why, yes, dear confrère: that's exactly it.

Let us leave them. The weapons to be used against him are in his books. I admit he has some talent. But he irritates me, and there's nothing I can do about it. In the last resort, what do I feel about him? I am waiting for him to die.

Two o'clock. The garden is filling up again. A healthy organism suddenly invaded by microbes. I want to go down this way; a man is there already. Retrace my steps? People there, too. I'm surrounded. Even where no one is to be seen, someone is whistling at the top of his lungs behind a bush, and with this noise, invisible though he is, he sets up against me his own conception of the universe, which is vulgarity itself. People pour into the garden from every side. I am not of their kind. If they realize this, what will they do to me? I think of those small divinities of the woods and springs who remained on earth for a time after the advent of Christianity, always on the alert. No myth has ever touched me more.

Before leaving, as a souvenir of the garden I pick up a stone, cool as the necks of the young. But I do not know why I have picked it up, since I shall throw it away in a few minutes. Perhaps simply in order to be able to throw it away.

On the way out, I pass a pretty girl sitting by the succulent grass on the edge of a walk. She is smoking, and studying a list of share prices. My face, which had relaxed, stiffens again. Lines reappear which the glow reflected from the foliage had effaced. I must go back to the world of men, I must begin to hate once more. Scoronconcolo, take back my cloak of light.

After lunching with Solange in a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, Costals had taken her to the Bagatelle gardens.

At their second meeting, in May, he had told her how surprised he was that such a pretty girl should still be unmarried. Answer: she had had several offers, but would only marry a man who attracted her. Costals knew how rash it was to be the first to talk of marriage, and it was out of a natural tendency to rashness that he had done so. Seneca has a famous phrase for woman: animal impudens. Add one letter and you have man: animal imprudens. After that, the subject of marriage had been dropped.

Today, again, it was he who broached the subject point- blank:

'Marriage without divorce. Christian marriage, is a monstrosity for men. Completely against nature. Man's instinct is to grow tired of what he is accustomed to, and yet he's expected to remain faithful to a woman who loses some of her attractiveness every week. A husband of fifty-five who isn't a moron is still in the prime of life: how can he be satisfied with a woman of fifty unless he's a pervert? If he does it out of a sense of duty, nature rebels, and his health suffers. All the most intelligent doctors I know advise men of that age, if they are at all virile, to be unfaithful. Christian marriage is the basis for a whole multitude of offences against reason and nature - but then that is the very essence of Christianity: quia absurdum. You'd think the "jealous" god wanted man to be miserable, and created him stupid so that in his stupidity he would deliberately seek out the conditions that make for misery. As far as I'm concerned, I'll tell you this: the upper age-limit for a woman if she is to be considered desirable by yours truly is roughly twenty-six. As for the lower limit, better not mention it. An Arab naturalist of old, who has deservedly become a classic case as a result of similar characteristics, tells us that the hare changes sex every six months. For me, a woman changes sex at twenty- six or twenty-seven, and ceases to be a woman to become something one no longer desires. Do you think I would want to kiss you, let alone all the rest, when you're fifty? Not to mention the moral transformation: a woman, after marriage, can change morally as well as physically, can become a different person, as a boy of sixteen may become a different person from the one he was at fourteen. One would be venturing into the unknown.'

Suddenly, like a bird flitting from a branch, a little girl jumped down from a bench.

Continuously though she turned the idea of marriage over in her head, Solange could not have been less prepared to counter these observations with judicious arguments. She listened, with an air of some constraint, without saying a word. He went on:

'An average man can marry. But if a man who's at all exceptional marries, woe betide him. Great men's marriages are the part of their lives they hate to admit. A wife is a source of worry, and an exceptional man must have serenity of mind. A writer, for instance, must be able to regulate, measure out what he gets from life, turn on or off at will the tap marked life and the tap marked work. One writer [Emile Clermont.] has said something to this effect: "What I need are flat, level days, empty days, so empty that even love and friendship would disturb them." Such empty days are essential for reflection, conception and creation. And of course, there would be no question, as Flaubert exaggeratedly demanded, of empty days all the time. But empty days in one's own good time. For that, a man must not be dependent on anybody else, must not cohabit with anybody, and must have no business commitments. A creative man should be able to forget his wife and children. That is impossible, and besides, what is the point of marrying in order to forget you're married? I've tried living with women three times. With all three of them I quarrelled almost as soon as our cohabitation began. It's as automatic as falling out with a friend you've lent money to. Besides, I cannot bear to feel chained. To go and live abroad, or join a remote expedition, or withdraw into a religious retreat - all these things I can very well do without, but I need to feel that there is nothing to prevent me from doing them. Anything that tied me down would kill me; there's only one thing I'm tied to, and that is my work. I would put up with a thousand times more from an unacknowledged bastard of mine than from a legitimate child, from a mistress than from a wife, because it's the legal, compulsory nature of the tie that drives me mad.'

'I can see that a man like you might do without marriage if need be. But the absence of children seems to me more serious, especially for someone like you who has no brothers and sisters.'

'If I wanted to put it a bit pompously I would say this: I am wedded to life, and the books I draw from life are my children. It was in a similar spirit that Barrés said of Napoleon: "His victories were his daughters." And would to God Napoleon had had no other family but that! Another thing: one of the reasons why I wouldn't have a son today (let's not even speak of daughters - that would kill me) is because I believe that, in the world we live in, I couldn't have the kind of son I wanted. Sooner or later the ignominy of the age would be bound to rub off on him. And what would I do with a son I could not but despise? I would hate him, with an unbelievable hatred. I don't want to run that risk.'

It was true that at the age of twenty, when he had had Philippe, he had not yet written anything, nor had he enough experience, nor perhaps enough self-discipline, to be deterred by the risks he was running. Chance had ordained that Philippe should turn out well. But it would be foolish to tempt providence.

'And yet,' said Solange, 'there are plenty of men who are quite satisfied with marriage, even famous men.' (She confused famous men and exceptional men.)

'The weak-willed and the simple-minded will always be satisfied with marriage. And remember this: those who defend marriage most vociferously are often those who suffer most from it. They feign marital bliss, for fear of being seen through and pitied.'

'You're young now, but don't you think that a time will come when you will feel the need for someone to comfort you in moments of depression?'

'What a very bourgeois idea of the world - to think that it's inevitable for men to have their moments of "depression"! Believe me, there are men who not only don't know what "depression" means, but haven't even the faintest notion of what it might be. Myself, for example, I never have the slightest need of support (unless of course I'm physically ill). I rely on my creativity; that is my health and my salvation; that is what relieves and refreshes me. I have no need to be two; or, more precisely, there is only one circumstance, one alone, in which I need another person besides myself, and that is for the purpose of pleasure. Otherwise, whenever I am, or visualize myself to be, with another person, I feel diminished. And in any case, supposing I did have difficult moments, I would find consolation either in myself or in the teachings of the sages. Or in the sexual act, the most potent consolation of all - but there's no need of a wife for that, as far as I know. I ask you, where could a young woman find the power to console me, otherwise than in her body? No, I'm afraid I have nothing but contempt for marriage conceived of as a mutual insurance policy between two poor devils who are incapable of standing up to "the difficulties of life" on their own: two shivering paupers who need each other's warmth.... If it is that, so much the better: we oughtn't to sneer at anything that comforts people. But let me repeat what I said to you at the beginning: that it's only for second-raters. And let's leave the rest out of it.'

'Millions and millions of men, ever since the world began, have found solace in a wife. You can't alter that.'

'Oh, yes I can - I can deny it by my actions. To every man his own destiny; and that's not mine. I have always had a brotherly feeling for Sisera, whose story is related in the Book of Judges. He's a Canaanite general, and fleeing from the Hebrews he takes refuge with Jael, the wife of an allied king. Jael comes out of her tent and says to him: "Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not." He goes into her tent, and lies down, exhausted, and she covers him with a cloak. And he asks for a little water, for he is dying of thirst. The Bible actually says "a little water", and when I think of the modesty of this request, I weep a tiny bit (if you don't see me weep, it's because I'm weeping inside). Sisera falls asleep, and Jael, taking a tent-peg and a mallet, nails his head to the ground from temple to temple. Sisera is a brother to me because of being hated and because of having such a thirst, which for me is the thirst of the triple tongue, my thirst, that is to say the thirst of the three wisdoms, and his fate would be mine if I ever took refuge with a woman: she would reduce my brain to pulp, because women always hate men's brains, and there's a remark of Mme Tolstoy's about her husband, so revealing of the female attitude and so profound in both its terms that it is worthy of holy writ: "I cannot abide him, because he never suffers, and because he writes." The Catholic theologians, or at any rate the Jansenist ones, in whose writings I came across it, claim that Sisera is one of the forms of the Devil. Which may well be, if one considers his thirst; though on the other hand I doubt whether the Devil would ever have put his trust in a woman, since he is the personification of Intelligence.'

'You couldn't help admitting that when you are physically ill, you need help. When you are old and infirm, you'll be very glad to have a wife to prepare your poultices for you.'

'I hope you said that like a parrot, and not after mature consideration. Because if you really meant it you would go right down in my estimation. What a splendid victory for a woman, to be called upon at last by a decrepit old man! On a par with the victory of the Church when the unbeliever in a coma agrees to see a priest. Well, yes, when I am old and tottering I may perhaps marry. And what then? It won't be a question of being united body and soul, and so on and so forth, but of giving a devoted nurse the satisfaction of an established position. And it won't invalidate anything I've said about marriage.'

Now they were among the rose-beds, themselves a bit decrepit in the late July heat. He went on:

'Whenever there is anything beautiful or successful, man somehow contrives to spoil it, even when it's his own creation. Just now I heard the murmur of distant water; we hurried towards it, and what did we see: a statue above the water - and a statue that isn't beautiful is something really horrible. If I see a bench, it has no back to it; and to make a bench without a back is to show very little knowledge of what real rest means. And now look at these roses, and then I'll tell you in what way they remind me of marriage. Each rose has an identity disc with its registration number, its French name, its Latin name, and a reference to a "plate", for we are still at school. I notice that none of these roses bears the name of a poet. But there's the "President Carnot" rose, as heavy as a soul in sorrow: it reminds me of those Algerian villages which used to be called in Arabic "Head of the Waters" or "Pigeon's Rest" and which were re-baptized "Ernest Renan" or "Sarrien". In this oasis which one thought had been created for relaxation and enjoyment, these labels plunge us right back into the social maelstrom. The "Honourable X" rose invites us to consider such delicate moral problems as the precise definition of honourability. The "Entente Cordiale" rose obliges us, in spite of ourselves, to indulge in such questionable gestures as investigating whether it (the rose) may not have withered a bit. The "Mme X" (a well-known actress) forces us to draw a comparison between Mme X and a rose. In my opinion, having started on this path, one ought to go the whole hog, and I suggest that the names of the people appearing on these labels should henceforth be accompanied by their honorific titles, their French and foreign decorations, etc., not forgetting, wherever it applies, the sign indicating ownership of a car which one sees in directories, nor the entry HP for hôtel particulier.' [Hôtel particulier: a large private town house (Translator's note).]

'But what's the connection between these roses and marriage?'

'Man ruins love by marriage, as he has ruined these roses by red-tapery. Love is spoiled not only by marriage itself, but by the mere possibility of marriage. The spectre of marriage clanking its chains - the chains of marriage, needless to say - poisons any relationship with a girl. The moment I say to myself that I might... no, I can't even bear to pronounce the words ... my love for you begins to dwindle, as though under the influence of some evil spell. If I dismiss this baleful idea, it rears its head again and spurts fire. No, the only way of turning something as insensate as marriage into something at all reasonable would be to allow either party to divorce at will without any need for justification. A priest has the right to abandon the cloth after his novitiate if he feels he has no vocation for the mystic marriage. Ordinary marriage is a vocation too, and one needs to have had a taste of it to see whether one has it or not. I should certainly have married if I had been sure of being able to break it off without having to justify my decision, after a two-year trial, for example.'

'A two-four-six year lease. Or rather six-four-two!'

A child's ball landed near them, raising a little cloud of dust. 'Look, a shell exploding!' cried the small boy, who was about seven years old. Where had he seen shells? At the cinema? The things a little European will think up in 1927!

'There's one other contingency in which I might be prepared to marry. In the event of some catastrophe, war or bloody revolution. Then, since everything would be done for anyway, a little more, a little less hardly matters. If it's going to give so much pleasure to a damsel, we might as well call at the Registrar's before buckling on our swordbelt. If war broke out tomorrow, I might perhaps marry you.'

The ground was scattered with bamboo husks (at least, that is what I call them), smooth, white, polished, made expressly for profound thoughts to be inscribed thereon. There was a bird ... (well, my little bird, do give me a nice simile! Ah yes ... ) a bird in the centre of a round tree, like the flame in the centre of a Venetian lantern. There was foliage drenched with sunlight, a blaze of foliage, and a man could be seen carrying it away in his arms. There were crows, self-important and cantankerous, not unlike humans. There was a sparrow gargling on the edge of the pool, and more sparrows lying in the dust like cattle. There was a sea-gull listening to its own cry (but was it really a sea-gull?). There were little frogs, the shape of whose bodies reminded one of the French athletes selected for the Olympic Games. Dead leaves covered the surface of the pond, under which the fish must have found it difficult to see, poor things. An artificial overhanging rock had been built for them to shelter under when it rained.

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Solange Dandillot

Paris

28 July 1927

Dear Friend,

I have made up my mind to write to you, despairing of ever plucking up the courage to speak. When you are there, I feel paralysed, I lose all initiative, and yet our frequent meetings, the fact that we are seen together, the indiscrete (sic) gossip that may arise from this, make it essential to have things out with you as soon as possible. You must be indulgent with me if I cannot express my feelings any better in writing than by word of mouth.

Surprising though it may seem to you, I am still a pure young girl. No doubt it's ridiculous, out-of-date, but there it is. If we are to continue to see each other, to go out together, people are bound to say that we're engaged (I refuse to envisage any other explanation). If it were your sister, what would you advise her to do? What would you think of a man who had adopted such an attitude towards her?

What are we to do? Stop seeing each other? That would be very hard. Could we not find a way of reconciling your repugnance for marriage with my scruples? Why could we not try a sort of legalized relationship, with a civil ceremony only, and without informing anyone (except my mother and my grand-parents, naturally), a temporary marriage, since you cannot bear the idea of permanency? No religious ceremony; I have too much respect for the Church to involve it in a travesty of matrimony. And I promise you that I would go out of your life as silently as I came into it, as soon as you began to find me a burden. A two-four-six-year lease, nothing more.

There! I don't know what else to say to you, and I shall await your reply with trepidation, though I feel certain that, honourable man that you are, you will not put it off too long. I leave you, my dearest friend, with the assurance of my tender affection.

Solange

Ever since her first meeting with Costals, at the Doignys' on the 1st of May, Mlle Dandillot had been thinking of marriage. She had never conceived of marriage except with a man who attracted her; on any other terms it seemed to her repellent. No one had attracted her up till then, and she awaited her Prince Charming with tranquillity. Usually, a woman starts by loving love, the universe, nature, God, and then she realizes that what she needs is a single human being. Solange had never loved anything, or anybody - except her mother. Neither her heart nor her senses being in need of sustenance, she was perfectly happy in this state, and quite prepared for it to last forever. But she saw Costals, and sensing that he was attracted to her and feeling drawn to him herself (oh! no question of love at first sight!), she thought to herself: 'Why not?'

She had discussed it with her mother at once - yes, from the very first day, such was their mutual trust. Mme Dandillot was delighted: 'At last she's attracted to a man, and since that was all she was waiting for ... ' It was worth overlooking the drawbacks: the difference in age, the fact that Costals was a writer and so might draw Solange into a world to which she would not be entirely suited either by her tastes or her comparative lack of culture. Though not at all snobbish, Mme Dandillot had nonetheless been flattered by the fact that a famous man ... (and vanity had also played its part in her daughter's preliminary reaction, though it was soon to give way to the opposite feeling: regret that Costals was a writer, and regret that he was famous). Utterly remote from the literary world, and never having read anything of Costals', Mme Dandillot was unaware that he had a somewhat dubious reputation in sexual matters.

On the way back from the Doignys', he had complimented her on her simplicity: 'That little girl's ring!' Solange was indeed simple and natural, but she had always taken it for granted. The following week, having been invited through Costals to the Piérards', and 'dressing up' more than she had done for the Doignys', since it was a much more elegant party given by people she did not know, she decided not to wear a handsome family brooch which normally went with this particular costume. And whereas at the Doignys' she had worn a little make-up, this time she used none, but simply bit her lips to bring the blood to them, and remained for a full minute on the landing with her head down (pretending to fix her stocking) before going into the flat. From then on she had always kept a close rein on this capacity for simulation, in big things as well as small. The advantage of this inconsistency of hers was that, having a little of everything in her nature, it was easy for her to externalize only what was pleasing to Costals, and to keep the rest in abeyance.

In the box at the Opéra-Comique on May 11th, she had hardly opened her mouth she was so paralysed with shyness. But if Costals had made an advance it is doubtful whether she would have demurred. From then on she had ignored the impertinence of his first letter and his habit of treating her as a bit of a tart, partly because she was fond enough of him to put up with it, partly because she wanted to bind him to her, and partly because, like her mother, she was lacking in pride.

She had not shown the letter to Mme Dandillot, for fear of the bad impression it might make, but had agreed with her the sense of her reply - that she should telephone her willingness to see him again. She pretended not to understand what he meant. But she understood perfectly well, though in a rather vague way: for she liked vagueness, like all women, who feel more at home in it.

In these circumstances, Costals' advances during the concert, straightforward though they were, had come as a surprise to her. He had embraced her in public; he had kissed her thigh through her skirt, had lifted her skirt and stroked her naked thighs. This girl, who until then had never been kissed without putting the man in his place, who would never have tolerated even the mildest advance, had been bowled over by all this. On returning home that evening, it will be remembered, she had had a sort of nervous fit, and vomited: from that evening (16 May) she loved him. It had taken her a fortnight to work up to it.

And so, in the Bois de Boulogne, on the evening of their first kisses (22 May), she was already entirely his, though a little shocked (contrary to what she told him later) by some of his caresses. She told her mother that he had kissed her, and kept quiet about the rest. It was from that moment that she decided on the policy she would adopt in order to get him to marry her: never to speak of marriage, but to wait until he did, so as always to be able to say to him: 'But who was the first to mention marriage?' She was ingenuous enough to have no doubt that he would do so one day - a day which she believed much closer than it was in fact - and knew herself to be patient enough by nature to be able to await that day without too much anxiety.

As is usual in such cases, the two women waited as long as they could before breathing a word of all this to M. Dandillot. For a fortnight the name Costals was never mentioned in his presence, but eventually he had to be told that they were going out together. M. Dandillot pricked up his ears. Plans were discussed. Costals was invited to lunch.

M. Dandillot had hit it off with Costals from the start, and given his blessing to the women's plans, but for various reasons said nothing about them to the writer during their two conversations. This born bachelor, who had married 'because everyone does' and who had had nothing but worries as a result, who moreover was by far the most intelligent of the three Dandillots, sensed that Costals was not the marrying sort. In addition, he had no great love for his daughter, who had been conceived by accident at a time when, being extremely worried about his son, he had sworn never to have another child. The fact was, he considered her stupid, which was untrue, or at best insignificant, which was equally untrue: no one is insignificant. If he had broached the subject of marriage to Costals, he would have said to him: 'First of all, you're not cut out for marriage. Secondly, even supposing you were, my daughter would be wrong for you. Thirdly, I shall be dead in a few weeks. My family have given me enough trouble for the past thirty years: I wash my hands of what happens after I've gone. My wife and my daughter want this marriage. You are old enough to know your own mind. You can sort it out yourselves.' This 'thirdly' had overridden the first two reasons, and so he said nothing.

M. Dandillot had died without a word of any consequence to his wife or daughter; no supreme adjuration; no final piece of advice; no outburst of tenderness; no posthumous letter. Entrenched behind the solitude and silence into which he had withdrawn twenty years before, he had left no indication even as to the state of his affairs, so that it was only by chance, when going through his papers, that Mme Dandillot learnt of the existence of a safe-deposit box containing some gold. When Mme Dandillot had asked him two days before his death: 'Do you still agree to Solange's marrying Costals if he proposes to her?' he had simply said: 'She can do what she likes', just as, two days later, when she had begged him to agree to see a priest, he had merely raised his arms and let them fall back on the bed in a gesture of resignation, too weak to say a word.

From the day of their first embraces in the Bois, through the day he had made her demi-vierge (25 May) and the day he had made her a woman (24 June), to the day at Bagatelle when we have just seen Costals, for the first time, admit that in certain circumstances (war or revolution) he might marry her, Solange had stuck to her policy of never mentioning marriage. She had been astute enough to grant him without fuss or affection everything a woman of easy virtue would have granted, while at the same time remaining what she was: a rather old-fashioned little thing. In this way she had satisfied not only Costals' sexual appetite but also his 'austerity'. She had shown herself to him in a dual role - tart and young lady - and people only interested him if they were dual (at the very least); she had presented herself to him as something of a contradiction, which was the best way of exciting him: he had thought of her as someone after his own heart.

What she felt for him seems to have been not so much love as the possibility of love. Abhorring anything irregular or underhand, she was waiting, before giving free rein to her love, to see a path open out in front of her along which she could venture wholeheartedly. It was from the same sort of feeling that she had not been able to bring herself to say tu to him: she did not want to say tu to a man who might abandon her any day and become a complete stranger to her; she would not say tu to him until he had slipped the engagement ring on to her finger. She had given herself to him out of affection, and also in the hope that it would bind him to her. Which was wise of her, for if she had played hard to get in order to inflame him the more, he would have slid out of the whole thing: he was not the sort of man who allowed himself to be manipulated by women. At first she had experienced an overwhelming pleasure from his caresses, when they were more or less chaste, though the pleasure grew less intense when she realized that his tenderness was usually but the prelude and, as it were, the froth of desire. From the caresses of his sensuality she had experienced no pleasure at all: she was frigid by nature, being a young girl, and frigid by heredity, so to speak, since both her father and mother were frigid. Thus she kept her love as it were in abeyance. It was to some extent Costals' own attitude towards her at certain times, when he told himself that he would willingly become more ardent if she became more ardent too, or more indifferent than she if she chose to withdraw.

She was convinced that the marriage would take place. Her mother had her doubts, being more experienced and having meanwhile read Costals' books. Not all of them, however, such is the frivolity of humankind. This woman was prepared to give her daughter to a writer, and yet did not take the trouble to read, and ponder with the utmost gravity, the entire literary output of this writer, who put the whole of himself into everything he wrote.

'If he doesn't mention marriage, you'll have to do so first. Things can't go on like this. There's sure to be gossip sooner or later.'

'Don't worry, he'll mention it.'

'If he hasn't said anything by next week, I shall invite him round and ask him what his intentions are.'

'No, please, don't interfere. In that case I'll write to him. But we must wait a little longer.'

'And what if he answers your letter with a firm "no"? You'll have to stop seeing him.'

'Obviously ... But I assure you that even if he does answer "no" it won't be a firm "no". The main thing is not to pester him. If one does, he digs his heels in, and then.... He likes to make people fume with rage. He reminds me of Gaston (her brother) at the age of fifteen. You think he's serious because he writes books and all that. He's a kid. He does things only kids do, like running his hand along railings or shop-fronts. The sort of thing you only see errand-boys do, not men. In fact, there's a guttersnipe side to him which is what I like least about him.... '

That 'obviously' of Solange's took a great weight off Mme Dandillot's mind. How sensible her little girl still was, after all!

Mme Dandillot did not interrogate Solange too closely.

'You've been to his flat?' 'Yes.' She knew quite well that if she added: 'Have you slept with him?' looking her straight in the eye, Solange was not the sort of child who would say no if it was in fact so, or at any rate would persist in the lie. And she loved and respected her too much to want to make her tell lies. Nevertheless she had been unable to resist asking her: 'You know there are certain precautions to be taken?' - to which Solange had answered 'Yes' without raising her eyes.

Since she had no girl-friends, and since Mme Dandillot could not for a moment imagine her seeking enlightenment on such matters from books, it must have been Costals who had instructed her. For the future? For the present? Mme Dandillot was fairly sure that her daughter was the writer's mistress, and let it go at that, being a woman of her time and of her country, not to mention her social position. In fact she thought to herself: 'If he gives her a child, he'll marry her.' Be it noted that not the slightest suggestion of blackmail crossed her mind.

Holding that the notion of ambivalence is the key to psychology, Costals had spotted at once that in these two women honesty was mixed with a certain amount of calculation. Yet, though capable of a just appreciation of the general picture, time and again he found himself debating whether in such and such an action they were being true or false, and often proved to be mistaken. And this uncertainty was to be one of the factors in the mistrust which he never ceased to entertain towards the plans of the Dandillot family.

'I received your letter. It surprised me a little. But before tackling the main issue, as they say in the law-courts, I should like to make one observation. You tell me you are a "pure young girl". Words must after all have some meaning. I might call you a pure young girl because as a writer I am entitled to some poetic licence. But you, when you tell me that you're a pure young girl.... I really cannot understand how anyone could put that in a serious letter. Now let's get to the point.

'My first objection is that you have raised this dilemma much too early. I hardly know you, I haven't had time to put you to the test. And how could you yourself agree to marry a man you've only known for three months? You need to know a man for three years.

'Let us assume that there's one chance in a hundred thousand that I might marry you. By breaking with me now, on the grounds that I haven't made up my mind at once, you would lose that chance. And that chance does after all exist, infinitesimal though it is. You talk of breaking off, whereas, on the contrary, the more we see of each other the better I shall get to know you and therefore the better basis I shall have for making a decision.

'Like you, I should like to reconcile "my repugnance and your scruples". But the solution you propose is not at all, whatever you may say, a "travesty of marriage". You know perfectly well that it makes no difference whether the Church comes into it or not. It is the civil ceremony that makes a marriage, and there's no way out of it except by divorce. If I want a divorce without having any complaint against you legally speaking, and if on the other hand you refuse to accept divorce, there's nothing I can do about it, I'm trapped.

'A word about your "respect for the Church". You "respect" the Church "too much" to wish to involve it in what you call a travesty of marriage. In my opinion that "too much" is very little, and you don't respect the Church at all, since you're prepared to dispense with it in order to get married.

'Briefly, what I suggest to you is this: that our relationship should continue as before, but with greater regard for secrecy than in the past: absolute secrecy, in fact. (If I have not kept it as secret as I might have done up to now, it's because I thought you might acquire some reflected glory from showing me off a bit.) Let me make you happy in an atmosphere of liberty, spontaneity and vigour, which is my natural element when nothing trammels me, and not in the atmosphere of the kitchen sink. After a certain time, when I have tested your feelings and mine, I shall consult a man of law and get him to work out how one of the parties to a marriage can get out of it without the other's consent.'

All this, which occupies two pages of a book, was gone into in elaborate detail for two hours and ten minutes, with passionate sincerity and seriousness. He also made known the conditions, all sine qua non, he would lay down for any marriage, no matter who with: separate maintenance; a quiet ceremony in some remote spot, with only the witnesses present; no religious ceremony, so that they should be spared the grotesque formalities of annulment in Rome; no children; and three months' conjugal holiday per year, during which he could go away wherever he liked and the couple would be strangers to each other, for, he added, 'a home ought not to be a place one stays in but a place one goes back to.' The rejection of a single one of these conditions would entail the immediate abandonment of the whole scheme.

Solange seemed rather stunned. She said she would think it over, and might perhaps agree. She said 'perhaps' in a bird-like voice, a thin, high-pitched voice, as women say it when they are about to yield. She would discuss it with her mother.

'What exactly are you afraid of?'

'Becoming too attached to you.'

'And then my leaving you?'

'Yes.'

'Well, then you'll suffer! Frankly, I think you're being rather cowardly. And how would marriage put your mind at rest, since I shall never marry anyone unless I find a means of getting out of it whenever I want to? A sensible man going off to war thinks out ways of getting himself evacuated when he has had enough. In marriage too one must foresee how to get oneself evacuated.'

'You're not much of a one for taking risks....'

'You can say that to me, of all people! That's a good one! I take risks in order to get things I want. But to take a risk for something I don't want.

She was staring at the ground, but at these words she lifted her face towards him (as though in reproach?). Touching her lightly on the cheek with the tip of his gloves, which he was holding in his hand, he turned her face away, as though he did not want her to look at him at that moment.

'I want to lend you some books: Tolstoy's journal, and his wife's. You'll see what would happen to us if we committed that act of madness.'

'What a lot of notes there are in the margins!'

'They're the notes made by the various girls I've lent these books to. You'll find at least five or six different hand-writings. For these volumes are a veritable breviary for any young lady who wants to marry me.'

He turned over the pages of one of them, and read two or three hand-written observations.

'Look, here are some intelligent notes. In pencil - so it's impossible to recognize the writing. It's rather moving, this message from someone I can't identify, someone who loved me, and of whom these notes make me think: "Perhaps, after all, I might have been able to marry her without much damage." ... '

Solange's eyes were glued to the margins, and Costals was struck by the hardness of her expression. So we're jealous, are we? Ridiculous!

'Are you satisfied with our conversation?'

A silence, then:

'Yes.'

'So, for the time being, we carry on as before?'

A silence, then:

'Yes....'

'And you'll come to my flat the day after tomorrow at six?'

A silence, then:

'Yes.'

'My little darling, I can see you're unhappy. From now on you'll have to settle down with that unhappiness, while I, who am the cause of it, do my best to soothe it and gradually cure you of it.'

When he kissed her hand on leaving her, he felt that it was as cold as ice.

Costals' Diary

3 August - Looked at in cold blood, this marriage seems to me absurd and impossible, which it undoubtedly is. But in moments of exaltation I see it as:

1. An ordeal worthy of me. It is a great thing to make a success of something one despises, because one has to overcome not only the obstacle but oneself too. It always takes courage to challenge life. Not that I'm afraid of life, damn it! I've overcome adolescence and all its horrible miasmas, I've overcome war, I've overcome long-distance expeditions, I've overcome solitude, pleasure, success, and all the various dangers which surround the private life of a man who is ready for anything. There is only one monster before which I've always flinched: marriage. And now it's up to me to overthrow the Hippogriff! Or rather to turn it into a saddle-horse. I want to astonish myself, to prove to myself that I can be just as daring, just as free and easy in marriage as in celibacy. Of course I should have to behave like a braggart flexing his biceps: 'We shall see what we shall see,' followed by a roll of drums. Such an attitude is farcical, seen from the outside. But is it my fault if I'm obliged to whip myself up into a frenzy in order to face what terrifies me so? Even to the extent of calling to the rescue, for example, the Roman knights whose order, under Augustus, comprised more bachelors than married men? Those who braved the enemy most valiantly dreaded finding themselves alone with a missus. I'm no exception. 2. An experience necessary to my knowledge of life, and hence to my work. A means of renewing the human substance of my art, fertilizing a new patch of earth, opening a new water-course. An unknown land to be annexed, or at least to fly over proudly. That's it, fly over, glide over, as I glided over the war, as I have glided over pain, as I glide over fatherhood - barely wetting the tips of my fingers. To go through marriage as one goes through the midsummer fires. Will there be crises? So much the better. A writer will always pay cash down for a crisis, no matter what.

And then, it would be amusing to learn what duty is.

4 August - She came. She gave me back Tolstoy's diary, and his wife's, without a word. Aurel's saying: 'There are women to whom one lends a marvellous book and who return it to you without a word as though they were handing you the sugar-tongs.' If Dante were to reappear and give a public recital of an unpublished canto of the Divine Comedy, there would be women, intellectual women at that, who could think of nothing else to say but that his trousers were not very well creased. To all my questions she replied with feeble variations on the theme of: 'Why do you think what happened in Tolstoy's case will happen in yours? There's no reason to believe it wouldn't work....'

Everything is made more difficult by the fact that these people are totally lacking in wit.

In just a few days, she has managed to mess up my Tolstoy, sticking the cover together with adhesive paper. She must be rather slovenly.

Nothing on earth can persuade me that I need her presence.

There is absolutely no reason why I should marry her.

I don't love her. I should like to find more reasons for loving her, but I can't. I don't love her, and yet I'm prepared to commit this folly for her sake.

The fear I used to have as a child when I was taken out in a boat. The impression of someone embarking.

I feel drawn towards the story of the Tolstoy marriage as one is drawn towards an abyss. The story used to haunt me even before I had the slightest thought of marriage. Détériora sequor. I see where evil lies and I head for it.

I marry you not to make myself happy but to make you happy.

If one talks about it enough, it will happen. The feeling that a machine has been set in motion, and henceforth it will be impossible to stop it.

5 August - I am going into this adventure as I went into the war, and perhaps as I go into everything else: obsessed, from the moment of entering it, with how I shall be able to get out.

Worse still, thinking of the leap of triumph I shall give when I get out - in fact conceiving it as a preparation for this.

And then, for ever after, this wrong vis-à-vis Solange, not only to have gone into the marriage as into something one will escape from, but to have considered it as a sort of foil intended to make my subsequent life more deliriously happy.

6 August - She comes, but informs me that she is unwell. Women, always ill, always unhealthy, never absolutely wholesome. I inquire when her indisposition will be over: tomorrow. But when I ask her if we can meet the day after tomorrow, she says she cannot. The following day she can't either. Three days! How unloving she is! A brief good-bye. A limp handshake. Her coldness frightens me. What has happened? Have I offended her in some way, either morally or physically?

This has happened. When she first broached the question of marriage (in her letter), I resisted. Now that she's cold, the idea keeps running through my head, and I see myself demanding this marriage which four days ago I rejected. I who thought I was master of my own will now see myself submitting because of her. At the moment of writing, I do not feel inclined to lose her. And yet she is so cold, so capable of running away (like a little gazelle), I can sense how certain she is to make me suffer.

You have given me everything, happiness and suffering. You have been mingled with all the things of this summer, like rain mingled with the branches of a tree.

You have disillusioned me with solitude. I can hardly believe in it any more.

Baudelaire: 'I can understand how one might desert a cause in order to know what it will feel like serving another. It might be pleasant to be alternately victim and executioner.' Pleasant perhaps to be the victim, after having been so often the executioner.

I am always going from one extreme to the other.

10 August - I told her flatly that I had come closer to the idea of marriage, and that in the meantime she had moved further away from me. 'No, I haven't. On the contrary, I think I'm becoming more and more attached to you.' - 'Why were you so cold the other day?' - 'But I wasn't cold!' When I insist that she was, she goes on protesting she was not, with a look of anguish in her eyes, as though imploring me to believe her, which immediately makes me feel that I'm in the wrong.

On leaving her, I am convinced of her sincerity. Convinced that everything is moving towards it. But a moment after leaving her I ask myself: 'Why she rather than another? Why she, when there are so many others more this and more that than she?'

Even if I were presented with the Queen of Sheba's daughter, fourteen years and three days old, on a golden platter, I would think of the unhappiness it would cause you, and I could not do it.

11 August - Here is a girl for whom I feel affection, esteem, and physical attraction. And the prospect of marrying her is like a waking nightmare, as bad as a declaration of war.

Will she get on with Brunet? She doesn't like children. She doesn't like small boys ('Their ugly little mugs. ...'). She doesn't even like young men ('They're so stupid!...'). She won't like him. Not to mention the silent reproaches: 'How could you have brought him up like this?' (To be censured by Mademoiselle Dandillot! ... ) Perhaps she will want to exert her authority over him. That I shall never allow. I did my damnedest, God knows at what cost, to keep him away from his mother, and now to think that he might have to reckon with a step-mother! Someone coming between him and me! Fifteen years' work destroyed!

As for him, I know he'll say at once (before he knows anything about my plans): 'Couldn't you fix me up with her? No? How mean you are!' With anyone else but her, yes, it might have been a good idea to allow him to take the plunge with his step-mother. But S. is absolutely the wrong person for that: much too stupid. He'll hang around her the whole time. He'll know I sleep with her. She'll be the object of his repressed desires, the harbour of his solitary voyages. He'll be tossed about and will suffer because of her. And I don't want him to suffer through anyone - woe to anyone who lays a finger on him! - and above all, above all, not through her.

I ought to arrange a meeting between them right away. But I know so well what will come of it: one more reason for not marrying her. And what I'm looking for is a reason for marrying her.

Another thing: what if I give her a child? The very thought of it nearly drives me mad. If it's a girl I shall be certain to desire her eventually: a lot of agitation, complication, responsibility, in spite of my education [Costals is referring to the tuppence-coloured picture books (Images d'Epinal) which were the earliest reading-matter for French children at the beginning of this century. They depicted kings enamoured of their daughters, cats in love with princesses, giants addicted to little boys, etc. It is not surprising that Costals retained from all this a tendency towards sexual confusion (Author's note).] - the whole machinery of trouble grinding into action, as it does whenever a man has anything to do with a woman. And then, desired or not, a girl commits and ties one much more than a boy; one can't leave her to get along by herself: an Everest of worry and time-wasting. If it's a boy, I shall love him, and I don't want to give to another son what I've already given to the one I have. There are words that cannot be uttered twice, even inwardly. I can, at a pinch, repeat the same words to a hundred or a hundred and fifty women and mean it every time, because women only affect the surface of my life - and even so, I've suffered often enough from this sort of reiteration. But to repeat everything to a second Brunet ... No, not that. 'Chacun en a sa part et tous l'ont tout entier.' [Each has its share, and all have it in full. (Translator's note).] Perhaps mothers can really divide their maternal love without weakening it; but I'm not a mother. And besides, all have it in full - I'm sure that's a hoax. They're boasting once again.

Moreover, I have already taken the insane risk of creating a human being, and this human being, in my opinion, is a success. I love him, I think he's fond of me, I have never had any fault to find with him, he enjoys my company and I enjoy his; that sort of miracle doesn't happen twice.

There are powerful reasons why a woman should marry. For a man there are none: he does it out of gregariousness. (And it is therefore natural enough for the law to give men a better position in marriage than women.) 'But then, why do men marry?' I once asked the Abbé Mugnier. His answer was: 'Out of a taste for disaster.' Yes, it really is a love of risk, of danger, the dark and unhealthy attraction of trouble, which drives the male to bring this hornets' nest about his ears. If he jibs in the slightest, people accuse him of 'cowardice' - cowardice in this case being synonymous with that form of intelligence known as the instinct of self-preservation.

Truly it is an urge towards tragedy that makes me contemplate marrying her....

But no! I am seeking excuses in order to disguise from myself the only motive that inspires me, and that is charity.

13 August - When you are waiting for a woman you very much desire, when she is an hour and a half late and you have given her up, and then she rings the door-bell, your first impulse is not one of joy but of annoyance. Your imagination had gone off in another direction, and had got used to it, and this sudden reversal is disconcerting at first.

I don't know whether I was awaiting S. very passionately, but when, half an hour after the appointed time, she has still not arrived, I hope something may have happened - some revulsion on the part of her mother? - which will prevent her from ever coming again. Here she is. I go over the same old arguments again: 'By not marrying you I shall be safeguarding our love. Marriage is the end of love - as has been known ever since Methuselah. I should grow tired of you. You would get in my way. You would see me at my worst. Good-bye to rapture. Whereas in a love affair there's none of all that, or very little. What difference would marriage make to you? Children? You know in any case that I won't let you have any. Material interests in common? Well, honestly, do you need that? Being together all the time? But that's precisely what would undermine our love. In a love affair, each of us retains his freedom. Love is not bound by a code. Loving you is not a conjugal 'duty'. Seeing you is not an obligation but a pleasure. And the secrecy in which our relationship is wrapped makes it all the warmer - that too has been known ever since Methuselah ... '

I tell her all this, but what's the use? Her mind is made up. Girls entangle you in the spider's web of marriage. Whores wear you down with their demands for money. And respectable women give you a dose of c ...

14 August - On waking up this morning it seems to me as though all the reasons 'against' have sunk to the bottom like lees in a liquid; I can find nothing but reasons 'for'. Decide to marry her. Then, halfway through the day (four o'clock), a sudden decision not to. Is this the beginning of a stable attitude? Await her arrival with boredom.

(Later) The smell of her eyelids. Her skin, as soft as flour. During our love-making, that succession of deaths and resurrections, she is like a string being plucked and then allowed to slacken. Lay beside her for a long time, filled with tenderness, and loving her. Her hair, which always comes undone at the same time - ten minutes past midnight - as though to remind us that it will soon be time for her to leave. Then, when she goes to the bathroom, I am on the point of telling her not to give herself a douche. If I get her with child, well, that will settle the matter.

The unforgettable look in her eyes as she leaves - standing upright in front of me like a little soldier. 'You cannot possibly be false with a look like that.' 'I am not false.'

I asked her what she would do if I told her categorically that I should never marry her. At first she did not reply. Then, after struggling a little, something the gist of which seemed to be that she hadn't considered such a possibility. Her confidence irritates me a little. Nevertheless, determined to marry her, Costals thought about the marriage only for a few moments each day - on waking - and then dismissed it from his mind, as though laying down a too heavy burden, postponing a decision one way or the other. Having a horror of action that amounted to a philosophy, he acted only when pushed to the limit. It was also a matter of principle with him to put off painful decisions, not out of weakness of character but because he wanted to allow for the possibility that the circumstances might change and he would no longer have to decide. Moreover he knew that apprehension makes people vulnerable to whatever it is they apprehend. This policy had always stood him in good stead.

Two days after he had noted in his diary: 'Nevertheless, determined to marry her,' he suddenly thought of writing a long letter to Mme Dandillot explaining the reasons why he would not marry her daughter. This corrective measure seemed to him appropriate; he had come to feel a certain sympathy for this woman in the cruel suspense from which she must be suffering because of him. Moreover, he wondered whether she might not take him at his word. With what impatience he would await her reply acknowledging that 'under the circumstances, perhaps … ' Or simply a reply in which he might detect a certain insolence, which would allow him to break it off there and then.

Costals wrote this letter with much gravity and a touch of complacency. An excellent way of spending the feast of the Assumption.

to Madame Ch. Dandillot

Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

15 August 1927

Dear Madame,

I am writing to you from an empty flat in a deserted building, looking out on an avenue in which there is not a car, not a passer-by, not a sound; I had almost said not a cat, but in fact there is one, and very nice he is, with his tail as straight as a ramrod. I feel that if you are in Paris today, and Solange too - at a time when the ordeal you have just been through makes a rest and a change of scene more than usually necessary for both of you - it is partly my fault. And many other things are also my fault. It is for this reason that I feel moved to speak to you at some length, with deepened sympathy; to explain myself to you; and to ask you also to understand and forgive me.

If I write you this letter instead of coming to see you, it is not only because, as a writer, the form of expression that betrays me least is writing, so that with this letter you will have a very precise testimony to my feelings. It is because I feel sufficiently secure, as far as my conscience is concerned, to want you to possess, against whatever contingency may arise, this document signed by my hand.

Do not be surprised if the feelings I am about to describe sometimes seem strange to you. I am indeed strange. Far from priding myself on it, I have always sought to smooth the sharp edges of my nature, to emphasize whatever brings me closer to my fellow-creatures rather than what separates me from them, just as I seek to pass unnoticed in my private life. As a novelist, God knows the efforts I sometimes have to make to imagine the feelings of the ordinary run of humanity, feelings of which I have little spontaneous experience. However, I have never suffered from this singularity of mine until this moment, when I find myself suffering from it for the first time.

This marriage must not take place.

I can see what would happen as though it had already occurred, as though I were remembering it. I can see it because I know myself, because I have a long and subtle experience of myself and of my relations with other people, because I have always had a premonition of how I would react in any given circumstances and how, for instance, if I tried to go against my nature, nothing but disaster could come of it. It is as though it were not so much my soul as my constitution which rejects certain things to which it is ill-adapted. (When I went to Indo-China, I knew in advance that I should fall ill there because of my reluctance to go; and indeed I did fall ill. I could give you a dozen other examples of the same kind. . . .) The satisfaction of duty done? As far as I am concerned, it would be more suitable to talk of the satisfaction of duty left undone.

This is what would happen if I married Solange. From the very beginning, the moral obligations which her tenderness and devotion would create for me would destroy whatever pleasure I might derive from that tenderness and whatever comfort I might derive from that devotion. I should be anxious about what she thought and what she felt. I should be afraid all the time that I was not giving her enough. I should be afraid of the harm I might do to her and that she might do to me. I should have to reckon with her, and an artist ought not to have to reckon with anything except his work. She would blunt some of my strength, and rob me of my concentration. I should have no right to complain, and yet she would be a nuisance to me, and a source of weakness. I should feel that she was giving herself entirely to me, and I should be unable to give myself entirely to her. I should be unhappy, whereas in my solitude I have never been anything but happy. As for her, living with a man who was pining away, how could she herself be happy?

The outcome? Divorce. But divorce from someone with whom one has no fault to find? How could I reject a young creature who is all sweetness, affection and good will?'Go away! You've done nothing wrong. Your only crime is existing, and loving me. But your presence weighs me down, and your love imprisons me. Take your things away, I'm giving you your notice. You can sort things out with your mother.' No, that I shall never say. Why pretend that circumstances could arise in which I might say it and she might accept it? To do so would be to build on sand - deliberately.

What then? We would remain stuck to each other, gnawing away at each other, like the two damned souls in Dante's Inferno - an infernal tête-à-tête until the bitter end.

Another reason, a minor one in the eyes of the world, but not in mine. I am a volatile creature: I like people, I like possessing them, I have them in my blood. It is inevitable that a time will come when I shall desire other women. What then? Secrecy, constant lies, squalid deceptions with someone you love and who loves you? I shut my eyes and see that girl and imagine myself 'double-crossing' her. No, that too is out of the question. What remains? Collusion? With certain women, perhaps: not with her. But the fact remains that I shall want other women. Not after months or weeks of marriage. Not after a few days of marriage. The day after. The very day. 'But you must fight against it ...' I do not fight against what I desire.

This marriage must not take place.

The future also must remain open to us.

Two solutions. The commonplace solution, the lazy solution: never to see each other again. If you should choose that, I shall leave for Morocco, and you will be rid of me forever.

But in that case Solange must know the tenderness of the affection I feel for her, must know that she will always remain for me a memory undimmed by any clouds other than those I myself created, must know that this tenderness has never been stronger than at the moment when I conceive of cutting myself off from her, and that it is precisely the strength and constancy of this affection which compels me to bring about this rupture, since without them I should have no scruples about giving her less than she gives me, or lying to her, or divorcing her.

The alternative solution is less bourgeois. But you yourself have shown me, Madame, by being prepared to accept a marriage as bizarre as that which we have contemplated, that you have no hesitation in leaving the beaten track when your daughter's happiness is at stake. This solution is that Solange and I simply continue as before, but without the slightest intention of marriage.

Let us not talk about 'social conventions'. What is at stake? Once more, your daughter's happiness. One does not talk in terms of social conventions when one's daughter's happiness is at stake. Let us be realistic. Your daughter finds pleasure in contact with me, and I in contact with her. Must we forgo this pleasure on the pretext that we are not going to marry? Personally, such an attitude seems to me worthy of the Ice Age. Is there no middle way between estrangement and marriage, those idiotic solutions? Whatever is human is made up of all sorts of complexities and nuances. So, the status quo, with a new arrangement in the practical sphere to guard against gossip: she will come to me, but we shall no longer meet out, in Paris at least; and I shall never again mention her name in public. Morally and materially I shall give her everything, as in marriage; but outside marriage. In fact I shall be giving her much more than if we were married. For the feeling I have for her, which, when I see marriage ahead of me, advances painfully since it is aiming towards castas- trophe and knows that it must decay and eventually be shattered, leaps forward and expands freely as soon as the prospect of marriage is dispelled and no more obstacles stand in its way.

I remain, etc....

Costals

Next day, at a quarter past eleven, the telephone rang, and the somewhat raucous voice of Mme Dandillot asked if Costals was there. 'No, I'm not here,' Costals was on the point of answering: symbolic words, for indeed he never was (morally or intellectually) where people expected him to be. 'Speaking,' he said in a weak voice, but silently he exclaimed: 'Hurray! She's going to blow me up.'

'My dear sir, I was extremely touched by your letter, which was so honest and straightforward. But the matter is too important for us to go into in writing. Will you come and have tea with me this afternoon at five o'clock? We shall be alone.' 'Hum, five o'clock, I'm engaged,' said Costals: his first impulse being always to dodge - it was second nature with him. Then he changed his mind and accepted: just as well to get it over. He hung up, and at the same time hung up the idea of marriage, as one hangs a coat on a peg. Since they would be chewing it over for two hours that evening, he could well give it a rest in the meantime.

Every death is an occasion for renewal: out of the corpse spring pungent flowers. M. Dandillot's death, coinciding with these marriage plans, meant that everything in the Dandillot household for the past three weeks had tended towards the future. The dead man's room had been disinfected, all the paraphernalia of disease cleared away, as though no one would ever fall ill again between those walls, the windows everywhere thrown wide open, after being kept shut against noise for weeks. And, Solange having repeated some remarks of Costals' on the insane obsession of the French - much derided by foreigners - for cluttering their interiors with bric-à-brac, no small quantity of junk had been disposed of.

Mme Dandillot's soul had undergone a similar airing - a desire to slough off the old skin. If she had weighed heavily on her husband, he too had weighed heavily on her. The thought that her daughter was in love, then the certainty that this beloved child spent every other night in the arms of a man, had reawakened and rejuvenated Mme Dandillot, who was then in her fifty-second year, a difficult age for a woman. The vague yearnings that possessed her were not in the least directed towards men; they represented no more than a feeling that as soon as her mourning was over she would do some of the things she had never done, would 'get about a bit', travel, in fact would become what people call 'emancipated' - in other words look after her own happiness for a change.

Meanwhile, in the middle of August, the two women were still in Paris. Mme Dandillot might have had to stay there in any case, because of the lawyers she had to see about her husband's estate. Solange, however, could have gone to stay with friends at Etretat. But apart from the fact that it would have been difficult if not impossible for Costals to see her there without giving rise to gossip, the latter had refused to leave Paris. 'It's the only time my friends and relations are not here, and I can have some peace and quiet.' He did not much miss the beauties of nature. The older he grew, the less susceptible he was to nature and the more susceptible he was to people, or to himself. 'I don't object to a tree here and there, but I don't feel the need for a whole eyeful. As for the sea with its idiotic surface, crinkled like an elephant's behind, I don't want to hear of it at any price. I have more interesting things inside myself.'

In these circumstances, Mme Dandillot had been touched by the writer's letter. Its somewhat brutal frankness had shaken her, but without annoying her - on the contrary. The words 'with deepened sympathy' had not escaped her. Strange as it may seem, Costals' arguments had glided over her without making the slightest impression. And she awaited their conversation with a feeling of great serenity.

Costals had a hang-dog look about him as he rang the bell. However much he indulged himself in the avoidance of boring duties (he almost never did anything that cost him any effort), whenever he was forced into it the slightest thing crushed him, took on catastrophic proportions in his mind.

They began by beating about the bush in a state of mutual embarrassment. In the extravagant desire to gratify him which she shared with Solange, Mme Dandillot, who had understood from a remark of her daughter's that he was infatuated with Italy, observed incidentally that he was 'rather Italian looking', which was pure fantasy. Finally the tone changed, and at once things livened up as our hero leapt out of his trench without even a glance over his shoulder.

He repeated all the arguments he had gone over so often with Solange since the day at Bagatelle. Mme Dandillot listened with affectionate sympathy, almost with amusement. No, no, dear reader, set your mind at rest! Mme Dandillot is not going to fall in love with Costals. But after weeks and weeks spent looking after a dying man, then visiting one lawyer after another, it gave her an agreeable feeling to see a lively young man in this renovated flat; in this drawing-room where she had so often been snubbed by her son, had so often felt herself despised by her husband, socially and intellectually her superior (and class distinctions exist even within families), she enjoyed being spoken to by a distinguished celebrity in this tone of respectful inexperience, enjoyed hearing him talk such charming nonsense on a subject which she flattered herself she knew so much about.

And which she did indeed know about. She was well aware of what a normal marriage amounts to (there are admirable exceptions, of course): the classic music-hall duet, Nénette and Rintintin. 'What did I feel when I got married?' M. Dandillot had once replied - to someone who was not even a friend. 'Nothing. But a woman who brings you four hundred thousand francs is worth catching. I didn't love her, but I told myself that it might come with habit.' It had not come. After the first three weeks of marriage Rintintin had never again kissed Nénette on the mouth. From the outset he had made her feel his superiority. 'He loves me!' she used to think in the early days when he told her she was an idiot. Soon she began to take his remarks - 'You're off your head!' or 'What? You must be mad!' or 'How boring you are!' - at their face value. She hoped that the birth of Gaston would bring them together. Nothing of the kind. Rintintin refused at first to kiss the newly hatched infant (might not the latter's odious character as a child and as a young man have arisen from this sort of parental malediction? Mme Dandillot believed so), and could not bring himself to do so until a week later, with repugnance and dread, and blushing profusely. He did not like his son, although he was devoted to the boys in his sports clubs - perhaps because with his son this formidable egotist felt that his responsibility was engaged and that he had duties towards him, whereas with other people's sons.... Besides, it was not them he liked but his theories, which they were supposed to illustrate. Nénette buried herself in her household chores and hobbies, absorbed in the running of a big house with a garden, in the country. Truth to tell, she had little need of her husband's love (and even less, dear God, of the drudgery of sex, happily less and less frequent. Only when he told her that such and such a woman he had met was ravishing, or that he had been accosted by a street-walker in the rue Saint- Lazare, did she feel a faint gust of passion for him). All she wanted was to be 'understood'. Normally, when a woman complains of not being 'understood', it is because she is not loved at all, or because the man she loves does not return her love in due proportion. For Mme Dandillot, being 'understood' was more modest: it meant that M. Dandillot should give credit where it was due, that he should not leave her with all the burdens and responsibilities (the children, the house) while retaining the right to complain (everything tiresome that occurred was Nénette's fault - he treated her worse than the maid, which was logical enough since she could not hand in her notice), that he should take his nose out of his newspaper when she spoke to him, and that he should take an interest in something else besides the pentathlon, or 'natural' man, or whether it would rain on Sunday, in which case his crosscountry race was done for.

When Solange - unwanted - was born, Rintintin, this time, did not go to see Nénette for two days, and left her crying alone in her bed: he was punishing her for his own clumsiness. There was no longer any question of a new child bringing them together. 'Anyhow,' she thought, 'I shall no longer be alone. If those spiteful beasts' (her husband and her son) 'make me suffer, I shall have one consolation at least.' And Solange was indeed in every respect a consolation. Besides which, as he approached his fifties, Rintintin began to realize that he had wasted his life, and grew embittered, and his wife, sensing this, took a leaf out of his book. It was her turn to make wounding remarks, to create scenes, which always had the same finale: she would break them off brusquely by going up to bed (at two o'clock in the afternoon), and did not reappear. She was making up for twenty-five years of restraint when she was beastly to him. At certain moments of crisis she would go so far as to burn a newspaper that M. Dandillot had touched, or wash her hands with soap and water after he had shaken hands with her, or hesitate before kissing Gaston because he had just kissed his father. When he died, she would have liked to shed a few tears, but she could not manage it.

Such was Mme Dandillot's personal experience of marriage, at a time when she desired the union of her daughter with Costals to the point of submitting to almost any humiliation to ensure that it took place. Costals' intellectual superiority over Solange, his egotism, his eccentricities, the gap in age, their different attitudes to life, Solange's quasi-frigidity: all these circumstances were very similar to those which had clouded her own marriage. But it never occurred to her that anything but happiness could come of it. She was sincere in the apologia for marriage she was about to make to Costals, as sincere as one of those sublime fathers who say of their sons, if the headmaster of the boarding-school informs them of some 'distressing' episode: 'I'd prefer him to be dead than to think he had such habits as that!' when they themselves at school were notorious little monsters. The irresponsibility of young people who marry is excusable. But what are we to think of the irresponsibility of those who encourage them to marry and who know, or should know, better? It is as though the urge to marry were as much a basic human instinct as the urge to copulate.

Mme Dandillot interrupted Costals' reasoning from time to time. She was full of arguments which carried little weight, and did not even conceive of those - numerous enough, after all - which might have shaken him. Costals spoke of the exigencies of his work, without false modesty, like a man who knows he has the upper hand.

'What work of art could be purer than a simple human heartbeat?' said Mme Dandillot. 'Besides, that solitude of yours is no life at all. Marry, and at least you'll have warmth and good food and light and noise around you, and of course a few anxieties - life can't exist without them, but at least it will be life.'

'Noise!' thought Costals. 'So that's what they want. Their frightful inner poverty demands "noise" and not solitude: otherwise they would become conscious of their emptiness. They think I'm unhappy because I'm alone. "Good cooking"! They think their abject idea of happiness is the same as mine. And they think my life is no life at all!'

Mme Dandillot must indeed have thought that Costals' life was no life at all, for she went on about it, with many a jeer at old bachelors. Yet there are bachelors and bachelors, and it is comic to hear people harping on the 'solitude' of some of them, when this 'solitude' is peopled with ravishing creatures in a way that marriage can never be; there are ways of being married in celibacy, as there are ways of being celibate in matrimony. As for the attitude which sees the old age of a Flaubert, a Baudelaire or a Nietzsche in terms of bachelordom, it had best be forgotten.

Naturally she trotted out the cliché about 'companionship', and the cliché 'Someone to look after you when you're old', and then the even hoarier one about 'doing what everyone else does'.

'Surely you're not afraid of a bit of discipline? You've always been your own master, followed your own inclinations, but some day you'll have to go the way of all flesh. If you don't marry, you'll end up hankering for hearth and home when it's too late. Seeing some nice little bank-clerk on his way home to his wife and family and a hot supper, you'll sigh: "If only I were he!"'

Costals thought of Schiller's remark (in Joan of Arc): 'The gods themselves are powerless against stupidity.' He had once quoted this in an article for an evening paper. The article had been published in extenso except for the aforesaid quotation, which had been cut. One must never speak ill of stupidity in a French newspaper.

Then this respectable bourgeoise proceeded resolutely to boost the virtues of her daughter, like a slave-trader his negress or a horse-dealer his filly.

'She's utterly straightforward.' (Costals wondered whether to be pleased or displeased that she should be utterly straightforward.) 'She's very neat and tidy; she'll keep your things in order.' ('What's the point of having servants?') 'She doesn't care about luxury. Oh no, she's not the sort who'll cost you a fortune in clothes. A motor-car? She said to me herself that she didn't want one. She's told me dozens of times that her vocation was to be subject to a man, like an oriental wife.' ('Yes, when she's dug herself in.') 'She'll help you. She's no fool, you know. She'll type your manuscripts....'

'She'll go and see your publishers for you, and as she's, ahem, pretty, she'll get you some splendid contracts,' Costals finished off for her, sourly. The friendly feelings he had had for this woman the day before were melting away like snow in the sun. And the fact that Solange could be so intimate with her relegated the girl to a remote corner of his estimation. And tomorrow Mme Dandillot would have rights over him - the right to ask him to show her his accounts, the right to know all about his life, the right to enter his house any time she liked and poke about among his things. (His eyes fell on her very unfeminine hands with their prominent veins, gnarled hands like the claws of a bird of prey.) He remembered the title of a novel that had just appeared: Strangers in My House. 'One family is already too much for me, and now I've got to have two! If one simply married an individual, well and good. But one has to marry a whole flock of strangers, the obscene tribe of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts and cousins, who also have rights over you, if only, to put it at its best, the right to waste your time. No, society is mad. The whole thing is monstrous. If I had to marry at any cost (if the law were to compel me to) I would ask for a girl from the Public Assistance. Seriously.'

Costals proceeded to talk about the 'heaviness' of women. He recalled an incident that seemed to have made a deep impression on him: one day he was alone in a canoe not far from the shore when suddenly the frail craft seemed to have become weighed down, he had to paddle furiously, it was as though the boat were paralysed by some evil spell. Then he heard a laugh: a swimmer was clinging to the stern, being dragged along behind, and this swimmer was a woman he loved … Another time, he had seen a frog coupling with a fish and holding it clasped between her legs for a whole day until the fish suffocated to death....

Costals made such a funny face - so horrified - as he told these stories that Mme Dandillot thought him 'too sweet': the language of the shop-girl seemed to come naturally to her.

'So you're as frightened of women as that?' she asked with a rather triumphant air. Costals would have liked to point out that the strongest of the strong can lose the fight because of a speck of dust in his eye, that the lion justly fears the mosquito, and that 'dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to stink', as the Scripture says. But it is not easy to say such things in drawing-rooms, even a drawing-room with a dancing faun in imitation bronze, duly fig-leaved, and a palm decked out in pink ribbon like a pug-dog; in a word, a drawing-room much like a dentist's waiting-room, the only difference being that you are waiting to be married instead of waiting to have a tooth pulled out. But this difference, our hero thought to himself, is negligible.

'Let's get down to brass tacks,' Mme Dandillot said at last.

She told him what she would agree to. What did she agree to? Everything. She agreed that the wedding should take place in the country, in total privacy except for the four witnesses. She agreed to separate maintenance: she would give Solange an annual allowance, and would settle a dowry on her only after a few years, when the marriage seemed solidly based. ('She'll have stopped paying the allowance long before that, and the whole thing will end up with solicitors' letters', thought Costals.) She agreed that there should be only a civil ceremony; they could go through a church ceremony later, when the marriage had shown signs of lasting. 'There's no point in dragging the Church into a travesty of matrimony.' At these words, Costals gave a start: they were the very words Solange had written to him. Had the letter been inspired, dictated perhaps, by Mme Dandillot (in which case Solange had lied in protesting the contrary)? Or had the daughter, like a child, simply repeated something she had overheard at home? And once again Costals was revolted by this despicable conception of Catholicism. 'The religion of Europeans is worse than no religion at all.' He could not resist pouncing on it.

'My dear sir, I hardly expected after reading your books to receive lessons in religion from you,' said Mme Dandillot, pursing her peasant's mouth. She was one of those women who make you laugh when they put on a severe look and whose laughter gives you the shivers. She did not feel in the least shocked, but judged it only proper, since religion was at stake, to look as though she was. The Church serves as a pretext for the worldly, just as Jesus Christ serves as a pretext for the Church.

It was Costals' turn to protest a bit, but he at least was sincere:

'If I prided myself on being a Catholic, I should be a proper one. And if the Pope offered me a cardinal's hat, as he did to M. de Turenne, who had no better title to it than I have, I should accept it gladly. I say it without boasting: I'm sure I'd make an excellent cardinal.'

There was a noise of a hen laying an egg - a strange thing in the avenue de Villiers. It was Mme Dandillot laughing. She put her hand in front of her mouth when she laughed, as little girls do. She did not understand that Costals had spoken seriously, and that if he had entered the Church he would have been as stout a prelate as the Borgia Alexander VI, who was a bit dubious as regards morals, but never wavered an inch as regards dogma.

The good lady opined that, the civil ceremony completed, they could later, on the way through some out-of-the-way spot, get themselves blessed by the local curé, just like that; they could let him think they were already joined according to the rites of the Church, but that an extra benediction would be a comfort to them. Thus they would be able to announce in the Figaro that 'the couple were blessed by M. le curé of ...' etc., without lying. Costals recognized in this suggestion the true genius of the upper middle class.

He asked for a little more time to think about it. Mme Dandillot agreed with alacrity. If Costals felt he was on a slippery slope, so, too, was she: the slope of infinite complaisance. 'What a lack of pride!' he thought. But, after all, there is really no difference between people who are proud and people who are not, since the proud pocket exactly the same number of insults as the rest. There are no proud people; there are people who talk about their pride, and those who do not.

He said he wanted to think it over. In reality, he wanted to consult his lawyer on a point which he had not dared to raise with Mme Dandillot: how a man can get a divorce if his wife refuses to give him one and is guiltless? For Solange had emerged from this conversation intact. She had even survived maternal assistance. She still held firm in him.

Outside: 'Well, all this is very odd. Am I dreaming? What a business!' He felt as though he had got into a train to say good-bye to a friend, and the train had started up without warning and was now bearing him off to some unknown destination.

Women were wont to say of Maître Dubouchet that he had a disagreeable look. This is what they say of a man if he looks grave, or dignified, or just serious. Maître Dubouchet was a Pyrrhonist who took the utmost pains to look serious; such an effort is essential in the law-courts; without it, everyone would burst out laughing. Dubouchet compensated for this effort by making the most of the voluptuous pleasures of the court-room. To be able to bellow and fume and choke and mop one's brow and insult and weep and throw oneself around as though one had St Vitus's Dance, with a view to proving the innocence of an individual who has already admitted his guilt to you; to twist facts and falsify documents, to make fun of the victim, to crack jokes at the expense of witnesses - all this with the approbation, nay (here a flourishing of sleeves) nay, the enthusiastic approbation of society - is worth a few sacrifices to a man whose whole philosophy is based on the spirit of derision. Bald, glabrous, with a noble jowl and gold-rimmed spectacles, Dubouchet had the air of a thinker who does not think - a serious betrayal of Pyrrhonism, which deserves better than that. All this is nevertheless to imply that his appearance was nothing if not respectable, except of course when he was threading his way through the trams in the boulevard du Palais, dressed in black peplum and bib, not to mention his decorations. Dubouchet was unpopular, because he had a little too much money, and showed it. And anyone with money is a monster to those without it.

'The hero of my novel,' Costals was saying to him, 'is a sort of idiot who allows himself to be dragged into marriage out of charity for the young lady. After a time he sees that the marriage is obviously harmful to what he calls his opus - I forgot to tell you that my idiot was a literary idiot. He wants a divorce. But he has married an absolute nincompoop of a girl who has no desire to be unfaithful to him, has given him no cause for complaint, and refuses to divorce.'

'I'm afraid there's nothing to be done for your literary idiot if the wife is guiltless and refuses a divorce. Divorce under those circumstances is impossible. They could live apart, but they would still be married.'

'Come, come, Maître Dubouchet! You're not going to tell me there's such a thing in France as a restriction that can't be got round! My so ... my young cousin told me one day that a school-friend of his to whom he had remarked: "I wonder what parents are for?" had answered in a flash: "To be lied to, of course." The same might be said about laws: what are they for, if not for people to sharpen their wits on?'

'Of course there might be a way ... rather an improbable one, but since we're dealing with a novel.... A divorce is granted if the husband can produce in court some document which provides a strong supposition of the wife's infidelity; for example, a letter in which the wife told the husband that she had "had enough of this existence, that it cannot go on, etc." would suggest that her affections are engaged elsewhere. Your idiot could ask the girl, when they're engaged, to write such a letter, which he would keep in his possession and simply put in the post as soon as he had had enough. But is it likely that a fiancée would consent to write that sort of billet-doux? She'd have to be devilish keen to get married, and personally, I should have some qualms about the charac- ter of the young lady in question. But perhaps your heroine is like that?'

'Whichever way it is,' thought Costals, 'whether it's love or a frantic desire to see the thing through, she'll write the letter. I can't see her jibbing at an extra genuflection. What will she think? Probably what is in fact the case: that I love my destiny more than I love her. Once again I shall have put her in the position of knowing where she stands; which is to say that I shall have behaved honestly towards her.'

'Is it a parachute that opens or a parachute that fails to open?' he asked.

'In the normal course of events, it should open.'

'In that case, will you be so kind as to draft such a letter for me. And please weigh your words carefully. I want my idiot to land safe and sound in the luscious meadows of freedom regained.'

'Have you a fountain-pen? I'll dictate. "Dear friend . . ." No, don't let's put "dear friend". Let's begin ex abrupto: "If I write this to you it is because in your presence…'"

'"... I feel I scarcely exist." Perfect, you've hit the right note straight away. Leave a space and I'll fill it in: etcetera, etcetera. And then?'

'"We must face the fact that our experiment has failed. It is true that you always warned me that I should have to take second place in our life, after your work. But I had no idea how that would turn out in reality. I realize now that I mean nothing to you, and ... and ..."'

'"... and, although you try to conceal it from me, with that generosity which I have always admired in you . . ." Forgive me, I'm so used to drafting articles about myself that flattering epithets come naturally to me - it's an irresistible tic ... "you cannot help showing it, because of your natural irritability, with an unconcious cruelty which often stabs me to the heart." I've spelt unconscious wrong, because the young woman is supposed to be in the throes of passion. Besides, one of her principal endowments is not being able to spell.'

'New paragraph', said Dubouchet.

'No, in the throes of passion one doesn't make new paragraphs.'

'"I confess that I can no longer endure this life in which, in order to be a writer's wife, I must cease to be a wife at all."'

'That's too good - people would think at once that I had written it. But leave it: I'll make gibberish of it. Now what we need is for her to insult him a bit. How about this? "You have always thought that my presence would eventually be a burden to you, but I did not imagine that yours would become such a burden to me … "'

'And now the crucial sentence: "... or that I might one day contemplate a life in which the presence of someone other than you would be capable of making me happy. Do not answer this letter. My sole object in writing it is to ensure that you are not taken unawares if what you no doubt wish for were to come about."'

'Do you think that will do?' asked Costals, with the expression of an aeroplane passenger glancing at the frail form of his parachute in its bag.

'If that doesn't work, nothing will.'

'Wait,' said Costals. 'I must sprinkle it with a few womanly spangles.' He put three dots at the end of every other sentence, and an exclamation mark at the end of each of the others. He concluded the final sentence with: 'So there!' Dubouchet laughed.

'Congratulations on the "So there!" It's quite true, when a woman doesn't know how to put her meaning into words, or simply when she has nothing to say at all, she puts "So there!" There are infinite depths in that "So there!"'

'Allow me to disagree. In my opinion, women write "So there!" when they are particularly proud of having succeeded in expressing what they think or feel. "So there!" is a shout of triumph analogous to the cluck ... cluck ... cluck ... of the hen that has just laid an egg, and at the same time a childish challenge: "That's what I think, do you hear? Full stop. That's that."'

They argued the point a bit, but both were agreed that, however one looked at it, 'So there!' was pregnant with the unfathomable mystery of the fair sex. The bewitching smile, etc., etc., of the eternal Sphinx, etc., glowed adorably, etc., etc., on the face of 'So there!'

Before parting company, they gurgled a bit longer over their superiority, real or illusory:

'So you too,' said Costals, 'refuse to believe in the unfathomable mystery of womanhood? It's funny, all men, when they talk about it in private, are of the same opinion: there isn't a grain of mystery in women. But if they have to write about women, or speak about them in public, in other words if they have to express themselves officially on the subject, they all trot out the same old dithyramb about mysterious Eve. I suspect that on these occasions, acting as social animals, they unconsciously assume the role of heralds and recruiting sergeants for the species. Obviously the species requires women to be overestimated. Where should we be if men began to see women simply for what they are? As I see it, just as man does not desire woman because he finds her beautiful, but proclaims her beautiful in order to justify his desire, in the same way he does not idealize woman because he finds her "mysterious", but proclaims her "mysterious" in order to justify his ideal, an ideal which society, far more than nature, inculcates by every possible means with a view to propagating the species!'

'For thirty years, women have been coming to see me in these chambers, and these are women at the moment of making a clean breast of things. Well, I can tell you, a perceptive man can read the mind of any woman like an open book. He can see all her feelings stirring inside her, like fish behind the glass walls of an aquarium. But however much even the most perceptive woman may hang around the male, watching him furtively, listening at doors, he remains impenetrable to her. One proof of this is the fact that however feebly drawn female characters may sometimes be in novels written by men, they are never as grotesquely feeble as male characters created by lady-novelists.'

They went on gurgling a bit longer, but enough is enough. Whatever the truth may be, whether or not there is a mystery about women, there is certainly a mystery about men. The mystery about men is how women can ever love them.

A quarter of an hour later, back in his flat. A sudden shift from the sordid to the ethereal, from juridico-burlesque foxi- ness to the head of this woman thrown back in abandon and her love-tormented face.

Afterwards:

'I've seen my lawyer, and he said to me: "There is one way in which your hero might escape" (I pretended it had to do with the hero of a novel I'm writing) "if the experiment fails. But your heroine would have to be a girl who loved him deeply and trusted him implicitly, the kind of girl you never come across nowadays, a virgin of antiquity, a Corneille heroine. Is that what she's like in your book?" I told him that although the girl in my book was not strictly a Corneille heroine, there was nothing grand and generous that she was not prepared to do. "Well then," he said, "this is the way."'

He explained the whole thing to her and showed her the letter. He felt a little ashamed, and as they were sitting in armchairs, he leant back in his so that she should not see his face at that moment, or perhaps so that he should not see hers. But she turned towards him with a smile:

'I get it: it's "on appro".'

'On appro?'

'When something's delivered to you which you've bought in a big store, and you no longer want it, you can send it back. That's what they call "on appro" - on approval.'

'What a sublime girl you are,' he said, touched that she should take it so calmly. I called it a parachute-letter; so now let's call it an appro-parachute. Do you love me enough, are you really Cornelian enough, to write me such a letter?'

'Yes,' she said in her composed voice.

'Thank you. You are a docile person, and that's how I like women to be. That's how I should like you to be always. I want you to be like a cheich to me. Cheichs are Arab scarves which can be folded in all sorts of ways and which you can do whatever you like with. The Arabs are never without them: their cheichs serve them alternately as scarves, hats, towels, ropes, veils, filters, bags, fly-whisks, belts, handkerchiefs, underpants, or pillows. I haven't brought you up to my level so that you should be anything else but me. I want you to be me, and nothing else. So that I shall never have occasion to mistrust you. So that I shall never grow tired of you.'

The draft of the letter lay on the table. 'I ought to get her to write it at once.' But although he had dared to take the first step, he did not dare take the second, his supply of effrontery having run out for the time being. It would recharge itself, but it needed a bit of time, as when men expend their vital fluid. Moreover, he had only his own note-paper there, or the typing paper on which he wrote his manuscripts, and these would be recognized as his by the court. What was needed was either her own, or any recognizably 'feminine' - i.e. flashy - note-paper. So they talked of other things.

He said to himself: 'Is she doing it out of love for me, or simply out of hippogriffic passion? Is she amorous or ambitious? In any case it doesn't matter; I'm not going to kill myself prospecting a human soul. If it's love, it's admirable, and it might almost make me decide to marry. If it's ambition, she's a monster, and it would be interesting to live with a monster.'

'Things are going well for you,' he said to her on the doorstep.

Costals' Diary

23 August - The situation I've got myself into in the past five weeks is truly hellish: not loving her enough to take the plunge, but enough to suffer from not taking it. Yesterday, as we parted, I said to her: 'Things are going well for you.' When I woke up this morning everything was in the melting pot again. For five weeks, no peace of mind, no taste for anything. My life at once frittered away and blocked up. Every morning in a different mood, and at the mercy of the most trifling influence. If I go to the window and see a pretty face in the avenue, I cry: 'Abandon the pursuit of wenches? Oh, no, it's too frightful!' An item in a newspaper about a young peasant who in answer to the mayor's fateful question: 'Do you take this woman...?' replies 'No,' thus, the reporter adds, 'avoiding the irreparable', reminds me of the extent to which 'universal wisdom' finds that it really is something irreparable. Now I am at the no stage. A moment later, I remember something she said, or her plush rabbit, and I turn round and zoom back towards yes. This perpetual see-saw is killing me. My mood changes literally from minute to minute. One moment I'm frightened of her, of her mother, of all her family, of the whole horrible network; the next I'm puffed out like a spinnaker, thinking how happy I can make her. (I used to have mistresses to make me happy. I shall be taking a wife to make her happy. Tit for tat.) At the moment of writing, what I should like is to clear out without seeing her again, go to Morocco, spend three or four months there with my beloved Rhadidja, and on my return take Solange as my mistress, nothing more. The multiplicity and confusion of my desires and impulses, the speed with which they succeed one another, are such that I find it impossible to express them.

Whatever the final decision, doom is upon me for a long time to come. If I marry her, this doom is an absolute certainty. If I don't, I shall have regained my freedom but will always be plagued by remorse for having made her suffer, by the thought that I might have been happier with her, by an uneasy feeling, as long as she remains unmarried, that it is still not too late …

The train is carrying me off.... The same mixed feelings - apprehension and attraction - that I had in the train which carried me for the first time to the battlefront.

This is the most bourgeois of dramas. If I turned it into a novel, it would be appallingly dull and prosaic, without the slightest relief. It could not be otherwise, since it is in the nature of the nuptial tie to be sordid. The crisis of adolescence, the crisis of war (should I do the decent thing?), the crisis resulting from a surfeit of pleasure, the crisis arising from my duty to my work when all I wanted was to live, simply to live - all my crises have been in a sense honourable. But this one? This one is Triplepatte. [A famous comedy by Tristan Bernard. Triplepatte is the personification of the man who cannot make up his mind (Translator's note)]  Precisely, I am Triplepatte. And yet this drama too has a certain nobility: on the one hand, because it is my work that I want to safeguard, and on the other because all the trouble arises from my reluctance to hurt Solange. This does not, however, lift it above the level of the sordid. The fact of marriage corrupts everything.

24 August - I want you to forget me and I want you not to forget me. When you are not tender, I am hurt; when you are, I think you calculating. Because you are placid I call you cold; if you were warm I should call you gushing. It is I who am the element of torment between us, and it has never "been anything else but me.

I, whose only desire is to be like the close-cropped grass on which the cows lay their muzzles without grazing.

One always falls ill on a Sunday, when chemists are shut and doctors on the spree. One always needs urgent legal advice in August, when Paris is empty. Horrible August of 1927! In the Jardin des Plantes - one of the disgraces of France - the bear pads to and fro without a moment's respite, and the lion stands with lacklustre eyes swaying from paw to paw. Like these beasts that confinement and monomania have turned into neurotics, Costals too, cooped up in the cage of a love he does not feel, sways from side to side. Our swaggering hero, to put it bluntly, is now a poor devil who needs advice, who needs to be given a lead. That's what the idea of marriage has done to him! But why blame the emptiness of Paris for his failure to find people who might help him? His pride alone is to blame. Even if Paris were full, his plight would be the same. Expose his ridiculous situation to a friend or relation - never! Allow himself to be seen in this state, he who has always been so much his own master - never! Out of pride, he would rather commit an act of folly, perhaps irreparable, without involving anyone else, than avoid it by taking advice from someone he trusts. This marriage is only possible in one form: instantaneous marriage. At one go, as one gulps down a purgative.

However, at the end of the month he weakened. He felt such a need to discuss it all with someone, anyone.... To go and say to Maître Dubouchet: 'I've got a hero for a novel who ..was no longer enough. He must say outright, to a man of experience, 'Look here, I'm contemplating getting married in such and such circumstances … What do you advise?' And then, childishly, as believers confess to a priest because of the secrecy of the confessional and also because they believe him to be a kind and helpful man, Costals told himself that he must 'confess all' to Dubouchet, who would also be bound by professional secrecy, and was accustomed by his profession to 'lend an ear' to people's troubles. He struggled with himself, decided to telephone him, was delighted to find that the barrister was out till one, which gave him two hours' respite, telephoned again at one, to be told by the maid that Monsieur had gone away on holiday and would not be back for three weeks.

Loneliness closed round him again. At all costs he must break out of this circle! If a man of law confirmed that the parachute-letter would automatically get him a divorce, what risk would he be running? A few months of tribulation. He thought of his own solicitor, telephoned him, and made an appointment for five o'clock. Then remembered that his solicitor acted for the whole family, and if he were to hear in a few months' time that Costals had married, he would spread the story of the parachute-letter all over the place. Costals telephoned to cancel the appointment.

Then he remembered a lawyer whom he had button-holed in connection with some literary litigation, and who did not know his family. Telephone. The lawyer was on holiday. ('Always loafing around,' grumbled Costals, who spent the whole year on holiday.) But the head clerk could see him. Appointment.

Custom demands that the chambers of French solicitors should always be extremely dusty and ill-kept, as if thereby to guarantee the soundness of the firm and to warn one not to judge by appearances in these slum-sanctuaries. Maître S.'s chambers conformed to custom. In a wicker armchair, a relic, perhaps, of some third-rate boarding-house, where it had been worn down by the backsides of generations of governesses, Costals awaited his turn, glowing with humility.

The head clerk in Maître S.'s chambers, fifty-eight years old (fifty-four to the ladies), was repulsive from head to foot - or let's say from head to navel, for, sitting at his desk, he was visible only thus far. His hair was outrageously dyed and curled and heavily parted in the middle, his moustaches, also dyed, were turned up in the old style. Behind an ill-fitting steel-rimmed pince-nez, his eyes oscillated continually between petty tyranny and fear. His nose was repulsive, both bulbous and snub. His mouth was repulsive, warped at the edges, shiny and wet with kissings and suckings and lickings - a mouth doomed to cancer in three years; with a cigarette butt dangling from it. His flesh bulged over his collar, which was of celluloid, cracked at the corners. His chin had such dimples, my dear! There was a tie-pin stuck in the very knot of his tie. He was wearing two waistcoats (in August). He had a peevish, shifty, sidelong look, suggesting servility with superiors, ferocity with small fry, and cheap restaurants where people stuff the two remaining nuts in their pockets because nothing must be left, and where they furtively paw the waitresses and threaten to have them kicked out if they refuse to co-operate. He had the air of a minor official in a government office - one of those government offices no self-respecting person would be seen dead in.

Costals gave him the whole rigmarole about the hero of his novel and the parachute-letter. When he had finished, the fellow burst out laughing:

'The letter your barrister friend dictated to you belongs to the realm of fantasy. Far from being of any use to your character, it will tell against him. It's obvious that the wife, if she doesn't want the divorce, will make a clean breast of the whole thing and explain how the letter came to be written.'

'But wouldn't the court find it an improbable story?'

'They wouldn't find it improbable, because your hero is a literary man,' said the head clerk, who knew who he was dealing with. 'In any case, their suspicions would be aroused. They would institute an enquiry, from which it would emerge that the wife's putative lover does not exist and that the whole thing was fabricated in advance. Then the famous letter would be pronounced invalid, and the court would refuse to grant a divorce, if only to teach this too far-sighted husband a lesson. Indeed, the latter might well be charged with contempt of court. No, sir, with all due respect to your friend, the whole thing doesn't hold water. Imaginative, I grant you - barristers are never lacking in imagination. But otherwise. ...'

Costals was shattered. If there was no emergency exit from the marriage, there could be no question of proceeding with it. And he looked at this wretched creature, who was nevertheless the man in the know, the man on whom the yes or no of his destiny hung, the yes or no of Solange's; he looked at him, and he felt very humble in front of him, humble and sad as a Friendly Society badge.

'But can I rely on what he says?' His doubts were justifiable, for there was no lack of errors in the head clerk's observations (it would be tedious to enumerate them). 'After having checked the barrister's statements with the solicitor's clerk, I now ought to check the solicitor's clerk with the solicitor himself. Then I should get Counsel's opinion on what the solicitor says. Oh, yes, we've got plenty of people to fall back on.' In the same way, the man who has just been told by Dr A. that he has cancer, goes on to consult Dr B., who tells him he is perfectly healthy. Then he rushes off to consult Dr C., who tells him it isn't cancer but TB. Such divergences are in all probability part of the harmony of nature: three thermometers on the walls of your room, consulted simultaneously, will never show the same temperature. 'Allah alone knows the truth.'

Then a strange thing happened: our hero, who was always more or less intoxicated with himself, always more or less of a firebrand, stooped to an unparalleled humiliation in his need for his problem to be taken seriously and for someone to come to his rescue: he put himself entirely into the hands of this unspeakable creature.

'Listen, monsieur, I might as well tell you the truth: the person concerned is not a character in a novel, it's me.'

The head clerk moved his pince-nez and stared at Costals.

'This letter business must seem to you in rather bad taste. But the young woman, I assure you, is beyond reproach. I imagine she agreed to it out of love for me; people are so strange! And the young woman's family, too, is an excellent one. The grandfather was a public prosecutor. The father was one of the founders of the Olympic Games, and a Commander of the Legion of Honour....'

The head clerk bowed slightly, as though to say: 'Congratulations. I see we're moving in the best circles.' In spite of his distress (the word is not too strong) the old Costals, Costals the rake, had been unable to suppress a secret smile on conferring the red ribbon on M. Dandillot.

'Mind you. I have no desire to get married,' continued the writer, to whom the very idea of marriage seemed so ridiculous that he could not help pleading extenuating circumstances, even in front of this shifty stranger. 'I'm doing it to please the young lady...'

'Beware!' the head clerk broke in severely. 'I tell you: beware! I consider that I should be failing in my duty if I didn't put you on your guard against a marriage undertaken in such conditions.'

'Ah, don't I know it! You've no need to tell me this marriage is sheer madness. I never stop telling the girl so. And that is precisely why the question of the efficacy of this letter is so important to me. Mark you, the young lady is prepared to make a solemn promise that she will agree to a divorce - by whatever farce we can think up - if she sees that such a life is unbearable to me.'

'Well, of course, any girl will make such a promise, beforehand. But after! ... Aren't you aware of the female talent for constantly going back on what has been settled?'

'Woman aren't all as bad as that,' said Costals, who disliked hearing women spoken ill of, as though he considered that his own special province.

'And don't you know the old adage: "All's fair in marriage"? There's no such thing as a marriage in which one of the partners hasn't been more or less unfaithful to the other. In this business the worst is possible, and without ever going beyond the bounds of perfect respectability.'

'Insolent swine!' thought Costals. 'Did I come here to listen to this? Those horrible maxims! I came here to be encouraged to marry.' He glanced at the chief clerk's ring-finger, and saw that, like Dubouchet, he was wearing a wedding ring. 'Ah, so they're all married! They speak from experience! Besides, one has only to look at them to see marriage written all over their faces.'

'So, no precaution is guaranteed effective. One has to set sail without a lifeboat.'

'No precaution is guaranteed effective. But wait, it's quite simple, I'll show you the Civil Code … '

'Oh no, not that! If I put my nose into the Civil Code I'd go completely mad. I'm well on the way already: that's quite enough.'

'Moreover, believe me, it's always those who take most precautions who are the first to be gulled. Anyone who wants to get married should blindfold himself and dive in without a second thought.'

'Do you mind if I make a note of the information you've given me?'

'Not at all. Here's pen and paper.'

Costals jotted down: 'Repulsive from head to foot. Hair heavily parted. Eyes continually shifting between petty tyranny and fear. Wet, slobbery mouth. Flesh bulging over his celluloid collar.' He would put the character into one of his novels.

'Forgive me, I'm keeping you,' he said with genuine affability.

'Not at all! Take your time.'

Costals looked the man over once more, and noted: 'Hideous nose. Peevish, shifty look. Mouth doomed to cancer in three years. And such dimples on his chin, my dear!'

'Thank you. You're kindness itself. I don't know whether I shall follow your advice, but in any case as far as I'm concerned our short meeting won't have been a waste of time.' Then he left.

'Blindfold oneself, and dive straight in regardless,' he thought to himself. 'It's exactly as I said: instantaneous marriage.' What was the point of seeing these lawyers, who only tormented him? It was as though he only sought advice once his mind was made up. It was no use his summoning up every possible reason 'against' (seeking them even in Solange's face, her body, her way of making love); none of it made any difference; all that had been transcended; it was as though he had gone beyond the decision stage. It had come about by an imperceptible train of circumstance, as everything happens, as war happens: one wakes up to find oneself already embroiled. On 3 September he noted in his diary: 'It is absolutely incomprehensible why I am marrying her.' And on the 4th: 'The longer it goes on, the clearer the reasons for not marrying her appear to me to be. And yet it is more and more certain that I shall.'

Next day he was invited by Mme Dandillot to another prénuptial cup of tea.

The moment he entered the Dandillot drawing-room, Costals was struck by the smell of Virginia tobacco - to him rather repellent - which hung there, and he remembered something Solange had told him - that her mother did not smoke, except when her nerves were particularly on edge.

'I should say the situation looks fairly promising from your point of view,' he said forthwith. 'In fact, assuming that the thing is to happen, one might aim provisionally at October.' (He never pronounced the word marriage in her presence, partly because of the absurdity of the word and partly in the same spirit as certain primitive peoples are afraid to name their gods, and only refer to them periphrastically.) 'It could be done at Perros-Guirec, where I once had a shack. I shall have to find out if the two witnesses per partner can be reduced to one apiece.' (He had no idea whom he would ask to be his witness, appalled at the thought of being seen in such a grotesque situation by someone he respected.) 'You, for instance, if you absolutely insist on coming....' (He felt magnanimous, and entered the sacrifice he was making in the debit and credit account he was already keeping with the Dandillot family.) 'Do you think any inhabitant of Perros- Guirec would do as a witness for me? When I had to declare my father's death at the town hall, I went to the nearest bar to find a witness, and gave him a few francs....'

Mme Dandillot's face had lit up, exactly like a room when one switches on the light on entering. She had been so afraid he would say to her: 'My dear Madame Dandillot, we must drop the whole thing.' She at once began galloping into the future.

'Perros-Guirec is most amusing ...  Afterwards, you can retire to some secluded little spot to hide your love.' (At the words 'hide your love', Costals shuddered; supposing he had loved Solange, they would have deflated his love on the spot, like a pin-prick in a balloon.) 'At the end of the month, you'll come back and settle in Paris.' ('So, she's giving the orders already?') 'During your absence I could find a flat for you.' (Costals, who had been looking for a flat non-stop for nine years without finding one that was strictly adapted to his needs, his fantasies and his idiosyncrasies, contemplated the abyss that separated him from Mme Dandillot, and indeed from the human race in general.) 'As you'll be on the system of separate maintenance, Solange will bring her own furniture.'

'Would they be things belonging to you, or things newly bought?' the writer anxiously inquired. Solange might want to bring the laughing faun. He would refuse to have it at any price. A first bone of contention. But not, alas, a ground for divorce.

'Everything would be new,' said Mme Dandillot, who had not forgotten Costals' remark about 'French bric-à-brac'. 'And besides, you could choose it with her. A man must have an interior that pleases him.'

'I shall wear a lounge suit at the Registrar's,' said Costals, who had forgotten this detail. Like all of his kind, though vague about the general picture, he was meticulous about trifles.

'I don't even think there's a law against your getting married in a soft collar,' said Mme Dandillot, laughing. Her face was exultant.

'Solange must have told you we agreed that I should have three months' conjugal holiday a year, during which I would go far away and relax.'

'Yes, so she said. At first I thought it a bit odd. But after all, lots of women are separated from their husbands for long periods. Naval officers' wives....'

'And the sort of liveliness of imagination which prompts me to strike up acquaintance with every attractive woman I meet ... '

'I'm broad-minded. I can well understand that a man, when he's travelling, for instance.... But provided, of course, that the dear child never gets to hear of it.'

'Adultery and deceit are lawful and commendable!' Costals thought to himself. God knows, he liked easy-going mothers. But at this moment he felt a bit disgusted.

There remains one very important point; that Solange should agree to a divorce if it becomes absolutely necessary. She gave me a solemn promise that she wouldn't oppose a divorce.'

'She has said to me time and time again: "Do you think I'd foist myself on him if I knew it made him unhappy?" That she would never do, she has too much pride. In that event, she would simply leave the conjugal home and come and live with me: a case of automatic divorce.'

'Is it a case of automatic divorce?' asked Costals, in whom these words inspired an uprush of joy, as if Solange had just left the conjugal home, taking the laughing faun with her.

'Of course. Haven't you ever read the Civil Code?'

'Someone tried to make me read it the other day. But I thought that would be an absolute disaster.'

'Yes, indeed, I can't quite see you struggling with the Civil Code!' said Mme Dandillot with an affectionate laugh. This famous man, whose opinions people sought, who was said to be hard and an 'awkward customer', was an absolute child! She did not think precisely: 'I shall be able to lead him by the nose', but she thought so vaguely. And, in her mounting euphoria, she poured him another cup of tea. Meanwhile he was thinking: 'Neither Dubouchet nor the head clerk ever told me there were cases of automatic divorce. How frivolous people are! Not for one moment did they realize that these things were vitally important to me.... ' He also recalled Mme Dandillot's remark about her daughter's 'pride', and he smiled at the thought, convinced as he was that Solange had not an atom of pride, or anything approaching it. But women boast of their pride, real or imaginary, while men hide theirs. Because women like to be envied, whereas men fear to be. Nevertheless he felt the need for additional guarantees: 'May I have a solemn promise from you too, that you will not try to influence her against divorce?'

'I give you my word of honour.'

'Saadi, although in love with his wife, abandons her in order to devote himself to his work, and writes to his father-in-law such a beautiful letter on the subject of freedom, that the latter forgives him. I shall write you such a letter.'

'The Corsicans have always had very distinctive ways,' said Mme Dandillot, who assumed this Sadi must be a Corsican. There was Sadi Carnot, and everyone knows that the entire administration of the Republic is Corsican.

'I had various other important things to say to you, but I've forgotten them ... Ah, yes, this for example ... If the husband refused the mother-in-law entry to the conjugal home, would that also be grounds for automatic divorce?'

'Well, well, if we've already got to that stage!'

'Shouldn't one always be ready for the worst?'

'I've never heard of a marriage taking place under such conditions,' cried Mme Dandillot, without acrimony, but showing signs of having reached the end of her tether.

'You're the one who wants this thing, not me,' said Costals somewhat drily.

'My dear Monsieur, if this marriage is really such a cross for you to bear....'

'No, no,' said Costals, staring at the floor. 'I'm simply pointing out your responsibilities.'

There was another silence. Mme Dandillot's face had clouded over.

'We are also agreed,' said Costals, 'that I shall not be obliged to accompany her when she wants to go out in the evening.'

'If you don't want to go out with her, she can come out with me or with friends.'

'And there'll never be a wireless in the house.'

'She loathes them.'

'We shall entertain very little. I'm sick and tired enough of my own friends.... '

'We shan't impose our friends on you, and we shan't try and get to know yours,' Mme Dandillot interjected humbly.

'I refuse to go out to dinner parties, in other words make polite conversation to some strange woman in a diamond necklace I find sitting next to me, whose name I don't even know, who wants me to talk about God, and who has the mentality of a housemaid, a stupid housemaid - the whole thing lasting a full four hours, which means five counting the time it takes me to dress - five hours that might be spent re-reading the classics (for I only read the masters, nobody else matters), or thinking, or taking the air in the Bois, or simply sleeping, which is innocent, whereas making small talk to imbeciles is not.'

'But isn't life bound to involve a certain amount of voluntary time-wasting?' said Mme Dandillot. Like all people who waste their time (ninety-nine point nine per cent of humanity), she instinctively resented those who did not, suspecting that they were superior to her. And then, the woman with the diamond necklace - had she not played that role often enough herself?

'What appears to be time-wasting can sometimes be rest, or even work. No dinner party has ever been that.... But what if I wanted to get married in Naples?' he asked out of the blue, as though this new prospect settled everything.

'Legally there would be no problem. Provided, however, as far as I know, that one of the parties has lived in Naples for some time. It would delay things ... And ... isn't Naples rather far?' she asked hesitantly.

'Would you come?'

'I don't know ... You've taken me unawares. But still, if you absolutely insist on Naples, you shouldn't bother about me. The main thing is for Solange to be happy.'

'I wonder if the wedding could take place in Persia. We might have it in Isfahan ... '

'All that can be looked into,' said Mme Dandillot, with sudden weariness. She swallowed several strong mouthfuls of tea, and said in a firmer voice, as though she had stoked up the engine:

'I presume you have a lawyer?'

'Oh yes, several.'

'Ours is Maître Vignal, rue de Miromesnil, an old friend of my husband's. Perhaps the one you decide on could get in touch with him?'

'In order ...?'

'In order to draw up the contract, of course.'

'Oh, there's no hurry.'

'But, dear Monsieur, Solange - not to mention myself - Solange urgently needs to go to the country for a rest. She's put it off long enough, and I suppose she could put it off a bit longer.... Still, you must agree that the sooner it's all settled the better.'

'Nothing can be settled until a decision has been reached.'

'What! Hasn't a decision been reached? We've been settling the minutest details for the past half-hour!'

'Excuse me, dear lady, let us be precise. I said to you at the beginning: "If the thing happens," "assuming that the thing happens." That's clear enough.'

'So you haven't decided?'

'I've decided in principle. In practice, I can't yet give you a firm promise.'

Mme Dandillot's body drooped and sagged.

'Listen, dear Monsieur, I'm convinced of your good faith. But you're putting a strain ... such a strain ... on Solange and me. It's been going on for six weeks now. . . . I'm quite upset by it,' she added, the accents of the cook piercing through the upper middle class exterior.

'I know, Madame, I know!' said Costals with feeling, putting his cup down on the table. 'It must be a very painful ordeal for both of you. But after all, if Solange is suffering, it must be admitted that she herself asked for it. Whereas, if there's an innocent victim in all this, it's me. I never asked anything of anybody. It's you who have put me in this frightful dilemma. And besides, if I hesitate, I have every cause to. There are as many reasons for this marriage as against it. How could one not hesitate? Anyone who didn't would be a nincompoop.'

'You'll never decide!'

'I have decided.'

'Are you speaking seriously?'

'I'm speaking solemnly.'

'Well then?'

'I repeat, I have decided to marry Solange. But as for putting the decision into effect, that calls for a renewed effort on my part, which I beg you to spare me for the moment, because I'm at the end of my tether.'

'Do you consider yourself engaged, at least?'

'Of course not, I ask you! An engagement is the second stage. Besides, I don't understand these rites. What exactly does it mean, to be engaged?'

'You make a firm promise to the girl, you give her a ring … '

'Solange and I have already agreed that there won't be any rings. "Rings for birds", what! With me, there'll be no rings beforehand. But I might give her a ring when we divorce, for instance. That at least makes some sense. It means that we remain good friends.'

Mme Dandillot stared at Costals with consternation. She rang the bell. 'Is she going to show me the door?' he wondered But no, it was to tell the maid to close the kitchen door, from which, indeed, there drifted an appetizing, too appetizing smell of Brussels sprouts. Ah! all hope in life was not yet dead!

'What am I to say to you? I suppose we must wait a bit longer. And you can't give us even an approximate date when you think you … '

'Oh, no dates please!' cried Costals, stiffening. 'Fixed dates, fixed hours, are like dust in a machine - that's the way to throw a life right out of gear. One morning or one evening I shall telephone you and say, "Well, dear Madame, it's settled".'

'Do give the poor child this chance of marrying someone she likes,' said Mme Dandillot in a tone of supplication. For some time now she had been looking right and left and making nervous gestures with her hands - with her jaw, too, like an old horse chewing its bit. 'We realize perfectly well that you could marry anyone you wished. But do give her this chance! If after two years you find that she interferes with your work, well, at least she will have had two years of happiness.'

'I want to give her a whole lifetime of happiness, not just two years,' said Costals vehemently.

'"In principle" or "in practice"?' Mme Dandillot inquired with a faint smile.

'In principle. In practice, it will have to simmer a bit longer.

But don't worry,' he added, getting up, 'things are going well for you.'

She escorted him into the hall with a sad smile on her face. But he was so eager to get away that, before Mme Dandillot could stop him, he had boldly made his way to the kitchen door, mistaking it for the front door, and opened it. Whereupon the smell of Brussels sprouts emerged and hurled itself upon him with all the joy of a locked-up dog released by its master, and much denser, more powerful, more aggressive than before.

Left alone, Mme Dandillot went back to the drawing-room and collapsed into an armchair. Her face, which had been set in a worldly grimace for the last hour, loosened and sagged, but at the same time hardened, giving her an almost wild appearance because of her staring eyes. She massaged her cheeks in the direction of the ears, to smooth out the wrinkles that ran down from her nose.

Costals, meanwhile, rushed down the stairs four at a time like a schoolboy escaping from prep, five minutes before time and skedaddling as fast as his legs will carry him, imagining the beak is on his tail. When he felt he was out of range, an expression of amusement spread over his features. 'Before I was merely a Triplepatte. But after the kitchen gag, I'm Charlie Chaplin as well.' At various times in his life he had thought himself Julius Caesar, Don Quixote, Jesus Christ, Gilles de Retz, etc. Which may sound ridiculous, but is not, since each of these great men also imagined himself to be a character he was not, and actually drew his strength from the illusion: Caesar believing that he was Alexander, Don Quixote that he was the Knight of heaven knows what, Gilles de Retz that he was Tiberius, and Jesus Christ that he was God. The shame Costals felt at the thought of being a son-in-law, or on the way to becoming one, he tried to get rid of by exaggerating the farcical side of his situation, in such a way as to be able to go on turning life into art. Although he had been perfectly natural throughout his interview with Mme Dandillot, he could not help feeling, after the event, that he had enacted with her a scene in the best traditions of classical comedy; and this to some extent saved him, in his own eyes, from the nuptial tragedy. With his feet turned out a little, in imitation of Charlie, he strolled down the avenue, appalled and delighted.

They met the following day at the entrance to a picture exhibition - masterpieces of modern art. As neither of them had the slightest feeling for these pictures, and as they were both natural and honest enough to admit it to each other after a quarter of an hour, they left the gallery and walked aimlessly through the centre of Paris, very peaceful in these early September days.

'Did your mother tell you about our talk yesterday?'

'Yes.'

'Things are going well for you. I'm convinced that this thing will take place. Leave it to me. But, my poor girl, what must you think of these shilly-shallyings?'

She turned her face towards him and said simply:

'I just wait....'

Poor little thing! Such submissiveness! Yes, she was patient, as patient as.... (Costals almost always thought in similes) as patient as a mare.

He stopped her in front of an interior decorator's window.

'That's a nice carpet. Liable to show the dirt, unfortunately. ... Do you like that kind of lighting?'

It was the first time he had spoken to her about such matters. They went in, and talked to the salesman for some time. It gave Costals a feeling of gratification, not only because it committed him further ('Now I can't possibly turn back.') but because this future he was preparing was attractive to him. He took a little sketch out of his wallet and showed it to her: it was the plan of a flat. One of the rooms was marked: 'Sol.'s room.'

'I've put your room and mine at opposite ends of the flat, for days when I can't stand you any longer.'

She did not reply, but he felt her hand searching for his.

During the next hour, in a tea-room, he recaptured once more the atmosphere of that Sunday in the kitchen, when he had thought her so serious. But what giant strides had been made since then! They spent this hour chatting about their future, and about the flat, which was to be 'as pale as Parian marble', and the servants, who 'mustn't be too intelligent', and the food, which should be 'plentiful, but decidedly mediocre' (he had noticed she was something of a gastronome, and disapproved), etcetera, etcetera, the whole thing cosy, familiar, cordial - and so simple! Impossible to treat her more like his wife. (And that soft voice of hers, that was so well bred.) He found that, in everything, she met his tastes more than halfway. 'She won't disturb me,' he told himself, with some amazement. 'Perhaps she will even help my work, by keeping my friends at bay.' For a moment he thought of hastening the celebration of the thing. From time to time she would turn towards him suddenly, and, being smaller than he, raise her eyes a little, smiling, with an expression of radiant tenderness, as though to thank him for giving her his love - which was not love but a sincere attachment.

'You happened to be there, so it was you I chose. Yes, if this thing takes place, I shall have picked you more or less at random, so that it should really be like life, since most marriages happen by chance. I wanted to place myself in the normal circumstances of marriage, and that is why, quite voluntarily, I shall have married in absurd circumstances. I also wanted not to give it too good a chance of succeeding, because I was curious to see what mutual sympathy and goodwill could make of it. You notice that I still say "If this thing happens." I'm not making any promises. You would lay yourself open to the most horrible disappointments if you got it into your head that we were engaged. When I consider we're engaged, I'll let you know.'

He asked her what she wanted to do - whether she wanted to come back to his flat (with all that that setting now usually involved), or go somewhere else. She said her mother had seen a film which was partly set in Chatelaillon, where they used to spend the holidays when Solange was a little girl, and that she had even recognized their villa in it. She would very much like to see this film. Costals could not help thinking that she did not have a very pressing desire to yield to his embraces.

The pen jibs at having to describe, however sketchily, the depths of stupidity, vulgarity, imbecility and baseness of this comico-lachrymose film, which was of course French. Five hundred half-wits licked up this pus with ecstasy. There was the Supercretin and the Supersucker, the pure-bred Degenerate, the unadulterated Subman and the quintessential Innocent; and beside each of them, one tenth of a virgin, meaning eight and a half virgins for the whole assembly, if our count is right. Our friends had been there for half an hour, and Costals noticed that not once had Solange retched with disgust. She did not laugh, but she swallowed the worst without turning a hair, whereas it had happened to Costals, sometimes even when he was at the cinema with a woman he had just picked up and was therefore in a good mood, to have to leave the theatre because he was physically at the end of his tether. On the contrary, when the action of the film switched from Chatelaillon to the Côte d'Azur and he said to her 'Shall we go?' she answered: 'Couldn't we see how it ends?' So she liked it! Crucified in his seat, Costals had to swallow this French film to the dregs.

'Well, I might have known,' he thought, 'but even so … '

This is what she makes me a party to. And whenever one sees men at such squalid shows, they've been dragged there by women. I dislike anything that brings out the stupidity in men, and that's why I dislike woman. If it were Brunet, I'd say to myself: "It's his age." The eternal superiority of kids over women! They can't irritate us, or at least it's wrong to be irritated by them, since there's only one answer to everything they do: "It's their age." It's exactly the same with the proletariat: we forgive them what we cannot forgive the bourgeoisie.'

Afterwards they dined in a restaurant. Try as he might, he could not bring himself to speak to her. He wondered why: they had talked with perfect ease before. At first he thought the cinema had frozen him up; then he realized that it was simply because he had nothing more to say to her. He racked his brains, but nothing came. 'We're not yet engaged, and already we've nothing left to say to each other. The marriage of the young carp and the old rabbit.' Solange did not seem surprised at his silence: she herself was so used to that condition. ...

He had chosen a rather common restaurant, to punish her for being a gastronome. All their fellow-diners looked revoltingly healthy: must one, then, be tubercular, in order to look at all well-bred? As soon as he entered the restaurant, Costals had felt capable of murdering the lot of them. Characteristically, he at once envisaged the most extreme act: with him, there was none of the sort of protective padding that Europeans normally interpose between irritation and the thought of acting on it. He looked at each of these men and wondered which of them would get the better of it if it came to a fight. Everything else was nonsense. At table, he was to all appearances extremely quiet, and even had a slightly dopy look. And yet, at the slightest provocation, he would have grabbed a knife from the table and struck.

Their immediate neighbours were a party of eight - father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, muchacho, little girl and babour [A word used in the author's family on the maternal side, meaning baby. (Author's note)] (the count is wrong: that only makes seven). The father, a realist. With dazzling intuition Costals guessed that he was a realist from Oran (a settler?) on holiday in the 'metropolis'. Blond, energetic-looking, with a tooth-brush moustache and aggressively untidy hair (no comb had ever passed through that mane), for a realist must be untidy: it proves that he is no aesthete, that he is of the earth earthy. A certain resemblance to Benda, which sounds a bit steep but is nevertheless so: if Benda, instead of having a few wisps of hair, had a proper thatch, he would look like a realist from Oran. The mother, perhaps calving under the table, just like that, simply by opening her legs, like a true realist from Oran. The daughter, short-arsed, a swarthy young she-goat, and ditto the little girl. The muchacho, from whose agreeable physiognomy one could tell at once that he was called Albert. And the babour, muscle-bound, a show-off if ever there was one. These seven persons (or eight) vied with one another as to whose nails should be most deeply in mourning - perhaps mourning their lost illusions about French colonization in Oran.

But we haven't mentioned the son-in-law, and it was on him that Costals' attention was mainly concentrated: already in his eyes all sons-in-law formed one big family. Moreover, this one was a Son-in-law with a capital S, the prototype of the species. Dumb as a carp. Sitting there smiling at everything that was said by his father-in-law - his mother-in-law - his wife - and the muchacho - and the little girl. And lines had formed on his face, already deeply ingrained, in spite of his youth: the lines of perpetual approbation. He even turned towards Costals from time to time, doubtless so that Costals should also approve of the father-in-law - or the mother-in- law - etc. No one ever addressed a word to him, or even glanced in his direction: he really was the ideal Son-in-law. Whenever he opened his mouth, rather than look at him they lowered their eyes - that is, when they didn't start talking to someone else. Only the muchacho showed the slightest kindness towards him: when the Son-in-law spoke to him, the good-natured boy would offer him a few words in reply. The agony of being a son-in-law! But then, why was he a son-in- law? And yet he had had his day of triumph, dressed in tails cut like a waiter's, with bridesmaids got up like sugar-plum fairies. And to think that Socrates, Goethe, Hugo had been sons-in-law. Costals' faith in humanity trembled.

'Miamiamiam!' said the babour.

'Yes, my little one. Didiadodoadoda,' said the mother.

'Dodoadidi?' queried the realist from Oran. 'That's right, dodoadidi,' he affirmed.

'Diddums want to go walkies,' said the she-goat.

'Diddums want to go walky-walkies,' said the son-in-law, going one better, to get a share of the limelight.

'Meueueueuh!' howled Pipicaca, who saw the effect he was producing.

'Yes, my little precious one, yes, bibiabobo,' said the mother, putting her hand under its bottom, the instinctive gesture of every fond mother.

'I think that child wants to be sick,' said the realist from Oran, who, like a true father, wanted to show how competent he was.

'To be sick!' screamed the mother. 'You're seeing double ... oh! It's because Paulette was holding him. He wants me to hold him, doesn't he?' She sucked the baby's cheek (kiss), then shook it like a plum-tree, then sucked it again, ferociously, then slapped it. She was almost beautiful, as everything is beautiful when it is a perfect specimen of its type - and she was the incarnation of maternal hysteria. Finally she bore the child away to the lavatory. And the entire family, rid of the mother and the baby, gradually reverted to a semblance of dignity. Another twelve years, Pipicaca, today so beloved and so important, and you will be almost a little stranger at the family table. You will no longer be stupid, so you will no longer be interesting.

Costals and Solange left on foot, and went round to the avenue Henri-Martin. He felt so acrimonious towards her that he bought her a bunch of roses. She insisted on carrying the box. This quasi-oriental self-effacingness pleased him rather, although he wondered if it might not be part of her pre-nuptial strategy.

'I cannot offer you these roses without accompanying them with an amatory quotation,' he said to her. ' "Do not expect fidelity from the nightingale, for every moment it sings on a different rose," we read in the Gulistan.'

Inside his flat, they stood for a while leaning on the window- sill: he did not want to appear impatient. Clouds sped across the nocturnal sky above the Bois, so dense and so low that they might have been taken for a trail of smoke left by a locomotive. Popping open the press-studs on the side fastening of her costume, he had slid his hand in next to her skin, imprisoning one of her breasts. But anxiety about the future nullified the enjoyment he would have got from this contact if they had had a future of freedom before them.

'Would you mind undressing?'

As though she were incapable of anticipating his desires!

'Would you mind taking off your stockings?'

As though she did not yet know that he loved putting the sole of his bare foot on the bare arches of hers, like a crucified man on the foot-rest of his cross.

She had to go to the lavatory, and Costals remembered the Arab mare he had once had, so proud and so delicate that she would never urinate or dung when he was on her back.

We read into the sensations of physical love what the soul, planing above it, puts there. Something immense, when a sensation of this sort is powerful enough to be sufficient unto itself. Mlle Dandillot was not the woman to give a man a self-sufficient pleasure. Moreover, did she perhaps feel Costals' aloofness? One has only to see the word 'French' on a box of matches to know that they will never light. The same is true of French girls, and it was true, that evening, of Solange. In bed, she clasped him limply, as if for form's sake; as he did, too, feeling the grain of her skin with his finger-tips, and savouring every last drop of boredom this odourless body, these flaccid legs might contain. There was absolutely nothing in this girl that could rouse him. From a distance, her face gave the impression of being clear-cut; close to, in the act of love, it seemed rather blurred and flabby, without a hint of pathos. (And how passionately he loved the faces of women at the moment of satisfying them. There were women he passed in the street whom he would have liked to have just once, for ten minutes, simply to see what happened to their faces at that moment. He would have liked to have a little camera on his forehead, like a dentist's lamp, to film their faces at that moment. Quite apart from the fact that it would have provided him with a 'collection' which, if offered to a few of the more venerable academicians, would appreciably have hastened his progress to the Quai Conti.) Almost the whole of Solange's body, even her arm-pits, was as odourless as a sheet of paper: there was nothing but the slightly sour smell of her mouth, the faint, insipid smell of her hair, and another, sweetish smell. (Why was Costals reminded of the lively, wholesome smell of his son's hair? He was unaware of the fact that it is the rule for a boy's hair to smell stronger and better than a woman's.) They were folded in each other's arms, but still she did not clasp him, and he would not have known she had moved her arms but for the ticking of her wrist-watch which he could hear in different positions, like some importunate insect that had crept in between them.

Costals' body was dead, too. It was the first time it had happened to him with her. That was the last straw! Suddenly he thought - perhaps because of the stormy sky they had just seen, which reminded him of a similar sky, highly dramatic, above the Gharb, flooded as far as the eye could see - of the little Moroccan girl whom he met out there every year, and whom he called Terremoto [Earthquake, in Spanish.]  because, in the way she seized and gripped and shook a man to bring the marrow through the whole length of his body from the distant cerebellum, she was like a little earthquake trying to uproot him. ('Oh, the paradise in that girl's body!') At this memory, his body awoke, came to life, like a snake hearing the snake-charmer's flute, and throbbed to the rhythm of his blood. And he clove the woman, as one opens up an artichoke to get at its heart, and he knew her. Nevertheless the whole thing was so drab that he scarcely knew it had happened until he heard Solange's impatient cry:

'You're hurting me!'

'What! Don't you realize that's part and parcel of your pleasure?'

'But I don't want you to hurt me,' she insisted querulously. He threw her a sombre look.

As soon as it was over she got up, almost with a bound - it was her only manifestation of energy during the whole evening - and made for the bathroom: how obvious it was that she had been in a hurry to get it over! Costals got up too, and met his image in the looking-glass, the tense features, the narrowed eyes of an enraged tom-cat. The face of the disappointed male, full of exasperation, malevolence and brutality - ugly and ridiculous, above all ridiculous. He flung himself back on the bed. And yet, on this very bed! ... There were plenty of others! ... Others with whom his sensuality was such that, glued to their bodies like an insect drunk and motionless in the corolla of a flower, not even a knock on the door would have budged him, as an insect will allow itself to be crushed without trying to escape. Faces rose up before him.... 'What I ask of a woman is to give her pleasure. The rest comes of itself, so to speak.' But perhaps, with this sex, everything was fake. Now to arouse a little tenderness, now to obtain marriage, now to earn a few pence. Perhaps there was not one woman in a hundred who felt anything in the arms of a man unless she had first been 'prepared'. They were not made for each other morally; they were not even made for each other physiologically. Man enjoyed, woman did not; man had to teach her that, too; nature, already miserly enough where she was concerned, had failed to provide for it. When Dubouchet had said to him: 'No matter how much women may hang around the male, listen at his doors, he remains impenetrable to them,' he might have added: 'And first and foremost - how symbolic! - in the primordial act: in the orgasm. She tries to guess what it is, but cannot begin to visualize it, and envious of this male endowment, feigns to possess it herself in order to excite the male and in order that he shouldn't pity her.' The simulation of passion, the sad nightly comedy, year after year. And it was this fundamental incapacity that women sought to compensate for when they took refuge in 'pure love', set it up as an idol, tried to force men to worship it when men had an instinctive loathing of 'pure love' as of everything that is against nature, and finally, representing their infirmity as a virtue, and the health of the male as an infirmity, belaboured the poor fellow with their bogus commiseration and their sublime indignation, accusing him of being too 'selfish' and too 'coarse' even to glimpse the splendours of 'pure love'. Costals thought of all this, and all the time he remembered that sweetish, almost sickly smell and that soft, nerveless body, like a white slug.... And he dreamed of embraces that would be worthier of his mettle, heroic embraces, mighty minglings as of a pair of wrestlers on the mat, in which it would be no longer a question of conquering a miserable consenting ewe-lamb (all said and done, what a farce to talk about 'victories' over women!) but of strength overcoming strength and for an instant turning it into sweetness. That would be real sport. That would be man's work....

He got up and looked at himself in the mirror once more. Now it was not so much his disappointed face he was ashamed of. He was ashamed of having been humiliated by that, of having wasted his vanity and his appetites on that sort of 'exploit'. The mirror reflected his vigorous, half-naked torso, and he gazed at it with satisfaction. 'I'm worth more than that.'

A blank sheet of paper lay on the table in front of him. He scribbled on it: 'Once more, that terrible thought runs through my mind: I do not know why I chose her. And once more I ask myself: "Why, oh why, am I doing this?" [Marrying Solange (Author's note).] And once more I reply: "I am doing it for her. I am also doing it in order to have experienced all the disparate savours of the world. I am also doing it in order to submit myself to the conditions of ordinary life. I wanted to be no longer aloof. I wanted, through her, to find, as it were, the subterranean water-level of what is most human and to bring back a bucketful, however bitter. I put my trust in her, in myself, in nature, in my destiny. May it not recoil on my own head."'

She came back. He could not help looking at her with a hint of derision at the thought of her lack of response. They stood at the window again for a while. He would always remember that stormy sky. He said to her:

'I suppose you would think me a swine if I were to leave you now.'

'I don't believe I could ever think that of you.'

His esteem for her came flooding back, heart-rendingly.

'You once told me you were afraid of the future. Now it's I who am afraid.'

'And I have complete confidence.'

His pity for her came flooding back, heart-rendingly.

He took her home in a taxi, incapable of banishing his forebodings, incapable of saying a word to her. Every time she had felt something crack between them, she made some affectionate gesture towards him: this time, she had taken his arm. He would have liked to make her understand that this gesture made him gloomier still. 'She does it like a dog putting out its paw.' On the threshold of her house he said, looking up at the sky:

'My heart, too, is full of clouds.'

'And mine is full of stars!'

These words shattered him.

Costals went home and took a sleeping-draught. [What Mme Dandillot, little versed in Latin, daringly called a dormifuge instead of a somnifère (Author's note).]

O healing waters of oblivion! As he lay in bed, he summed up his dilemma for the hundredth time: 'I love this girl up to a certain point, no further, as I've had the honesty to say to her in writing. Why "no further"? Let's say it's because, socially and intellectually, she is too remote from me. Let's say it's because, sexually, she is pretty well rock-bottom. Or rather, don't let's "say" anything. I don't love her more because that's how it is. Obviously, such a marriage has no raison d'être. And yet I love her enough to suffer from her suffering, in particular the suffering that a break would cause her now that I have allowed things to go so far. But the suffering she would undergo from a rupture at this stage would be as nothing compared to what she would go on suffering for months or even years if we married. So that this immediate suffering must not be a bar to breaking it off now. No, the only serious objection to a rupture - who would believe it? - is this: when all is said and done, there is still a chance, a chance in a hundred but a definite chance, that the two of us may find happiness in this marriage. So the sole question at present is this: should one gamble on this minimal chance, or should one refuse to gamble on it, at the risk of regretting it later on in one's moments of depression? But am I the sort of man who ever has moments of depression? Etc.'

He woke up at four and heard the rain trickling down his windows: those famous storm-clouds had burst. Summer rain, always so strange.... Nocturnal summer rain, full of portents, according to the Ancients. Nocturnal rain in July, on the night when, at eighteen, he had had his first woman. Nocturnal rain in June, in the war-time forest, on the eve of his being wounded. Nocturnal rain in August, in Naples, the night before he was stabbed. Nocturnal rain in September, after all hope for Brunet had been given up (cerebro-spinal meningitis) but at dawn the fever had abated. The strong man, the lucid man, on his tormented couch, abandons himself to higher powers. From then on he knows that the coming day will be marked.

He fell asleep again, and had a nightmare such as he had never had before. A body was weighing him down, horribly, a viscous mass covered him, stuck to him, enveloped him, and he struggled to throw it off. A small child who had fallen asleep with a huge cat lying on its chest might have such a nightmare. Although asleep, Costals had the feeling that he was awake, that it was not a dream, and that therefore he must be going mad, or rather that he was possessed, diabolically possessed; and it was a new and terrible thing for him, who had never been possessed by anyone except himself (the most disturbing aspect of himself).

The anguish of his awakening was somewhat similar to an unforgettable awakening he had experienced at the age of eighteen. On that occasion, he had fallen asleep beside his mistress - his first mistress - an Italian girl of sixteen. He knew she wanted to kill him, having heard her express the intention of doing so one night in her sleep. As he emerged from unconsciousness, he felt something cold and hard pressing against the nape of his neck. He guessed that it was the barrel of a revolver. The girl's hands were resting, gentle and motionless, on his head and on his neck. His gradual return to consciousness had been terrifying. His own hands were under the sheet; he would not have time to get them out before she pressed the trigger. But perhaps she was asleep: he could not see her face, which was higher up the pillow than his. What was he to do? He thought for a while, impossible to say how long. Then he murmured several times: 'God bless you, Maria, God bless you' and quietly turned his head. She was sleeping, or pretending to be asleep. He took the revolver. They went on seeing each other for four or five months, but he searched her whenever she came into his flat.

His awakening now, after his night of 'possession', was accompanied, like that other one, by palpitations and a feeling of oppression that lasted for some time. There was no escaping the meaning of his dream. It was crystal clear. The weight that had been smothering him was Solange and the life they would lead together. The 'possession' was Solange, devouring his soul and then creeping into the place where his soul had been. He remembered Dante's lines about 'the dreams of morning, more truthful than those of night'. He remembered the rain, full of portents. He remembered the premonitory dream. And the animal in him shuddered. And fear, which had been prowling round inside him ever since he had been haunted by this marriage, now took complete possession of him, submerging all else - no longer a rational and justifiable fear but the obscure, mysterious fear that makes wild beasts cringe and brings heroes to their knees. And under the impact of this salutary funk, he at last took the decision which his reason and his will had been incapable of taking for the past six weeks. That very day, without seeing Solange again, he would leave France for several months.

'She won't hold it against me. When I asked her "If I were to leave you now, would you consider me a swine?" she said she would never think that of me.' That's what men are like: give them a weapon against you, and they'll use it there and then. No one would have dreamed of regarding Flaubert as a minor writer had he not openly confessed that he sweated blood over every sentence.

In the eyes of the world, Costals' flight must seem the height of boorishness and cowardice. And yet the gods applaud him. Through the path of irrational panic, Costals had regained his reason. His flight would deliver him from the sort of magic spell whose hold over him he had been able to gauge that night, and under which he might have foundered utterly if he had not reacted in time. It would give him a chance to pull himself together. It would put his feelings, as well as those of Solange, to the test of absence. And finally, it answered to that supreme law which men do not take sufficiently into account - to wit, that inestimable advantages can accrue from the mere fact that one has moved from one place to another [When someone is run down the doctors advise a 'change of air', even if (they admit it themselves when pressed a little) the air of the place they recommend is of no better quality than that in which the patient is now living. A shy man, no matter how much he tries to summon up his courage, cannot bring himself to accost an unknown woman he covets in the street. He walks away, makes a detour, lets her walk on for a bit, and then, the locale of their meeting having changed, he accosts her with ease. A bull refuses to respond to the matador's pass. The capes draw it a few yards further on, and there the matador can do what he likes with it. The same is true of a horse that refuses a jump, or a wild animal that refuses to obey its trainer, etc.] – that what was impossible becomes possible simply because one has moved from one place to another. Costals' flight, 'cowardly' and 'boorish' as it undoubtedly was, from a narrow point of view, was from a higher point of view the right thing to do, however incompatible it was with honour, worldly opinion, and everything else.

Costals booked a seat on the 8.45 to Genoa that evening. Why Genoa? Because of Mlle Carlotta Bevilacqua, of Genoa, a little Latin sister who could refuse him nothing: in no matter what sphere, our brilliant novelist was never at a loss for positions to fall back on. Then he wrote to Solange and her mother. He told them he was going to Lausanne; he would not tell them he was in Genoa until he was sure, from the tone of their replies, that there was no risk of their turning up. This was the only insincerity in the two letters, which otherwise expressed nothing that he did not genuinely feel at that moment; in fact, he could not get through them without tears. Later on, he was to wonder how the joy of escaping from that inferno had failed to dry up these tears; why, indeed, he had wept at all, since he did not really love Solange, and knew it. He had wept, then, and wept for some time, because of the pain he was causing to someone whom he loved only up to a point! He concluded that tears must come easily to him, a fact of which he was not unaware.

Usually, when his inner life was going through an interesting phase (and this was certainly one of them: one does not weep for a woman every day), he would describe it in his diary. But today he was ashamed of his emotional turmoil, and was reluctant to dwell upon it. In his entry for 7 September he wrote furiously: 'Suffering. The bristles of my clothes-brush have turned white overnight.' It was the only trace of that entire day that remained in his diary.

to Solange Dandillot

Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

7 September 1927

Dear Solange,

During the war, one of my parents' maids whose husband had been home on leave, went to see him off on the train that was to take him back to the front. As the moment of parting drew near, before going through the ticket barrier, the man said: 'Wait here while I buy some cigarettes.' He slipped away, and joined the train by another gate, leaving his wife stranded there: he had fled from emotion. By the time the Armistice came, this man had won four citations for bravery in the trenches. Such is the courage of the male.

By the time you read this, I shall have left Paris, fleeing, in the same way, such useless and treacherous enfeeblements. This violent break was necessary to extricate me from the inferno of my uncertainties and my perpetual tergiversations.

I am not impervious to your fate. But if you suffer you are not alone in this. I shall say no more, for fear of showing weakness. Let us move on at once to the consolations.

You suffer now. It will be over in no time. If I had married you, you would have suffered long and deeply. Divorce would have been inevitable. Think of everything that would have preceded and accompanied it. God alone knows what I am capable of when I feel chained: like an old tom-cat, a friendly enough soul who will nevertheless scratch your face to shreds if he feels you are holding him forcibly in your arms. Be grateful to me for sparing you all that. It is my love for you that dictates this separation. [This is going a bit far (Author's note).]

Another consolation. Everything I have just said applies to me just as much as it applies to you. For six weeks I have suffered continuously. Great as were the joys I drew from you, the pangs I have drawn from myself because of you outweigh them: you love me, I love you, and my summer has been poisoned. I am putting an end to this suffering. You should be glad of it.

Another consolation. If you love my work, I want you to know that you have already done much for it. There is a corner of my work, as there is a corner of myself, where, whatever may happen later, you are lodged for the rest of my life. Nothing can alter that.

I want you to know that my affection and regard for you have gone on increasing ever since we met. I want you to realize that if, every time I saw you, I had not become more and more conscious of the extent to which you were worthy of this affection and regard, I should never have wavered in my hostility to the plan for us to marry; that it is because of this affection and regard that I have continually fluctuated; that it is because of them that I got to the point of awakening and nurturing your hopes; that it is because of them that I have now reached the point of appearing to behave badly towards you. And finally, you must forgive me because, whether culpably or not, I nevertheless did raise these hopes, and raised them only to shatter them.

I want you to know that my affection remains ready to play whatever part in your life you may wish. I am not abandoning you; I am simply breaking off in order to give myself a breathing-space. I am ready to give you everything you want of me, in whatever form you wish except marriage.

It is up to you, then, to choose either to forget me or to call me back to you on my return (two months hence). I shall know by the choice you make whether you merely had a hankering for the state of marriage or whether you really loved an individual.

Write to me poste restante Lausanne.

I cannot bring myself to end this letter with the usual form of words. I kiss you - you can guess how. A last embrace.... My eyes are filling with tears.... No, I cannot go on.

C.

to Madame Dandillot

Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

7 September 1927

Dear Madame,

By the time you read this I shall be in Switzerland for several months.

I feel shattered - to an extent that you cannot possibly be aware of - by the inner struggle that I have been waging for a month and more in connection with Solange. I could not face the prospect of another painful and futile conversation with you, and a leave-taking with Solange that would have been more painful still. I have not the same mastery over myself that she has: I am a sentimentalist, which she is not. And I have already overburdened her with the spectacle of a man torn asunder.

You know my reasons. Too many risks of such a marriage turning out badly, and of my being a cause of suffering to someone for whom I feel a real affection. And, in such an event, the moral impossibility for me to ask for a divorce from someone who would have done me no wrong. Consequently, bondage - and bondage to a person one loves, which is the worst form of bondage. As well as all the other reasons which I have already explained to you. No, when one is perfectly happy in a particular state - celibacy - one does not strain oneself to perform a deed so fraught with menace.

I had never seriously had to debate the problem of marriage with myself. No doubt it is to your daughter's credit that she was the first to bring me to do so. But she is also its victim. Had I been more confident in my objections, I should have given Solange a firm no, irrevocably and at once, instead of nurturing her hopes. Allow me to point out, however, that there was never any promise on my part.

I bitterly regret having raised these hopes in Solange and in yourself; woe to him who arouses false hopes! But after all, if I hesitated it was because I had good reason to do so, and besides, hesitation is of the essence of intelligence. I have wounded her, yet I am not guilty: that is life. If the situation were the same today as it was four months ago, I would not behave any differently. When I told her that this marriage was possible, I believed what I said. Oh no, I have nothing to reproach myself with.

Both you, Madame, and she have treated my idiosyncrasies with the utmost tolerance, and with an intelligence that touches me and adds to my distress.

My deepest desire is to maintain my friendship with Solange. Is that so impossible? I have spoken to you about this.

I remain, etc.

C.

In the train ... and, as always, untarnished by habit, that gust of emotion, almost anxiety, that accompanied all his departures: 'Will I come back? And, if I do, will this journey have brought me all the happiness I expected of it? Will it have brought me more happiness than the last one?' He imagined the little girl settling herself in a corner, then coming to his help because he was struggling with his baggage.... He spoke to her, and she answered him in a whisper.

He had posted the two letters at the station, so that they would not arrive until the next morning, when he would be far away.

Next morning at eight o'clock, at Modane, he said to himself: 'The postman has just been ...' and his thighs began to tremble. And he made a heartfelt wish - that one day she might be entirely happy, and that he might find in himself the inspiration to help her to be so. And he conceived something which, had he been a Christian, would have been a sort of prayer for her. And he told himself that he owed her an eternal debt, for having made her suffer.

Thus was fulfilled, after an interval of four months and a day, the presentiment he had noted in his diary on the 6th of May: that one day he would leave France in order not to hear her voice again.

PART TWO

As soon as he arrived in Genoa, Costals proceeded to organize what he considered to be the ideal life.

He rented a bachelor flat (near the Piazza Fontane Marose), and engaged a daily woman. His lunch was brought in from a near-by restaurant.

He got up at five, and worked from six till noon, then from 12.30 till four. At half past four he went out, and roamed the streets until midnight, doing a great many things he enjoyed doing, each one more outrageous than the last. Whatever he coveted, he took. He had his own special code. This code, indeed, on certain points, was extremely strict. But these were points on which conventional morality is indifferent. Whereas he was lax over points on which conventional morality is strict.

He knew no one in Genoa except women. Only women crossed his threshold. His life was divided into two parts: work and pleasure. The only things that seemed important to him. As his day contained nothing else at all, he had all the time he needed for work and for pleasure, both of which require a great deal if one does not want to botch either.

He had worked the character of Solange into the novel he was writing. The plot bore no relation to his liaison with Solange, but the character was copied as faithfully as he could manage. 'Ah ha, my girl, so you wanted to devour my soul! Now it's my turn to devour you. This will teach you that a writer always has the last word.'

After four days, letters arrived from Solange and her mother, forwarded from Lausanne.

Solange wrote: '... You tell me you are shattered. I am completely overwhelmed. Your suffering may be great, you poor thing, but how much less than mine! Yours was active, so to speak; you are like the man who tears the dressing off his own wound, whose will-power to some extent annuls the pain. I am the one whose dressing is torn off by someone else, and that's worse.... And God knows you operate without anaesthetics!'

Mme Dandillot, for her part; took up some of the arguments against marriage in Costals' letter. She opined that a formal liaison with Solange would be a much heavier tie than marriage. She ended thus: 'Believe me, I have the utmost regard for you, but it hurts me to see my little Solange suffering so. Write to us. Best wishes, etc.'

Costals considered these two letters eminently reasonable. 'Really, what sensible people they are! Far from complicating things, they lubricate them rather. I might even go so far as to say that they were a bit easy-going. A great compliment in my eyes, however much it may be decried.'

Extraordinary how, after a few hours, the whole episode had become part of the past! His pain had been as it were overridden by relief. How often, dead beat, his muscles reduced to pulp by over-indulgence in sporting or cytherean exertions, he had said to himself: 'A couple of days and I'll be myself again.' But in two hours all trace of it had vanished. In the emotional sphere he recovered just as quickly. A few days of this Genoa régime, under which he did absolutely nothing he did not enjoy doing, were enough to put him on his feet again. The first round of his fight with the Hippogriff had been won by intelligent retreat. No doubt there would be a second round, but since it was not yet imminent, it was wiser not to think of it. Consequently, his euphoria was untroubled except by the thought of Solange's suffering.

This characteristic ability of his to achieve happiness to the full on the spur of the moment, was accompanied by another characteristic: the desire to share it with someone he loved. How often had he wired Mlle du Peyron, asking her to send Brunet post-haste to wherever he, Costals, happened to be, because he was in the seventh heaven in such and such mountains or such and such forests! This time, too, after a week of euphoria, he thought of bringing his son to Genoa. But the boy was staying with some friends in England and he had just written to his father saying he was 'perfectly happy'. One cannot disturb someone who is 'perfectly happy'. So Costals abandoned the idea of bringing Brunet to Genoa, and contented himself, in order to make him even more 'perfectly happy', with sending him a nice little chunk of pocket money. On the same impulse, he sent presents to two young ladies for whom he felt a solid attachment.

In ten days he received four letters from Solange. (Her handwriting, he thought, was beginning to look a little like his.) The first three were melancholy, but not excessively so. A touch of gaiety broke through from time to time. However, after he had neglected to answer the third by return of post, the fourth was an explosion similar to her 'geyser' in July:

'Our separation.... I am sucked down, as it were, by a force independent of my will, and this state of prostration from which I drag myself only to sink back even deeper leaves me gasping. If you ever doubted my feelings towards you, and if I myself perhaps was unable to guage [sic] them with absolute accuracy, I can no longer delude myself about their strength and profundity; I measure them by my suffering.'

to Solange Dandillot

Etretat

Pierre Costals

Via Carlo Felice, Genoa

19 September 1927

My darling,

I don't want you to be unhappy. It's quite simple: come.

Come and spend a fortnight here. You don't understand? I fled from you, and now I want you back! But you see, with me the absent are always in the right. Your absence in particular always does me good. The thing is, for the past ten days I've been working like a buffalo (or rather like half a buffalo, since I only work half the day). Now, there are two great sedatives in my life: a certain act which means little to you but which I find a great release; and work. On the 7th of September I had not written a single line for four months because of you. Now that I've unstopped myself, there is room for you once more, and I feel in the right vein to make you happy for a fortnight. I say a fortnight, because after that there is every likelihood that I shall start persecuting you again.

I shall take a suite in a hotel. You will sign yourself in as my wife.

And besides, for a girl who is as 'virginal' and well-brought- up as you are, there is something extremely improper about this plan of mine, which is an additional reason for you to give me the pleasure of agreeing to it.

With my fondest love,

C.

Beware! There are no hippogriffical implications in this plan of mine. I simply want you to have the 'fourteen days of happiness' of the Bibliothèque Rose. As you would stay for fifteen days, you see I give myself the right to make you unhappy for one day.

Written by Costals in his notebook the same day:

Charity commits one. If you write to a woman 'My darling', you must admit to yourself that it commits you. That you will never again be able to write 'Dear Solange' without causing deep despair, staring eyes, murmurs of 'Why has he changed?' and cow-like ruminations.

Costals had written this letter under the impact of the SOS from Solange. As soon as he had posted it, he began to feel uneasy. Not that he was afraid that his hesitations with regard to marriage might start up again: he felt that he was now firmly anchored in the negative. But a fortnight of Solange's continual presence would be a heavy burden. And moreover, in order to devote himself entirely to her, he would have to stop seeing Mlle Bevilacqua....

He had no need of Solange. No need at all. Neither his senses, nor his heart, nor his intellect nor his imagination needed her. He was calling her back simply because of the happiness his letter would give her. The difficulty would be to sustain this happiness. And for a whole fortnight. If only he had suggested a week. When he had written 'My darling' (it was the first time he had used the expression in a letter to her), he had asked himself: 'Why am I writing "my darling"? Pure affectation, that's all. In fact there's no reason.' The reason was that he loved her less. No doubt about it: it was because he loved her less that he called her 'my darling'.

He vaguely hoped that she would reply saying she was unable to come. He even thought of writing to tell her he had fallen ill. Only the pettiness and dishonesty of this stratagem prevented him. He had caused her enough disappointment without that. No more hot and cold showers!

Solange's reply was a little late in coming. He imagined that she had cooled off towards him, and was relieved at the thought: it would be easier for him to break with her. Then the reply came:

'My dearest love - your letter has given me enormous pleasure. The joy I feel is such that I can hardly contain myself from shouting it to the housetops. Mummy jibbed a bit at first. But when she realized the immense pleasure it would give me ... You've no idea how sweet she is. We spent last evening thinking up all the lies we shall have to tell our cousins here, to explain this trip to Italy. I shall arrive on the 27th at half past two. But I make one condition: that you should continue to be a semi-buffalo, in other words that you should in no way change your working hours or your way of life for my sake, and that I should not disturb you in any way.'

The letter went on, full of expansiveness and affection. Her happiness communicated itself to Costals: he was glad, and resolved to make this fortnight as nice as possible. Nevertheless, when he had to look for a hotel, and pack some of his things to move them there, etc., he sighed: what a lot of his time the girl was wasting! He dreamed of the day when she would be gone, and notched it on his calendar: October the 12th.

On the 25th he realized he had forgotten something very important, and wired Solange: 'Bring plush bunny. Important. Love.'

On the 26th, another telegram: 'Bring diary Tolstoy and Mrs Tolstoy. Important. Love.'

At 2.20, Costals was heading swiftly towards the platform at which Solange's train was due to arrive. Never before had he so badly wanted all the women he saw. Was he not about to be Solange's prisoner for a whole fortnight? Suddenly, in front of a newspaper kiosk, a seventeen-year-old girl. . . . 'Oh God, that girl inflames me. And to think that she's only one of my ribs! A supernumerary bone! [Woman, according to the Bible, is supposed to have been created from one of man's ribs. It was Bossuet who called woman 'a supernumerary bone' (Author's note).] I can't help it, that bone inflames me.' He panted. In a few seconds he had turned crimson, as though the blood was about to burst in droplets through the skin of his face. She had black hair and almond eyes; the long line of her forehead and nose receded, rushed back, as in the profile of Lionello d'Este by Pisanello; the Aztec type: yes, that was it, she was a Genoese Aztec; her chest was flat like that of a boy, a boy without an ounce of spare flesh (Costals hated this in a woman; it was indeed the opposite of what he liked, and that was why he liked it now). 'I'm mad about that girl ... I'm mad about that girl ...' Their eyes met. Costals began to zigzag in his course, like a wounded beast, then half-stopped. He had six minutes to spare, just time enough to approach her, to start something up. This passionate desire, this desperate need to escape from Solange at the very moment when the cage seemed to be about to shut on him, drove him to try and bring off this capture at any price. The girl headed towards the platform. Costals overtook her, stared at her again, intensely, and once more she turned her eyes towards him. Whereupon a train entered the station. Could it be Solange's? His watch said 2.26, but perhaps it was slow. Still, he could not allow his 'darling' to get off the train alone, and have to look for him … horrible thought! But it was horrible, too, to lose this woman, when all that was needed, perhaps, was for them to have met ten minutes earlier. He moved away from her to interrogate an official (no, it wasn't the train from France), then went back to her, almost at the double. At that moment another train appeared at the far end of the platform. How many seconds would it be before Solange's carriage stopped? Thirty-five? Could one, in thirty- five seconds, accost an unknown girl, of the Aztec type, and say to her: 'In heaven's name, let me see you again, tell me where we can meet,' with enough authority, supplication, sincerity, trust, etc., etc., in one's mien to etc., etc.? This he would like to do (perversity had now taken a hand in it) while Solange was there, two hundred yards away, a hundred yards, within eyeshot. 'Oh God! Oh God! How I long to make love to her! Oh God, inspire me! Oh God, help me!' (Inwardly he was on his knees.) 'All my life,' he murmured to himself, 'all my life will be devoted to making her happy.' The train glided along the platform. Costals lost his head. 'To think that I shall never have her!' Something akin to tears rose to his eyes. Exasperated, in despair, furious with Solange, he wheeled round and walked away from the unknown girl. Let him never see her again, at least! Let him never see that face again! Let him be allowed to forget her! Here, at a carriage door, was another face, once a promised land as that of the Genoese had been, but now too available and too familiar, too everyday …

Mlle Dandillot would never know how she had been deceived, betrayed and almost cursed at the very moment when, overflowing with trustfulness and joy, she was reunited with the man who had summoned her there.

In the midst of the crowd, he gave her a swift peck on the cheek, a husbandly kiss. Then he bustled around for a porter - quite unnecessarily, for she had only a small, schoolgirl's suitcase - as though he were looking for an excuse, because he could think of nothing to say to her.

As they entered the hotel there was an atmosphere of chilliness, of huddled whispering, in the foyer. From the moment he had appeared there the other day, simply because of the way he had asked: 'Can one hire a suite here?' they had hated him.

Solange bent over the registration form. 'How I love to see her lying!' he said to himself. He knew she was writing Solange Costals. The girl's face was grave and beautiful. The manager watched her intently as she wrote. The porter and the bell-hop muttered something to each other.

'You lie like an angel,' he murmured approvingly as they went upstairs. 'I was afraid you wouldn't know how to - and it's a real disease, not to be able to lie.'

'I can lie to people I don't care about. I couldn't lie to someone I loved.'

'No, nor could I. But I could lie to someone I only half-loved.'

Not for a moment had Mlle Dandillot suspected that Costals had invited her to Genoa out of 'niceness', in other words out of charity. 'Well,' she had thought, 'only ten days have elapsed and here he is calling me back!' What better proof that he could not do without her? How, after this, could there be any doubt of the outcome of their struggle? She came to the conclusion that Costals' flight had been providential. Mme Dandillot, too, was impressed. Lying on the bottom, belly upwards, on September the 8th, the Hippogriff was back on the surface again, more full of beans than ever, on the 21st. After some hesitation, she agreed to let her daughter go. She told herself: 'He will have lived with her, abroad, for a fortnight. Up to now I could pretend not to know the precise nature of their relationship. After this, impossible. Will he have the nerve to slink off again, when this time it will be tantamount to an insult?'

Mme Dandillot and Solange were agreed that it would be more than ever advisable for Solange to avoid the subject of marriage. She should give the impression, after Costals' two letters and his departure, of having given up her dreams of matrimony and of having come to Genoa simply for a final fling with him before resigning herself, so far as her mourning would allow, to grappling with suitors. Mme Dandillot thought of an even better idea, which involved arousing Costals' jealousy by means of these suitors. This was her plan.

Two years earlier, Solange had refused the hand of a young civil engineer, M. Jean Tomasi. But Mme Dandillot, attracted by prevarication as the magnetic needle is attracted by the North, had emphasized, in transmitting Solange's refusal, that 'the door was not finally closed', that her daughter was very young, and that 'later, perhaps … '  Once a year, then, the tenacious engineer had paid a visit to Mme Dandillot: everything still remained in the air, but the door was still kept half-open. Mme Dandillot therefore suggested to Solange that she should tell Costals that, since she had given up all hope of marrying the man she loved, her mother was about to reopen negotiations with M. Tomasi, and no doubt she would have no alternative but to accept the engineer.

At first Solange protested. When, a week later, she said to Costals: 'I could never lie to someone I loved', it was the truth. With a determined glint in her eyes, which she kept glued to the carpet, she repeated to her mother: 'No, I won't lie to him.'

'But, darling, it isn't lying to him. You know quite well that Tomasi comes to see me every year, and, as it happens, always in October. He'll be here in a month. It wouldn't be lying to tell Costals: "This young man is coming to see my mother at any moment".'

'That I can say, but I don't want to say that I shall agree to marry him, because I won't. I didn't marry him when I had no one close to my heart, and I won't marry him now. Now it's Costals or nobody.'

'You can say: "Since I've definitely got to give you up, you might as well realize that this fortnight in Genoa is the epilogue to our relationship. Mummy thinks that, after everything that's happened, the only solution is for me to marry as soon as possible. She's determined to get it over and done with this winter." Is that lying? How do you know I won't do that if Costals goes on shilly-shallying any longer?'

'I'll see,' said Solange. She turned it all over in her head, and much of it remained there.

Their suite in the hotel in Genoa consisted of two spacious rooms, separated by two bathrooms and a lobby. Costals had intended to show Solange round the town as soon as she had had a bath. He imagined her to be much more avid for the sights and smells of Italy than for love-making which, after their last encounter, he had every reason to believe might safely be postponed until the evening. He was therefore very surprised when, her ablutions completed, he saw her reappear not in outdoor clothes but in deshabille - completely naked, in fact, under an almost transparent garment. The centre of her body made a dark patch under the pale material, like a tuft of submarine moss under a light veil of water. What followed may easily be guessed. He performed it with the same avidity with which he sought to lay his hands on posterity.

In the Antwerp cancionero, Tristan and Iseult remain on the bed 'clasped, mouth to mouth, as long as a sung Mass'. Costals and Solange remained on the bed an hour longer than the office of Tenebrae at Solesmes. They had lain down at half past three. They rose again at nine o'clock.

He had drawn her out of the well of sorrow to make her live beside him, no longer for a few hours at a time, but night and day, he alone with her alone, closer still to each other in the heart of the foreign multitude. He had told her to sign in at the hotel under his name, and she had written this name which was her soul-name: Solange Costals. And now here she was, 'Madame' in the eyes of all, in the very circumstances in which she would have found herself on honeymoon, and in the traditional land of honeymoons and orange blossom. Never since she had known him had she had such utter faith in what she hoped for - a sense of absolute security. And her love, which had been waiting to see a stretch of clear road in front of it before giving itself free rein, burst forward with all its strength, like a sledge launched down a slope.

Never had Costals seen her as she was that afternoon. Her indescribable tenderness. Her indescribably blissful face, radiating happiness, in the midst of her loosened hair, which was like a third being lying between them, full and thick in his hand. In fact, the third person was chiefly the plush rabbit lying on the pillow beside Solange's head, rather moth-eaten and dusty - it would be ungallant to say 'grubby' - with one ear flopping over its snout, and one eye replaced with a boot button. Frequently Costals would kiss it instead of Solange, or else the mouths of all three of them would meet. Costals, who knew his own propensities, was well aware of why he had asked her to bring along the rabbit. (On the other occasions he would make his women wear carnival masks representing animal heads during their love-making. How he outsoared them then, leaping beyond the narrow limits of their sex!) So violently did he involve the rabbit in their love-games that there came a moment when it completely took possession of his imagination to the exclusion of Solange. Then his sensuality took on a quasi-religious character; but soon, no longer in control of the myth he had unleashed, and in the grip of all that was most unbridled in his nature, he was overcome with a kind of terror, and, his eyes dilating, he took the rabbit and placed it on a chair, hiding it under his pyjamas. Whereupon he was restored to reason.

Every few minutes Solange would draw back a little to gaze into his eyes; then she would kiss him, stroke his face, give him more kisses than he gave himself (he was like an overmatched boxer), and he could feel her long hands on his body in new and unexpected places, on his hip, or his shoulders, like those antique statues with severed marble hands still clinging to them from statues once joined to them but now lost. She thrust her head at him, cat-like, then nestled it in his arm-pit, and she had a way of suddenly pressing herself against him with a brief little moan - literally, a death-rattle of tenderness. As he took her for the second time, he thought he glimpsed a wild look in her eyes, and asked her: 'Well, are you beginning to feel something at last in this confounded puppet-show?' To which she replied: 'I feel less indifferent to it than at first.' Since a great deal was not to be expected from her on this score, Costals considered this reply so forthcoming that he was inflamed by it, and proved it to her a third time. She hung out her tongue like a dog, offering it to him.

When he got up, feeling hungry, and said to her: 'Come on, then, up you get! Oguefi! ['Get up!' in Arabic.] Time for grub,' she gave a little sigh, almost a cry, and then said to him: 'I love you so much!' as though to imply: how nice it would be to stay here forever. Costals' lip was bleeding, from a bite by his shepherdess; his face was swollen and discomposed by her kisses; and he felt a bit groggy. He opened the door of Solange's bathroom by mistake; and he saw, imprinted on the wet bath-mat, the marks of her bare feet. He remembered that, although he had kissed every part of her body, he had nevertheless omitted to kiss her feet, and the thought saddened him.

Costals had always felt an obscure affinity with animals. In his day-dreams as a twelve-year-old, he used to see a bear advancing towards him. Whereupon he would smile at the bear, and the bear interpreted the smile as saying: 'Not only do I wish you no harm, but I wish you well, because I understand you perfectly.' (Already perhaps, in this 'I understand you perfectly', there was the intuition of a paranormal knowledge.) And the bear did not attack him. They even became pals, and helped one another. It may be worth noting, incidentally, that the child had despised the Jungle Book. No passionate person can tolerate, on a subject close to his heart, a way of feeling which differs at all from his own. The young Costals would have found it quite natural for the animal world to be completely closed to Kipling. But since this world was not completely closed to Kipling, he was irritated by the writer's superficial interpretation of these beasts, and by the superficial character of the relations between them and Mowgli.

The performance of 'stopping the bear with a smile' had never, as he grew older, vanished from Costals' mind. If, at the age of thirty-four, he happened to meet a stray dog with a savage look in some lonely wood, it never entered his head to pick up the nearest stone, or even to make the sign of the cross at it, which - animals being always full of hatred for Jesus Christ - would have made it run howling away. He would say to himself: 'If it passes by without looking at me, I won't look at it. If it does look at me, I'll simply look back, and it won't bite me.' There was a mystical faith in all this, and Costals recognized it as such: he knew, therefore, that the whole thing was absurd. In confronting a savage dog he was savouring a triple pleasure: (1) the pleasure of the absurd; (2) the pleasure of putting his trust, not only in the dog (love) but in his own power (pride); and (3) the pleasure of risk (for, after all, he knew he was taking a risk by trusting to his smile).

When he came back from the war, Costals had struck up an acquaintance with an animal-tamer, Monsieur B—, from whom he had learnt that training by kindness, originating in Germany, had recently caught on in France. Between German trainers and their beasts, male as well as female, bonds of affection would often develop, which sometimes went quite far and by means of which the animals performed from love what the old methods made them perform from fear. Costals had gone into the cage with Monsieur B. and, after four or five sessions as an observer, had learned to handle the animals under the trainer's supervision. He believed that if he had had the time to practise regularly, he would have acquired some skill at it. The taming of felines, in so far as he understood it, was a work of domination based on a mixture of courage, intelligence, 'pure' sympathy and sexual emotion (an emotion that innocently revealed itself in its physiological manifestations), all of which, being liable to turn to violence at a moment's notice, admirably suited his temperament.

Costals' power over animals extended also to young people, but stopped there: he had no power over 'mature' men and women (such a pretty word, 'mature' - like cheese!). In his business relations he had no other faculties but will-power, cleverness, brutality and duplicity, which are the usual ingredients by which a man succeeds in doing what he wants and avoiding what he doesn't want. In his pursuit of women, only prestige, persuasion and patience came into play - nothing out of the ordinary. And moreover, his failures in both spheres were legion. Finally, it must be added that, even with animals and young people, his power subsided like the wind on certain days. Melancholy lulls! He was reduced to being a normal man, and felt totally at a loss.

In the vast world of the living, animals and young people were the only creatures to whom Costals never wished harm, to whom indeed he always wished well. Perhaps, partly at least, that was the secret of his power over them: they sensed that he wished them well. The reason for this benevolence doubtless lay in their sweetness and grace, but also in the fact that they were the quintessence of naturalness: how could one be angry with them, since they were devoid of pretension? 'Mature' men and women put on airs, and nine times out of ten lower themselves in the process - hence they are a source of justifiable irritation to those who still have some regard for the human species. But one cannot hate, one cannot despise, either animals or children, because one can never accuse them of being unworthy of themselves: they are miraculously exempt. Costals was so grateful to them for enabling him to experience what sympathy is - that quality which, according to him, had been the characteristic of the golden age - so grateful for being able, with them, to relax from the harsh mistrustfulness which was his normal attitude towards his fellow-men, that he tended to express it in somewhat excessive terms. 'They redeem humanity,' he would say of animals and young people. It was because of them, and them alone, that, if he had had the power to do harm on a grand scale (bombing a city, for instance), he would have done it with reluctance, and perhaps could not have brought himself to do it at all. The redemption of humanity by animals and the young was one of his favourite myths, and (which was even odder) had been so ever since he himself had been an adolescent.

It has been necessary to expatiate a little on this subject, to prepare the reader for the scene which follows.

No sooner had Costals and Solange ordered a table for lunch in the garden of a little suburban trattoria than a squad of cats came trotting out of the house towards them. They advanced in extended order, one of them stopping dead right in the middle of the manoeuvre to lick a paw. Although there were other people having lunch, it was they who had been picked out at once. The pink cat didn't think twice: at one bound it was on Solange's lap, then it scrambled up over her bust, settled on her shoulder, nuzzled her toque and knocked it askew, raised its tail in the approved style (resisting Solange's efforts to lower it) to show her its bottom, like a tiny full moon, and in fact seemed to have no other objective than to place the aforementioned under her nose.

As for the yellow cat! A feline prawn. A prodigy of emaciation and virulence, with affinities to the flea, the prawn and the spider. Standing on its hind-legs and wiping its nose on Costals' dangling hand. Jumping on to the table to get nearer to his face. If Costals moved away to take a look at the scenery, balancing itself on the edge of the table, its fore-paws stretched out, waving, as though to hold him back, and proving ad nauseam that, unlike mystic love, feline love does not lend wings, otherwise it would long ago have flown through the air to nestle against his cheek. And all this with such an uproar of purring that Costals' own throat seemed on fire. But every time a noise was to be heard from the inn, the creature would turn its head and stop purring. 'Animals, too!' thought Costals. 'They too have only to be reminded of home, and at once their happiness is over.' (Incidentally, it really is an astonishing thing in cats, this gift of being able to stand on their hind legs exactly like goats. That they should do it when one calls them or strokes them, well and good, but to rear up like circus cats ten yards away from a man simply because, having lost sight of him, they have just spotted him again - what sensibility, with an engaging tinge of hysteria!)

When the pink cat nuzzled Solange's neck, Costals noticed that she shivered slightly. She said that it smelt of vanilla, as all cats do when they are young, healthy and well-groomed. And her understanding of cats was demonstrated by the conversation she carried on with it. Every time she said something, it answered with a miaow. If she was silent, and then spoke again, it would reply. What else could that be but speech?

'I've always been like that with animals: a big sister to them. When I was small, I never made any distinction between them and humans. I used to say to my brother: "If you drum against the aquarium like that, you'll make the fish cry." I maintained that horses didn't like their faces, and that was why they stirred the water they were going to drink with their hoofs, so as not to see their reflections in it. At Toulon, where we had a villa for a time, the days when the sirocco blew used to put me in the same state of electric excitement as the animals, who used to go a bit mad. I simply had to run, and I used to drag Gaston along with me....'

'I've noticed this animal side of you for some time - from the way you stare at the flame when someone makes us a rum omelette, or the way your voice changes when you talk about your cats, whose names, incidentally, I don't yet know....'

'They haven't any.'

'No names? What do you do when you want to call them, then?'

'I don't call them. They come when they want to.'

Sublime words, thought Costals. There's the guarantee of my future freedom, if I marry her, as I may well. And the hardest thing to get people to do, even one's friends, is to leave you alone. I'll 'come when I want to'.

Alone of the four, the blue cat crudely begged for food; the others no doubt were there with the same object, but they disguised it admirably (and what an age the blue cat took to decide whether it wanted what Costals offered it or not!). When Costals held out a bit of mustard at the end of his finger, what a look of disappointment, of irritation, of reproach, and also of snootiness! Monsieur fancied himself, Monsieur felt insulted. But when he was offered a piece of orange peel, that really was the limit: Monsieur fled at once. Now he was sulking, sitting a few feet away from the table, looking the other way when one said pss ... pss ..., like a bourgeois when a beggar approaches, and yawning. As for the mauve cat, which had climbed on to the table, it simply devoured Solange with its eyes, opening its mouth from time to time and emitting a miaow that was more potential than actual (not a sound could be heard): it looked like a cross between a seal and a bear-cub. Solange said:

'How much more moving the silence of animals is than the verbosity of men!'

'Yes, but the silence of men is more moving than the silence of animals. . . . Forgive me, but the more I hear people talk about the intelligence of animals, the more I am struck by their stupidity.'[There is an untranslatable pun here: bête = animal, bêtise = stupidity (Translator's note).]

Meanwhile the yellow cat had buried its head roughly in Costals' half-closed hands, where it had remained for some while, like a child crying into its mother's hands, or a lover into the hands of his beloved. And Costals, when his food was brought, at first did not have the heart to touch it, for fear of disturbing the cat. Fortunately the latter, raising its head and catching sight of a little boy who apparently appealed to it more than Costals, jumped down unceremoniously and ran off to rub itself against his bare calves, leaving our author to resume his lunch. Whereupon the mauve cat, which had awaited its turn like someone waiting to go into the confessional, performed its act, which Costals might have described as follows:

'Pussy right in the middle of a ray of sunlight, like a dancer under the spotlight, while everything else remains in shadow.

Pussy shakes a paw.

Pussy, one ear up and one ear down, like a roisterer. (Why a roisterer?)

Pussy pushes me away with a paw. Ah! so we have a mind of our own, have we?

Pussy bites my shirt-cuff with the utmost violence.

Pussy lifts its dangling ear with its paw, but this time turns it inside out: bad luck! Pussy cannot get it back into place, and gives me a dirty look.

Pussy sucks the handle of my fork.'

Etc.

To get rid of the mauve cat, Costals spread out a newspaper on the ground for it. The pliability and dryness of this newspaper, and the crackling noise it made, played marvellously on the mauve cat's nerves. Now it would sit on its posterior, playing with the edge of the newspaper with its fore-paws and then, of course, losing its balance, falling over backwards, catching sight of its backside in the process, whence an irresistible temptation to lick it there and then. Now it would sit on the newspaper, with the tip of its tongue, which it had forgotten to draw in, sticking out like a bit of ham sticking out of a sandwich, without its knowing - and even if there had been twenty people there, not one of them would have drawn its attention to it, as one would to a gentleman with some bird-lime on his jacket. And yet this forgotten bit of tongue gave it a not very intelligent air. When the mauve cat made as if to leave the newspaper and come back to the table, Costals gazed at it sternly, and the cat stopped with a paw in the air.

'The way you stopped that cat reminds me of the way I control our black tabby. I may tell you I don't like her at all, because she's always been everybody's pet, especially my father's. I only have to look at her and her face falls, she lowers her ears, and slinks away at once, sensing that I don't like her.'

A slight pause, and she added: 'I don't like her!' with such passion that Costals felt that she could be dangerous one day.

'I'll show you something even better.'

Placing his hand over the root of the mauve cat's tail, he took its hind-quarters in his palm. Whereupon the mauve cat, which was obviously a female, completely lost its head. Erectile and vibratile, stretched to snapping-point, in a really sensational nervous paroxysm, frantic, snarling, its eyes like those of a Russian woman (bright green and popping out of its head), it twisted and writhed like a serpent-cat, offered itself right and left, all its dignity (which had never been great) gone to pot, 'came' and 'went' like an 'easy' bull, covered Costals' ankles with hairs - unimpeachable evidence, an examining magistrate's delight - fawned on his shoes, and reminded him in a thousand ways that it was high time it was exorcized. Costals himself was seriously affected by the Spirit. In front of the mauve cat, as in front of a bouquet of flowers, he would have liked to dance, prostrate himself, bang his forehead on the ground, and finally eat it - this last impulse being that which inspires believers to eat their God, lovers to kiss and bite the person they love, which is an adumbration of the act of eating him ('devour with caresses'). He contented himself with uttering cries and mimicking; his face had become cat-like, he had adopted their infantile ways, their look of wild innocence, and even purred, with such a realistic purr that Solange, leaning towards him, listening, was quite taken aback. Soon - as with the plush rabbit - he had to break off, feeling that the moment was coming when there would be nothing for it but to slash his own flesh and crunch ground glass.

As they were leaving, after touching farewells to the charming squad, he said to her:

'In Provençal, a young girl is known as a chatouno. From now on I shall call you the chatoune.'

From this lunch he took away two profound impressions, left by (1) Solange's animality, which brought her much closer to him, and (2) the strange look (jealousy?) she had given him when he had gone on holding the two warm little hands of the yellow cat in one of his.

Afterwards they took a taxi to the harbour. The sea was sea- green, the sky was sky-blue, the steamers - their hulls painted with minium - bled into the water. The quays smelt of hemp, tar, wood and brine. In the scorching barges kohl-eyed dockers lay sleeping. A liner was getting under way, and as it headed for the open sea it gave a little toot, poor thing, to keep its pecker up, and made water behind: piddling with fright. Clearly it was a boat that was new to the job.

They walked along the jetty, then stopped and sat down on a pile of rope. A delicious compound of cool breeze and warm sun! From time to time a wave struck the base of the jetty with an explosive thump. A fishing-boat called Dignitas (imagine a French trawler calling itself Dignity) was bearing off, and its hawser, unwinding along the quayside, was the image of a sea-serpent sliding lazily into the waves. Along its beams the sun lit up a flickering patchwork of flames and flowers, and the shadow of the boat, beneath it, was absinthe-green. Gulls rocked up and down on the swell, with an air of acute discomfort, as though they were about to be seasick. And amid the slow, ponderous movements of the harbour, a single motor-launch alone added a touch of speed, leaving in its wake a wide Neptune's trident of foam that lingered on the water long after it had disappeared. On the other side, towards the open sea, the waves surged and tossed like a woman having a bad dream.

Solange said that the boats at their moorings, with their heart-shaped sterns and their perpetual rocking motion, made her think of hearts in torment. Costals said that, swinging against each other, they reminded him rather of a row of dervishes. Then he delivered a poetic speech about 'boats with women's flanks which are like steeds beneath you, like mares taking a jump when the waves lift them and one feels them rippling beneath one with all the life that is theirs, and one helps them on with the complicity of love.' He confessed that whenever he was in a boat on a sea furrowed by waves, he could not help falling prey to a certain sensual perturbation. Solange refused to admit defeat: she compared the gentle motion of the moored boats, drawing slightly apart, then coming together again, to that of prams being rocked to and fro by seated mothers to send their infants to sleep.

Costals said that their combat with images on a given theme was like the alternating songs of the herdsmen of ancient Greece, and that she deserved the laurel wreath for her image of the prams.

'I won the wreath for the taming of the cats. You've won it in the image tournament. What will the decider be?'

'Which of the two of us can stare longest at the sun.'

Costals flexed his biceps: the sun and he (or 'he and the sun'): they were pals! He'd show her!

Solange raised her head and her pupils widened. She gazed calmly at the sun.

'You looked sideways!'

'Sideways? Oh, how can you be so unfair!'

'Let's begin again.'

He glanced towards the sun, then, with the air of a photogenic dictator, focused his eyes.... In fact he focused nothing, for no sooner had his gaze struck the fiery zone than his head sank, his eyes filled with tears, his eyelids clenched tight like those of the aurochs when Ursus breaks its neck.

'Ah, the dirty dog!'

The chatoune turned tranquilly towards the zenith. Her features stiffened, her pupils became so immense that they devoured the cornea almost entirely. And she stared at the sun.

If Costals did not fall on his knees, it was because, in spite of everything, he was a fairly civilized man. And if he did not say there and then 'I'll marry you', it was because he still retained a modicum of good sense. But he had to make an effort to prevent himself from doing so. He was certainly determined to marry her. Could any man but he be the lord and master of She-who-stares-at-the-Sun? (Surely there must be a hieroglyph which meant just that: He, or She, who stares at the sun.) He had thought her an ordinary little bourgeoise, but no, she was someone of his calibre, even superior to him. She had proved it with a supreme sign. He imagined her sculpted in granite, seated, her hands on her knees, with the head of a cat. And he seated at her side, his hands on his knees, with the head of a lion. And their tails were entwined. And two rays of sunlight, carved in the rock, descended upon them both. They would take a Coptic priest with them from Cairo, and their union would be blessed on the ruins of Heliopolis. To celebrate the marriage, he would give a great public feast in Alexandria, at which he would do battle with a lion. Yesterday there had been no question of having children. Now all that was changed: they would have fourteen sons. Yes, from the moment they moved on to the superhuman plane, all values were changed. From the moment she had stared at the sun, Costals' literary work retreated to the background; their reign was all. For it would be too stupid if they could not find some tribe to reign over: since already, for her beauty alone, Solange was adored by the children of Europe, there must surely be a child-race that would adore her. And the strength he would draw from her would be great enough to enable him to deal simultaneously with his realm, his work, and his fourteen sons. Before the scene on the jetty, Solange had been a curb on his wilder flights. Now that he knew she was worthy of them, he would make her participate in these flights; she would be one of the ingredients of his poetry. Before, he could find no place for her in his life. Now she had one. Once again he realized that it was not marriage that had made him hesitate so much as Solange's presumed mediocrity. Now that she had given proof that she partook of the superhuman, he thought of their marriage: 'It would be madness to let it slip.'

Costals had not drunk more than a glass of wine the whole day. But when they returned to the hotel, he was so intoxicated with her, or rather with his own idea of her, in other words so intoxicated with himself, that he hastened to wrap a wet towel round his head to ease the strain of the laurel wreath. As the reader himself may equally feel the need to wrap a wet towel round his head, let us pause for a while.

They were at the window, after dinner.

On the suburban hills, rows of street-lamps bordering avenues invisible in the darkness made a diadem of pearls about the city. Houses full of modest angels each playing with its little paradise. A stretch of beach against which the surf lapped contentedly, rising here and there like a horse tossing its head to show its rider its white-flecked forehead. The high places of silence above them, and the stars, each named after some erotomaniac God, the stars recumbent like cattle in a meadow, a few of them apart from the rest, as a bull stands apart from the herd, waiting to attack some young passer-by who ventures off the road. To the left, the Milky Way seemed to rise from a hill, like smoke from some dying sacrificial fire.

'I love big cities,' he exclaimed passionately, dreaming of all the human material waiting to be corrupted there. And, like an electric current, he felt the three 'phases' of his relationship to the world pass through him: (1) how to enjoy it; (2) how to guard against it; (3) how to make game of it.

'I love any city when I'm there with you,' she said. 'I'd like any provincial hole, or the country, or the desert just as much, if I were there with you.'

Continually, now, she sought physical contact with him, which was something quite new. She had put her arm round his waist (a thing she had never done before) and laid her head on his chest. From the open window on the floor below them rose a 'heady' female scent. She kissed his hand, his mouth, his forehead. He laughed. 'Why do you laugh?' she asked, her face a little anxious and abashed. He did not answer. He was laughing to see her so amorous, she who had always been so cold. But it was she who laughed when, having slid his hand inside her clothes by complicated routes, he plucked the hairs at the base of her spine.

For the first time in her life she had wanted something. Thereto she had dedicated a new-found will, a fresh strength, unused for twenty-one years. She had wanted this stranger to be hers for ever, and she felt that after all their torments he was ready to be at last. How normal, how natural it was, this life they had lived in common since yesterday! It was as if she had never lived in any other way. How quickly her past had closed up behind her! And the more aware she became of it the more her love grew, as a torrent swells gradually more and more. It was really the thought of marriage that was the cradle of her love, as it was, or had been, the grave of love for Costals. And she leaned against her man, with all the primordial heaviness of her sex, heavy as a rain-sodden tree, murmuring a confused prayer: 'O God, make my happiness last! I shall never grow weary of it.... '

'Look at that light-house,' she said. 'Wouldn't you think there were people inside it following one another perpetually without ever catching up? That's something one mustn't do in life.'

And indeed there were shadows flitting across the illuminated beacon of the light-house, always equidistant from one another.

'The waves also go on chasing one another without ever catching up,' said Costals. 'It's an interesting reflection, though I distrust metaphors with philosophical pretensions. Metaphors should just be metaphors, and not try to pass themselves off as something more.'

For a long while they gazed at the nocturnal city and the commonwealth of stars, and then he said:

'These houses, already full of youthful sleepers, torment me. They remind me that there are things that I do not possess. As far as my eyes can reach, and well beyond, across the whole face of the earth, my people stretch: all those to whom, as a writer, I have brought something vital, and who are ready to offer me a token of their gratitude. This brings me no joy, for I have no use for their tokens: I know that what they are ready to offer me is never what I want. There are as many unknown women as there are stars in sight as I speak to you now who have written me page after page assuring me of their gratitude, their admiration, their friendship, and what have you. But if, one night, I were to knock at their door and say: "I am he whose name is alive at the other end of the earth, and yet it is as a supplicant that I have come to your door. I have come to receive my reward for what I have given you. You who said to me one day, with such fervent simplicity: 'I would like to give you pleasure', you who so far forgot yourself as to kiss my hand, lead me now to that room where the flesh of your flesh lies sleeping, and let me know her. I shall not harm her, I shall not turn her against you, I shall cover her with my riches and she will flower beneath my riches; she will flower beneath the riches of my rain and of my summer. Woman is the warrior's reward, but the children of men are the reward of the poet, and mothers who shut their eyes are the dew of the human species" - if I said all that to them, I should doubtless be met by closed faces and mouths full of insults. And the thought pains me. But what pains me even more, perhaps, is the thought that there are mothers who would be prepared to offer me the flesh of their flesh, for love of me and my works, but who do not know that that is the only thing I want of them, that I spurn the incense of their praise and the smoke of their sacrifices.'

'You ought to slip a veiled appeal into your next novel, in the style of an advertisement: "Mothers wishing provide tangible proof admiration M. Pierre Costals by putting him in touch daughters requested communicate. Utmost discretion. Please send photographs." And perhaps you might even add: "Tokens M. Costals' gratitude will surpass all expectations".'

Solange's jocular tone failed to conceal her underlying acerbity. People who know nothing about life (and pride themselves thereon by calling themselves 'particular') are always rather acid towards those who have some human experience. She did not at all approve of Costals' bringing home to her the extent of his appetites at the end of a day when they had come so perceptibly closer to each other. To which he might have retorted that old father Zeus, in the Iliad, is no more tactful towards his ever-loving when, inviting her to share his bed, he enumerates all 'the others' on the pretext of attesting that he likes her best of all; and enumerates no less than seven, with a suitable encomium for each.

Nevertheless Costals replied with the utmost seriousness:

'It's a good idea, and by giving it to me you improve your own prospects. Yes, I shall launch an appeal on those lines in my next book. Let them understand who may. I'm tired of being loved so inadequately, in a sterile and pointless way - it makes me sad and reproachful like a dog whose master, with stupid persistence, goes on offering it a piece of meat it doesn't want, when there's some vanilla cream on the table which would make it burst into speech with joy.'

'If I remember right, the Minotaur needed seven boys and seven girls every year. Is that your ration?'

'I have no ration. People say a lot of things against lust. They say it's disappointing - that it makes one sad - that it prevents one from working - that it prevents one from being an entirely moral person. But what they don't say, and this is one of the most striking things about it, is that it's never-ending. In the act of love-making one thinks to oneself: "What riches I'm storing up for myself. With this, I'm well provided for." But no. Your mistress gives you pleasure and happiness, and you feel desire, affection and esteem for her; but at the same time you go on chasing, and one day in three your pursuit brings you someone new. Well, if you're suddenly deprived of all that, it's as if you had never had anyone at all, you're as starved, as empty, as if you'd never had anyone. It's like water through a sieve. During the dog-days, we're irritated because science has failed to tap some of that excessive heat in order to return it to the atmosphere during the excessive cold of winter. Happiness is like summer: it doesn't go on radiating. There is nothing to be got from the memory of it when we feel cold. There are sensations that write in indelible letters. Happiness writes white.'

She felt sorry for him. She was always so glad when she had an excuse to feel sorry for him. And whereas a few minutes earlier she had felt herself to be of very little account in his life, now she felt indispensable once more, to protect him from the cold.

'Dear Minotaur, may I suggest that if you need this perpetual renewal of fresh bodies, there could be no better proof that none of the women you've known has fully satisfied you.'

'Perhaps, on the contrary, it's because a woman has fully satisfied me that I feel such a desire to begin again with another - with all the others.'

They went back into Solange's room. The only light came from the pink lamp above the bed. This pink light was a novelty: there was no pink light in the avenue Henri-Martin; and there was something virginal about it. It was also the first time (apart from the 'hostelry') he had seen Solange in a bedroom that had not done duty for others of his women.

He asked point-blank:

'But after all, why do you want to marry me?'

'To be happy, of course!'

How she had blurted it out!'To be happy.' O wise response! He always liked people who spoke without shame of their 'will to happiness'.

'I do so want it to happen!' she said fervently.

And he, sincere but prudent:

'And I so want you to be happy!'

Yet, since the previous day - and above all since the scene on the jetty - he had begun to think of them as 'we'. Their harmony was complete, and his trust in her immense. What she said and what she did left an impression of ease, of familiarity, of absolute naturalness; they were on a footing of equality; they had only to let their souls give forth their emanations without in any way constraining them. It seemed to Costals that already he had fallen into the habit of thinking of the future in relation to her. His erstwhile exaltation having spent itself, he nevertheless found that it really was marriage that he now fundamentally desired. But what he was physically incapable of was saying the word that would bind him.

'In Athens, the betrothed girl dedicated her childhood plaything - your rabbit - and a lock of her hair to Artemis. In Boeotia, when she arrived at her husband's house for the first time, a wheel of the chariot that brought her there was burnt, to show that henceforth she could never leave this house again. In Rome, when they had reached that point, the bridegroom took his wife in his arms and carried her over the threshold....'

'I wonder if you're strong enough to carry me....'

He sensed the naïve challenge behind the remark, and did not like it. He lifted her up, and she clung to his neck, glueing her mouth to his. Carrying her, he crossed the two bathrooms, but stopped on the threshold of his own room and put her down. The corners of her mouth drooped, and her eyelids fluttered.

He suggested that they should finish the day by reading together.

'Shall we read Tolstoy's Diary, for instance - "waiting for each other at the foot of the page", as the saying is? We could begin at the page where he writes: "For fifty years, without a break, woman has been going down in my estimation." Unless you'd prefer the passage which begins with that graceful quotation from Gogol: "Lord, there was already enough filth of every kind in the world. Why did you have to add woman?"'

One may guess what these pleasantries led to: much romping and playfulness. Nevertheless, that night he did not go to her, for fear of spoiling, by sensations which she was liable to reduce to mediocrity, a day that had passed off so successfully. Perhaps also in order to show her that she sufficed him without those sensations. Alone in his bed, he turned over, half-laughing to himself, and murmuring: 'My little girl!' And he thought: 'It would be a crime to reject her now, and it's already almost wicked of me to leave her in uncertainty as I'm doing. Yes, now that I've brought her to such a stage of love and hope, it's my duty to marry her.'

He woke up in the night and heard the sound of raindrops. He remembered that the window of her bedroom had been half-open when he left her. He was afraid she might catch cold, and crept stealthily towards her door - curious, incidentally, to know whether she had locked it. But no; he went in. He did not look at her asleep: how was he to know? - since she did not want to be seen naked, or to be seen dressing or having a bath, perhaps she would be angry if she learnt that he had seen her asleep.... He merely noticed that she was lying curled up, and promised himself to tell her next day that it was bad for the circulation. Between rounds in the boxing gymnasium, he was always told: 'Stretch your legs well out.... '

He closed the window. On the way back, he kissed the foot of her bed.

Costals' Diary

29 September - Enchantment of fascist cats, challenge to the sun, nocturne at the window. . . . Yesterday was a day of wonders. After these two radiant days, today we get down to the prose. Five years since I cohabited with a woman. Reapprenticeship.

Palazzo Rosso, Bianco, etc. Luckily I know it all. Better not to have seen a museum at all than to have seen it only once in the company of a woman, unless she's exceptional. Margaritas....

Anxious about her all the time. Is she bored? Does she think I'm nice enough to her? Was she embarrassed by my shouting at the curator? Have I been idiotically extravagant enough for her to consider that I'm a man of the world? If she says to me: 'Don't bother about me,' is she sincere or merely being tactful? (a woman's ideal being to be served in small things and to serve in great). When I get back to my room an hour before dinner, having been alone with her without a break since ten o'clock in the morning, I feel an absolute physical need to lie down, heart thumping, convinced I've got a fever. A feeling of nervous exhaustion. A feeling of dispersion. A feeling of losing grip. It is three quarters of an hour since I left her, and the nervous vibrations inside me have not yet subsided. My handwriting has been quite changed by it all.

And all day long, in a country where looks are outstanding, being scorched by every face I met, while I was stuck to her. Naturally, I had never seen so many. (The one with the plaits round her head, like the ring round Saturn.... ) Oh, to let nature go to waste like that! If only I had been alone! As dismal as a horse that senses that its pals are out at grass while the bit is still lacerating its chops. One person can deprive you of the whole immense world, can steal the world from you, put a screen between the world and you. Everything is devoured by that one person; the resplendent universe ceases to exist.

(Written before going to bed.) These three days, the first two of which were flawless, and spent with a girl whose character is ideal, who is the soul of tact and docility, have nevertheless reduced my personality to a state of deliquescence. This evening, while preparing for bed, I go from one object to another without finding what I am looking for although it is under my nose. The dilution of my personality shows even on my face, which seems washed out; my eyelids are so heavy that I can hardly lift them. Inordinate intensity of my reflexes. 'I scarcely belong to myself,' sigh the weak-willed. Exactly, but I want to belong to myself all the time.

Title for a novel about marriage: The Man Who Lost His Soul.

During the first years of his marriage, Tolstoy thinks he is happy. In fact he is in a daze. He has been knocked over the head.

I am a snake that has been knocked on the head with a bludgeon. It can no longer move.

30 September - In the morning I stay in my room, on the pretext of having letters to write. In the afternoon, a walk in the old town (Sottoripa, San Lorenzo, etc.). Easy, pleasant conversation: all is well. And yet something she said disappointed me in the extreme. As she continues to refrain from questioning me about my life, I congratulate her on this. And she explains: 'But what if I found cause for suffering in your life, in your past! I would rather cherish the illusion that your happiness only began with me. . . So, what I assumed to be exquisite tact was nothing but feminine hatred of reality! Trust deriving from ignorance - there's something essentially feminine. They prune away from a man, from an author, everything they don't like, everything that doesn't conform to their 'dream'. The atheist, for them, is presumed to be a 'seeker', the hard man a tender plant, the happy man a prey to anxiety, the scoundrel a man of honour. They don't like real people, but phantoms or archetypes, and they know it. And people are surprised at the blunders they make! And they are surprised to find themselves 'let down' in the end!

After dinner, fearing that she might feel deserted, went to read Renan in her room, my armchair next to hers, my left hand slipped under the hollow of her knee, which is moist as a runnel that has recently contained water (this method of reading him would have delighted Renan). She reads Michelet's La Femme, rearranging her hair continually. Then I write this, having moved a bit behind her, in such a way that I have only to raise my eyes to see her. Spelling mistakes, words skipped, as a result of the absorption of my personality by hers. I am bewitched by this cohabitation, exiled from the world. I try in vain to read and write; my mind is elsewhere. In fact, it has been turned inside out.... S. pumps me dry, as hysterics do when they take on the nervous strength which they have sucked from those they come in contact with.

She asks me: 'No shadows? No misunderstandings?' I fondle her. But she must have read my thoughts.

She said something rather silly: 'Perhaps you don't love abundantly enough.... ' Why should one love a lot of people? A handful of attachments is enough. Four or five people - the piles upon which one builds one's bungalow. The beasts of the jungle may prowl and roar below, but one is safe. Unshakeable devotion to the members of the clan, but for everyone else, hm ... like those savages who, though tigers where society is concerned, have a brotherly pact with one particular species (snake-charmers, elephant-tamers, etc.). But why even a 'handful' of attachments? Fewer still: a single attachment is enough. A single attachment would be enough to justify one's existence, if existence needed justifying. A single person whom one loves more and more, from whose body and soul one draws ever more profound harmonies, like the violin of a master, which grows better and better the more he plays it. And this is why, contrary to what is believed by those I do not love, who judge me only by my non-love for them, I am a faithful person, absurdly faithful; only it is to those I love, not those I do not love, that I am absurdly faithful. Ah! when one loves, fidelity is not very difficult ... I should like to say all this to her, but if I say it like that, in the abstract, she will be convinced that she is one of the 'handful', and one fine day, what an awakening! And if I told her in so many words: 'I'm not talking about you', I should be stabbing her to the heart. So let her go on thinking me 'heartless'.

Going into her room later, find her with playing cards laid out in front of her. 'You're consulting the cards to see if I'll marry you?' She blushes. 'Not at all. I'm playing patience.' Even assuming she was telling the truth, to have caught her in the act of playing patience produces the same effect on me as if I had caught her pleasuring herself. That she should have brought a pack of cards in her suitcase! One degree lower, and we shall be at the crossword stage.

Cohabitation with a woman one 'loves' makes a man of one, because of the continual necessity of coming to terms with her, being on one's best behaviour, keeping a watchful eye both on oneself and on her. The spontaneous outpouring of love gives place to another feeling, by no means ignoble, in which one's affection for another person arises from constant self-scrutiny and self-discipline. But when this woman is only 'loved' (in theory) and not truly loved, and moreover bores you, such an effort is exhausting, especially if one is unaccustomed to putting oneself out for anyone or anything.

Living together is said to be an art. True enough. A state in which one needs constant therapy with a view to forgetting the other person, with a view to protecting oneself from the other person.

I, by your side, will find my solitude again - Géraldy.

Agreed, but that being so, the question irresistibly arises: in these conditions, what is the point of living together?

She pines, droops, looks distracted if I do not clasp her lengthily in my arms. As soon as I do, her face becomes transfigured: a dried-up garden in which a hose is turned on - or a dog that was whimpering because it was left alone too long. She is always imperceptibly reminding me of her presence, as a cat does in order to be stroked, or a dog to be played with. I think of that Siamese cat I was rather fond of, but which had such a need to be stroked that it roared ceaselessly - thirty raucous, agonizing miaows per minute - whenever it was not on someone's lap. As soon as it was, and being fondled, it stopped. Since I could not hire a special manservant to stroke the cat, or have an electrical apparatus specially designed for the purpose.... If I want Solange to purr, I have to pay heed to her the whole time: a little cajolery, an affectionate word, an 'attention' of one kind or another; she must feel continually propped up. To be somebody's oxygen flask is not much fun. No doubt, as I say, to remain in control of my work while being continually wrapped up in her, to carry through my life's task while comforting others, is a manly thing to do. But it exhausts me.

Let me live at the summit of my being. Let me drink myself silly on the exaltation I experience from the complete and perfect harmony between what I am and the life I lead. Let me walk on the waters. But no, she burns less ardently than I do, and more slowly. She does not and never will belong to the race of half-madmen to which I belong and which is the only ambience in which I feel at ease. I was on fire: she extinguishes me. I was walking on the waters; she takes me by the arm: I sink.

Lord Byron: 'It is often easier to die for a woman than to live with her.'

Lord Byron, to X: 'It seems you've married a pretty woman. Hm.... Don't the evenings sometimes seem a bit long!'

I am not condemning her, for she is blameless. I am not even condemning communal life, married or otherwise. I am condemning charity, which forces one to behave towards people as though one loved them, when in fact one doesn't (or at least: when one doesn't love them deeply).

1 October - Night with her - agreeable enough. But this morning she is sad. Women, eternal Penelopes, who unravel during the day what they have woven during the night. Evidently she senses that her presence does not make me happy. It is as though both of us were suffering from the accidie of people who have just entered the conventual life. I do my utmost to see that she is not unhappy, and in doing so I am unhappy myself, and she remains so: it is the moral of all works of pity. Is she also perhaps disappointed that I have said nothing definite to her, after those first two days when we were so near to marriage? Does she realize that I am at the same stage as when I took the train? Those strange words of hers: 'Mummy is absolutely determined that I should be married before the spring. We must soon give an answer to a young engineer.... ' There follows a long story about some engineer who has proposed to her. 'But you've never spoken to me about this engineer.... ' 'I didn't want to worry you.'

Well, let him marry her, and take her off my hands. And yet at the same time it does affect me, not in my pride, but in the affection I have for her. And then, I can't help wondering whether this engineer really exists. I believe that, if I discovered they had concocted the story in order to fool me (who knows, perhaps a combinazione with her mother), I should never see her again for the rest of my life. I may be this and I may be that, but I am not a person who can be fooled with impunity.

At five o'clock, as I was going out to do some shopping, she asked me to post a letter. It was to her mother. Young Dr F. once told me that he used to force the letter-box of his fiancée's house, to intercept letters addressed to her. When I told him: 'You're a real skunk,' he laughed and said: 'Well, at least it shows I've got some personality.' I was holding this letter in my hand, and I thought that if I needed to prove that I had 'some personality', like Dr F., perhaps the situation would be cleared up once and for all, and I should be released and cured. If I had read: 'I've told him about the so-called engineer.... ' I should have asked her to leave Genoa that very evening, and the future would have been washed clean. It is disturbing to realize how often it is the shabby thing one should rationally choose to do. When I fled from Paris, it was not a glorious gesture, and yet it was the right thing to do.

I strongly suspect that these letters she writes to her mother and receives from her (she does not correspond with anyone else to my knowledge. How lonely she is! I feel sorry for her) are full of me. I don't like it. All kinds of advice and diplomatic instructions must arrive from Etretat … These two women intriguing away together … How pure my life was when I was far from the gynaeceum! When I took what I wanted from it in my own time, without ever going into it myself. And fooling fathers and mothers for days on end instead of having to reckon with them.

And yet, even if the engineer is a myth, have I the right to blame her? Isn't it natural that, in the situation I have placed her in, she should try to hasten, to force my decision, even by falsehoods? If, discovering her fib, I had put her on the train back to France, wouldn't that have been odious of me?

It is a horrible thing to feel for another person nothing but that hybrid sentiment, half-way between love and indifference, which is pity. A sentiment that makes it impossible to enjoy them unreservedly, or for them to enjoy you (for people sense pity, and who has ever loved the pity of which he is the object?), that makes one fret and wear oneself out, and all to no purpose, because pity always ends with an explosion which hurls the two people, bruised and panting, in opposite directions, back to where they should always have been.

Rule: Never pity those you do not love (more or less what old Dandillot said to me).

Rule: It is pointless to be really nice to someone, unless one loves them a great deal. For one must love someone a great deal in order to be satisfied simply with having given them pleasure.

Rule: Do good, but at the same time wound the person to whom you do it, so that he will hold it against you. In this way you will gratify two vices at one blow - your love of being charitable and your love of being hated.

2 October - The school year begins tomorrow. In every city in Europe, as here in Genoa, all the kids with the same parcel under their arms: the new shoes they have just been bought. Brunet makes a scene, insists that unless he is bought a frog- green scarf, he won't be able to work properly. He also wants Old Mother Hubbard to buy him a tie: 'You're a woman: you know about such things ... ' He loves his frog-green scarf so much that he cannot be persuaded to take it off in the house: he eats his meals in it. He has not written to me since the 25th.

When he lived with me, he used to irritate me too. But it wasn't the same as with Sol. It would take pages to explain all the subtle differences. Or perhaps only a line. He distracted me from my work, because I was too busy loving him all the time.

(Written in the evening.) Interminable day with her. Nothing serious: simply the fact that we have nothing to say to each other. I imagine myself having made up my mind to marry her, and soliloquizing thus: 'To think that we're going to have nothing to say to each other for thirty years. Not only that it's just beginning, but that it hasn't yet begun … '

'You're gloomy. What's wrong?'

'You know quite well, it's always the same thing.'

'The future?'

'Yes, I'm haunted by the thought of being dispossessed.'

'Dispossessed of what?' I persist, determined to probe the wound thoroughly.

Of you.'

'So you think you possess me?'

Without answering, she presses herself against me - a gesture which maddens me. Her remark has turned me to ice. Three possible interpretations of this idea of 'possessing me'. She possesses me in the sense of forcible seizure. She possesses me in the slang sense of the word: I've been had by her, gulled. She possesses me in the sense of diabolical possession: the dream in which she was lying on top of me like a fungus, and everything I have observed about the way she eats up my life.

Later, seeing a train pass by, she sighs: 'Think of all the shattered hopes and unrealized dreams it's carrying away with it.' A woman will never believe that a passing train may also be carrying away realized dreams. For melancholy is the luxury of the poor in spirit. In the West, dominated by women, the cult of suffering; in the East, where man is the master, the cult of wisdom. But I, by the side of this silent and dejected woman, become soured, and turn over in my mind phrases that are unworthy of myself and of her. So then I take her by the arm and put her hand in mine. Every time I sense that there is something irremediable between us, I perform some little act of endearment intended to lead her to believe that I still love her, as though I felt she had read my thoughts. And in the end I come to have a horror of these lying caresses, which dishonour true affection, of which they are the simulacrum, as charity dishonours love. O God, do not let me give in to all the ugly feelings she arouses in me! Help me to hold out for the week that remains …

Living together consists almost entirely of waiting for the other person. Solange not being ready, Costals had gone down and taken his seat in the hired car which was to take them to San Cassiano. The village of San Cassiano is a target for excursions, in other words a place totally lacking in interest, since the sole object of excursions is to try and kill time. Solange appeared at last.

'You've put too much powder on.'

'That's because I hurried.'

He looked at her malevolently. Simply because she had put her powder on badly, because she wasn't looking her best. He saw what she would be like at fifty: a frightful, bloated little bourgeoise.

They drove off. The sky was greenish-blue like the bellies of certain monkeys. From time to time the countryside opened out to disclose the hard outline of the sea, and from this infinite, dazzling expanse of azure and sunlight there rose a chill as from a well.

Solange said not a word, and when you are a couple, neither has the right to look absent or preoccupied without being made aware of the other's anxiety or disapproval. As always when he did not know what to say to her, Costals slipped his arm through hers and took her hand, as a matter of form. She pressed close to him, still silent, and he caught a glimpse of her expression of dumb reproach, with its eternal question- mark: 'Why, why don't you marry me? You know how much I love you, and you pretend to love me.' But soon, at the slightest jolt the car made she began to make faces and cling to the door-handle. Costals did not mind these jolts, which he would not even have noticed had he been alone. Gradually he became aware of them, and suffered likewise. Living together induces a process of osmosis. If one of the pair is bored, he forces the other to be bored too. If one suffers from some discomfort or other, he forces the other to suffer from it too.

Thus the journey, which lasted an hour, was ruined for Costals. Then they arrived at San Cassiano. The red and white village lay drowsing in the innocence of morning. Urchins, rather lumpish, snotty-nosed, their shouts tailing off, were playing at persecuting one another. A man was asleep in the sun, covered with flies like an open wound. Worried-looking dogs trotted briskly about their business, obviously with important engagements to keep. A tourist motor-coach, whose occupants had just visited the church, was driving off again. A pretentious-looking little woman sat in it with a tiny dog on her lap. Costals exchanged an extremely roguish wink with the dog as they passed.

'You made eyes at that old hag!' said Solange in a very unfriendly tone.

'Not at all, I made eyes at the dog. And how very saucy he looked!'

Now they were climbing up to the church, Mlle Dandillot's eyes glued to the tips of her shoes (a fine way to visit 'beauty spots'), in other words sunk in her hippogriffical stew-pot. They went into the church.

She remained for a long time on her knees. 'Did you ask the god of the Christians to persuade me to marry you?' he asked on the way out.

'I simply said: "My God, make me happy",' she replied, quite unselfconsciously.

'So you have faith?'

'No, but I have something … ' Costals had expected an answer of this sort, and it was in order to receive it that he had asked his second question: so that she might flounder a little more.

The torture of having eternally to reckon with another person whom one does not love! When one does love someone, it is pleasant to have to reckon with them; of the time they make one waste one simply tells oneself: 'After all, a certain amount of relaxation is always necessary.' Before the war, Costals had had a German sheep-dog, and often this dog, seeing him go out, would accompany him without being asked, and then make it blatantly obvious that Costals was expected to devote his time to playing with it. For two hundred yards Costals would make it chase after stones, or else, pretending that the dog was a lion, and roaring on its behalf, he would tame it. After which, since he had come out to read, if not to work, he had had enough. 'You damned monkey, this is the very last time I throw your stone for you.' Faced with the dog's imploring eyes and its irresistible sadness, this 'last time' was repeated over and over again. And Costals' walk was ruined. Fortunately, Hesiod's words can be applied to gods, beasts, children, savages and Costals (this recital is a key, though it may not appear to be one): 'The mind of Zeus passes easily from one thought to another.' Thus it would happen that the dog, its whim changing, and suddenly no longer 'loving' Costals, would abandon the game and go back home alone. And Costals, delivered from the demon of charity, could open his book again.... Walking beside Solange, he remembered these little scenes. 'Although nobody would suspect it, no doubt it gives her pleasure to go out with me. There's no accounting for tastes.' But if, changing her mind with canine suddenness, in other words no longer 'loving' him, she were to return by herself to the car, leaving him alone if only for ten minutes, what a sigh of relief he would have given!

On the way back she was even more silent and morose. And her silence continued in Genoa while they lunched in a restaurant - surrounded, as it happened, by five or six other couples none of whom unclenched their teeth except to eat. 'We are the Eternal Couple, who spend their lives sulking at one another. And if one wants to plumb the depths of human abasement, one must never seek them in the individual, however abject he may be, but always in the couple.' However, towards the end of the meal she tried to start a conversation, but this time it was he who did not answer. He was on the point of ordering his dessert in advance, paying the bill, and going back to the hotel alone, leaving her in the lurch. But they left together, he lashing his calves with his tail (it being understood that, ever since the 'challenge to the sun', he regarded himself, more or less, as some lion-headed Kronos). No doubt he had now earned the right to be alone for a few hours, but he would still have to see her again towards the end of the day. The prospect of meeting her again seemed an ordeal, and the thought of the girl's idleness - which rubbed off on him - a torture.

As soon as they arrived at the hotel, the storm broke.

'And now I insist that you tell me precisely why you were sulking this morning.'

'But I wasn't sulking! On the contrary, it's you who never really let yourself go when you're with me.

'I know you too well to let myself go with you. I only let myself go with people I don't know, and when it's dangerous to do so.'

'You trust people you don't know, but not me?'

'I don't trust anyone.'

'Don't you trust me?'

'I trust what you are now. I should be lying if I said I trusted what you may become.'

She shrugged her shoulders convulsively.

'You always think I'm sulking when I don't talk. Have you forgotten Miss Silence? I always feel much better when I'm not obliged to answer ... What I want is to be understood without having to explain myself ... But after all, doesn't everyone, more or less.... When you went out with your mother, didn't she remain silent some of the time?'

'Please don't bring my mother into it. I never had the slightest difficulty with my mother. I was always happy with her, and she was always happy with me. So you weren't sulking this morning? You didn't say more than twenty words in three hours, and you weren't sulking?'

'No. I was thinking about the future ... I was so happy to be with you.... '

'Well, anyone who had seen you would have sworn you were having a fit of sulks. If you look as though you're sulking when you're happy, it's rather serious. Because I've got better things to do than spend the whole day asking myself: "Did she get out of bed the wrong side? What's the matter with her? Is it my fault? How? Or is she simply feeling happy?" To have to hang on everything that goes through a woman's head! Let's say it's a misunderstanding on my part. Let's admit I'm impatient, irascible, impossible; nevertheless it's a fact that there are dozens of men and women with whom I never quarrel. And with you I have a quarrel after a week of living together. If it had happened after five years of marriage! No, believe me, a situation in which by loving each other we can't help hurting each other is not a healthy one. For I love you, and yet I feel capable of hurting you, although it is my misfortune not to have the courage to take the plunge and be frankly cruel to you.'

'If you're unhappy because you can't be nasty to me, then go ahead, get it out of your system.'

Agitated and distraught, she paced up and down the sun- speckled room like a wild beast prowling through the sun- speckled jungle, lashing her calves with her tail. Yes, it was true, there was something wild about her, this girl who normally lived with all her lights dimmed. Her expression was hard, her eyes had darkened and grown strangely bloodshot, as had her cheek-bones, which were now slightly blotchy; and her nose gleamed in the middle of her powdered face. Costals realized the extent to which she had become a woman, the extent to which he had made her a woman with all his manipulations. Ah! she had been well worked over. From her very first day here, even when she had been so tender in her caresses, he had noticed that she had lost her school-girl's voice, that voice from another planet, her lunar voice of old. Her face, her expression, had become sharper. And the energy with which she stuck the hairpins into her hair and combed her thick tresses was fraught with menace for that peace of mind so dear to the man of thought. Before, she had been a little artichoke. Now she was a woman. A bad business. Like the sea, which the timorous traveller goes out to examine at seven o'clock in the morning and finds calm, but which at ten, when he goes on board, has turned rough. Her hard woman's face. He was afraid of her. Afraid of what she was about to become. Afraid of what she might be capable of doing to him, if he were mad enough to shut himself up in the cage with her. And as there was always a dormant ferocity in him only waiting for a chance to show itself, it was fear that awoke it (the mechanism is always the same, with wild animals as with men: fear engenders the ferocity by means of which one may eliminate what makes one afraid, and ferocity engenders fear - fear of reprisals). And she, pacing up and down, glowing with beauty and life in her emotion, had the air of a caged panther; while he, seated, drawn in on himself, bent forward (so that his back suggested a bristling spine), his eyes narrowed, his mouth cruel, tense with cowardly malevolence, irresistibly recalled a hyena.

She went on:

'If you feel that this experiment has proved that you can't live with me, you have only to bring it to an end. I can simply go away. I didn't impose myself on you. It was you who sent for me....'

'I've been waiting for you to say that for a long time. I sent for you, yes. And why did I send for you? Because I felt you were unhappy. I had no need of you; on the contrary, you were bound to get in my way. I brought you here out of charity. The demon of charity, which is always disorganizing my life ... '

Mlle Dandillot collapsed into an armchair and began to sob. Costals flung back his head, like a boxer who has just floored his opponent. 'Well, there it is at last! At last she knows what crying is. [Solange never cries, has never cried. 'You can't cry when someone's looking at you, or you can't cry at all?' the doctor asks her. 'I can't cry at all.' Cf. Pity for Women, p 190 (Author's note).]

'It's always the same. I struggle against charity, then I give in. But charity is a double-edged weapon, it turns back not only on me, but on the person to whom I've dispensed it - for charity always misses its target; that's axiomatic. Then I suffer, that's to say I turn nasty, for with me suffering is never passive and inert, it at once becomes aggressive. Most of the cruel things I've done have been the after-effects of charity. With women. With men. That woman I showed you in my studio at Port-Royal ... And lots of others ... Always charity or pity at the bottom of it. Charity upset things. Cruelty restored them to normal. In fact I don't know why I say "charity"; it's much broader than that; it's good itself that's at issue. The "good" should mean living life to the full, without bothering about others. Your warmth should rekindle them, set them in motion. Alas! it doesn't work out like that. This frightful temptation to do good. Try as I may, I succumb to it the whole time. It's a vice. And doing good knocks me out. You know, the way rockets shoot up and then reach the summit of their marvellous ascent and fall back again, or rather vanish, cease to exist. Sometimes, too, they fall into the crowd, and people are wounded. And there would have been neither that fall to earth, nor that sinister dying away, nor those wounded, if there had been no marvellous ascent. Or again, think of a wild cat, its eyes popping out of its head, making a mad rush to the top of a tree. But once there, it can't get down, it miaows, and one has to climb up and get it. I too, when I've done good, or simply when I've done what the mob would call "my duty", when I've rushed to the top of the tree, I too am caught and start to cry. Such sadness.... As after the carnal act. Only, after the act, it's physiological, it's over quickly; and besides, it's exceptional, at least in my case; in fact one's extremely happy; in any case it's not in the least important, and those who use it as an argument against sex are fools. Whereas the depression I get after doing good happens every time, and it lasts, and there are reasons for it, or at least so I suppose. Perhaps the knowledge that it was useless: apparently useful, but useless in fact, and that I've been duped. Or the feeling that, where others would be happily aware of having done good, I feel only remorse, and the realization that one's so different ... Why should I feel pleasure in being so different from others, on occasions when that difference implies no superiority over them?'

'You said ... that day in the kitchen: "I enjoy evil... but ... I ... I think I enjoy . . . good even more",' Solanage hiccoughed through her tears.

He began to laugh.

'I told you that because it was the opposite of the truth, to tease God (metaphorically speaking, since I don't believe in God).'

A silence.

'I've had a fairly adventurous life. Out of two hundred battles fought, let's say I've lost a hundred. Out of this hundred, I lost fifty out of cowardice; I broke off and fled under full sail. But it wasn't only cowardice. I have too much contempt for the world's opinion not to enjoy running away. Someone once made a very witty remark about me: "He's only capable of making up his mind when it's a question of beating it." The other fifty battles were lost because of a momentary hesitation. One moment's hesitation, and my opponent got the upper hand. Well, in those fifty battles, my hesitation was always the result of charity. I was overcome with pity, and although in a position to strike the final blow, I didn't. Result: it was I who received the blow.'

'Have I struck you many blows?'

'Yes, many, without realizing it.'

Solange sobbed into her hands, her body shaking convulsively. Then with one hand she began rumpling her dress, and one of the seams split open. Ought he to shut up? Pity again! Besides, he was enjoying his anger against her, especially because today (as we have seen) Solange was not looking her best. Achilles in the Iliad says that anger is 'sweet as honey'. And anyone who has never felt himself quivering from head to foot with anger or hatred cannot be called a man: there is no merit in being kind if one lacks the power to be cruel. Moreover, he had never relented towards someone who was crying, simply because they were crying. Not even his son. He had a horror of tears. When his son was small, he had made him promise never to cry. (And sometimes Brunet would hide his face in Mlle du Peyron's skirts and say: 'Hide me, because I'm going to cry, and I don't want papa to see me.') One day, when he was thirteen, his father having given him a fifty- franc note to buy some ink for his fountain-pen and told him to bring back the change, Brunet had come home looking crest-fallen. 'It was the boy at the stationer's, not the boss. He cheated me out of fifteen francs. There's fifteen francs missing from the change. He said he'd given them to me. Oh, if only there'd been a policeman about!' Costals had never caught his son out in any dishonesty. But the disappearance of the fifteen francs struck him as suspicious. 'It's annoying, because I don't know which of you is lying, you or the stationer's boy.' Ten seconds went by, during which Costals made a few commonplace remarks about how irritating it was to lose fifteen francs, and at the end of those ten seconds his son's face turned scarlet, his mouth swelled up, and he looked like a frog: he was crying. 'Why are you crying?' 'Because you said it was me who took the money.' Whereupon he believed that Philippe was telling the truth, but did not embrace him or console him in any way. He let him go on crying, still saying nothing but vague and banal remarks.

It was not until the boy's tears had dried that he said: 'You know, I believe what you say.' And another ten seconds later, the child resumed his frog's grimace and started to cry again. 'You've got nothing to cry about any more. Why are you crying?' He did not answer, but heaved a great sigh and moved nearer his father (they were both sitting on a sofa) and put his cheek against his. And Costals, though convinced of Brunet's double grief, at being robbed and then suspected, and having witnessed his extreme sensitivity, since it was the assurance of having been believed that had made his tears flow a second time, Costals, his face in contact with that of his son (which was as fresh and cool as the body of a trout), had still resisted the temptation to embrace and fondle him. He had simply touched his hand, and then they had talked about something else. All this because he wanted to train people to understand that their tears would never persuade him to relent. (In fact Brunet's tears had not been entirely in vain, since it was through them that he had proved his innocence. But that is another matter.)

Costals went on:

'I began to pity you the day I realized that I didn't love you enough. That is to say from the very beginning. Ah, if only I loved you! If only I had been able to take you out of the hell of charity and bring you into the paradise of love! Everything would have been so marvellously simple. I know what it is to love: you would have been my wife three months ago. But I don't love you. I mean I don't love you deeply. And there's an abyss between loving deeply and loving otherwise than deeply. To love otherwise than deeply is not to love at all. My life is elsewhere. My life is where you are not. You were a mistake.

Mlle Dandillot leapt up, quivering, with the force of a billiard ball quivering at the edge of the pocket, and rushed to the door. He caught her, took her by the arms, forced her to sit down again, and knelt on one knee in front of her. He soothed her, letting her cry against his breast while he kissed her eyelids sadly. Sadly, because he knew that soothing her did not alter in any way the situation he had just described; and once more he was revolted by the caresses and cajoleries by which one tries to disguise some irremediable ill, he fought down the clichés that passed through his head: 'Cruel only to be kind,' etc., he fought down the vulgar impulse of lovers, whereby a 'scene' can only end up in bed. He did not speak, he had the honesty not to say anything to her: what could he have said that would have consoled her? He would have had to retract his last remarks and that he could never have done, even if she had begged him to. 'The desire for sincerity, that sort of turbid passion which justifies every crime.' [Jean Cassou (Author's note).] She stopped crying at last, and kissed his face, the palm of his hand, even his hairy fore-arm. These last two gestures, which she had never indulged in before, seemed very extraordinary to Costals, and little to his taste. Her mouth in those hairs, especially. Obviously women must be very different from the rest of the world, to take pleasure in touching a 'mature' man. (Perhaps, after all, they were merely following the instinct of their sex. But still, a man after the age of eighteen was not exactly appetizing.)

And then, always these gestures, when it was words that were required. However, the words came:

'I who try to do everything I can to make you happy. But you know yourself that I've always remained a little girl. I've never left the shadow of my parents, I've never had any friends. How do you expect me to be anything but awkward in my relations with people, especially with a man like you? I've got to get used to you. It's all a question of adapting oneself. You say it's more serious that we should have these clashes before marriage than five years after. It would be much more serious then. A day will come when habit ... '

'But I don't want life ever to become a habit with me.'

'Still, at the moment we're living in rather abnormal circumstances. You feel you have to look after me all the time; if we were living a normal life we'd only see each other for a few hours a day. If it was up to me, you could have the greatest freedom even now. Do you think I haven't learnt how to keep myself busy and amuse myself, over the past fifteen years?'

He went on fondling her. He stroked her forehead to smooth away her frown. 'Have I got wrinkles?' she asked. He teased her a little: 'Didn't I warn you in writing that I reserved the right to make you unhappy one day out of fifteen?' Pointing to the little stains made by her tears as they fell on her sleeve, he asked her if ordinary stain-removers were effective against tear-stains - unless she would prefer to leave them there as a souvenir, and her costume thereafter be christened, in the language of the fashion houses, 'Fountains of Italy' or 'The first time I cried'.

'I told you just now that I didn't trust anyone. Do you remember?'

'Do I remember!'

'Well, it wasn't true. I was lying. I want to trust people, just as Christians say one has to want to believe.'

'I trust you.'

'And there you were, pacing up and down the room like a jungle cat ... or at least a jungle kitten ... '

She smiled, and he was mean enough to think that she had cheered up remarkably quickly....

'You're always making the most execrable jokes, but for once you've thought up a nice one ... And you're afraid of a kitten?'

'Yes, of course. Kittens can scratch your eyes out.'

However, he could not let himself go as he would have liked, clasp her wholeheartedly in his arms, because his anger had exploded as soon as they returned, before he had had a chance to change his shirt (a tennis shirt which he wore without a jacket), and, the day being extremely warm and humid, sweat had seeped through under his armpits, so that he was afraid Solange would notice the smell if he brought her too close. This fear of his modified the whole aspect of their reconciliation, made it somehow stiff and cold, which distressed Solange: she would have so loved to bury herself in his arms! For her part, she was embarrassed by her red-rimmed eyes and flushed face, in spite of the fact that she had quickly powdered it again. Both of them hesitated to admit to themselves that if they were to carry through a scene that would figure honourably in their sentimental annals, they would first have to go next door to spruce themselves up.

He said to her:

'I've twice made you a woman - the day I took you, and the day I made you cry. Now I've really set my seal on you. Nevertheless I ask you to forgive me for having made you cry.'

With the utmost solemnity she replied:

'Yes, I forgive you.'

He went into his own room, and, after a moment, lit a cigarette. After another moment, she knocked on the door, and he threw his cigarette out of the window: no, this was not the moment to appear nonchalant! She said to him:

'I've just put a stitch in my dress - the seam had come undone. While I've got a needle threaded, is there anything of yours that needs sewing?'

He saw that she in her turn wanted to be forgiven, and to obtain forgiveness by making herself useful - materially useful, since she had failed to make herself spiritually useful. He was partly touched and partly embarrassed. Embarrassed chiefly.

'No, thank you. Besides, there's the floor-maid ... '

Lovers' quarrels are said to cement love. In reality, they cause cracks that nothing will cement. When one looks back over one's past, one finds (especially if one is a highly-strung person) that the people one has loved most deeply are those with whom one has never had a quarrel. And there are some: the miracle exists.

The next five days passed so-so, with walks in the town or on the sea-shore, and a few excursions. Solange was more and more certain that nothing positive would come of her stay; she found Costals stiff and evasive, with already a whiff of absence; and she put on her ugly 'What's the use?' expression. 'It was too good to last,' she sighed on one occasion, after a long spell of mutism. The remark brought a sharp rejoinder: 'What do you mean by that? Personally, when something is going well, I say to myself: "It's too good not to last." And it lasts.' Costals thought that what she ought to have said when he had caressed her after her tears was: 'Well, since you don't love me, and since you've admitted it to me, God knows how forcefully, I had better give up the idea of marriage.' But she had not said this. She would put up with anything. She was stuck to him like a cupping-glass, and she would not unstick herself until he tore her off and threw her away, at the risk of breaking her. She was in love, not with him, but with marriage, or else simply with the idea of seeing her obstinacy triumph. He wanted to have it out with her once and for all.

'Do you still think, after what I said to you the other day, that this marriage should take place?'

She lowered her eyelids before answering, with a slightly superior, big-sisterly look, as if to say: 'Come, come, the question hardly arises,' and then she said:

'Of course. It will all come right in the end.'

Why hadn't she at least thought of advancing her departure, if only, in order to avoid explanations, by pretending that her mother had called her back for some reason or other? But no, far from it; a remark of hers - 'Venice must be magnificent in autumn. Is it very difficult to get there from here?' - showed him beyond a shadow of doubt that she wanted him to take her to Venice. 'I only half-give to her, and half-giving is useless: one must give all or nothing. I put myself out a great deal for her; but in her heart of hearts she reproaches me for having brought her here to moulder in a rather ordinary town like Genoa. A town where no one is ever heard singing O sole mio, pooh! She bores me to death without getting any satisfaction herself: we know all about that. Take her to Venice! I'd rather die! Have her ruin all the exquisite memories of the time I was there with a woman I loved deeply, and the pure memories of the time I was there alone. She's unhappy here, and she sees that I'm unhappy because of her - so why does she stay? Because her trip's been paid for, and Genoa after all is a bit better than Etretat?' (For Costals, anyone who did a thing he had no particular desire to do, for the simple reason that he could do it for nothing, was condemned out of hand.) He asked her several times, almost reproachfully: 'So, in spite of that scene, you continue to love me?' She answered with a fond look. He was disappointed. Ah, if only she could have brought herself to break away from him!

He was already so immunized by habit that when she wandered round their suite half-naked he no longer even raised his eyes to look at her, pretty though she was, with that figure worthy of a 'Miss France'. Rather any unknown woman, however plain, than the most beautiful body in the world that one can have every night. In spite of this, from time to time he found himself wanting her, and hovered round her like a hawk above a hen; ridiculous no doubt, but not more so than cats or dogs that feel randy, and they, poor things, make no bones about it. She was slow to understand what he wanted. That endless rigmarole of caresses, with nothing to back it, that viscous sentimentalo-sexual mush - how loathsome it all was!

During the course of one of their conversations, she said to him:

'I admire you for having a moral code of your own, so totally non-conformist, and for remaining a decent man in spite of it. But you would do well to keep it to yourself, because if it fell on certain ears. ... It's lucky you haven't a son ... '

Costals felt himself turn pale, and was disturbed by it. So all the effort at dissimulation and pretence to which he submitted himself could be ruined in a second, and by whom! ... A wretched little female had the power to prise him open, as one prises open a box.

'And why is it lucky that I haven't a son?' he asked in a strained voice.

'Because if he heard all these theories from your lips.... '

He threw her a glance full of hatred. Ah, so she would be against him in front of his son, if ever....

'If I had a son ... I would passionately want to make him ... like me, towards and against everyone.... (His voice came in jerks, misfiring like an engine.) 'And his morality would be my morality ... towards and against everyone. And he would be a fine son. A miracle? But I live in expectation of miracles. I expect a miracle to happen every day. I wait for it, I challenge it, for weeks on end. For months. There have been times when I have waited for it for years. But it always comes. And I see it the very moment it comes - that is my gift - I see it as God could be seen when he appeared in the burning bush. Sometimes I grow tired of the miracle. Then I wait for another. For weeks. For months. You say to yourself that it must always be the same. But I've been at it for fifteen years and I'm still not bored with it. I'll never be bored with it. I'll croak in the middle of it. I'll croak with a miracle issuing from my mouth - like a fire-eater in a fair, puffing fire.... Now let's talk about something else. You and I are tired of this subject.'

An hour later, looking at his watch, he saw that it had stopped an hour before. He thought it must have been the violence of his rage when Solange had said to him: 'Lucky you haven't a son', which, affecting the mechanism by bodily contact, had thrown it out of gear. It had happened to him several times.

The two days preceding Solange's departure passed fairly lightly for Costals. The loss of nervous energy to which she had subjected him was such that everything inside him seemed to be happening in a sort of vacuum peopled with ghosts. In Algeria, he had heard of a kif-smoking Arab who, when in the last stages of stupefaction, was in the habit of repeating (was it a sensation peculiar to him, or a dictum?): 'Inside the kif-smoker's head there is a little bird breaking dry twigs.' Inside Costals' head there was a little bird breaking dry twigs. But where had it gone, the strength she had drained from him? When he thought about it, a strange smile appeared in his eyes, as though he knew where that strength had gone.

On the last night they spent together, a stormy night, he had made love to her mightily, and had gone back to his room, when a thought struck him which he was amazed not to have had before. He had asked her for a 'solemn promise' not to oppose a divorce if he married her. But he had not asked for a solemn promise about what the French language, with sybilline modesty, calls la suppression de part [Abortion (Translator's note).] We know how strongly he felt on the subject (there was no longer any question of the fourteen sons). This omission disconcerted and appalled him. He could not bear the uncertainty for another half-hour (the time it would take him to go to sleep), so he got up and went back to Solange's room.

She was asleep. He lay down beside her, above the sheet, without switching on the light. He could hear the rather unattractive noise of her grinding her teeth. He could hear the shrieks of the steamers in the storm-tossed harbour, the frightful shrieks they uttered when they went adrift, shrieks that might have been uttered by beasts or men. He had no desire to touch her, or even to look at her asleep, although there were so many others whom he had watched endlessly as they slept, full of frowns and sighs, like dreaming dogs, or with their mouths half-open and a thread of saliva strung from lip to lip.

'Solange!'

No answer.

He thought she might be dead. Oh, what a dawn! He remembered the night he had sat up beside his dead mother and had ended up by stretching out, exhausted, beside the corpse, above the sheet, as he was doing now.

'Solange!'

'Is it you?'

'Wake up.'

'What's the matter?'

'I have something important to say to you. Are you properly awake?'

'Yes.'

'I once asked you to make me a solemn promise. I now want you to make me another solemn promise. I emphasize the word "solemn" because just a mere promise.... For instance, when I give a promise.... Having "given" it, how can I possibly "keep" it? Whereas, a solemn promise is quite different.'

'What do you want me to promise?'

'If I married you, and you became pregnant, would you do whatever was necessary not to have a child?'

'Yes.'

'An abortion is always dangerous. If the child was born, would you do whatever was necessary to see that it didn't live?'

A flash of lightning lit up the room, a dazzling thought from on high: Nature, too, when she is angry, has infinite thoughts. And there followed a vast, long drawn-out roar, like the roar that the sea must have made when it closed over Pharaoh's host. 'Pharaoh, Pharaoh,' thought Costals. 'The hardening of Pharaoh's heart.... But it was Jehovah who hardened it, and afterwards punished him for it. So, which of the two, Jehovah or Pharaoh, behaved like a swine?' And his soul continued to call through the night, lovingly: 'Pharaoh! Pharaoh!'

When the trance was over, and silence had returned, he said to her:

'Do you remember what I asked you before the thunder?'

'Yes.'

'What is your answer?'

' "Yes".'

'Your answer is "yes"?'

'Yes.'

'Is it a solemn promise?'

'Yes.' .

'How naïve it was of me to think: "What sort of a world am I dragging this little girl into?'" Costals said to himself. 'Why, she has been in this world for ages!' A wave of affection swept over him: yes, they might well get on together ... 'I love this sinister world we live in: we suit each other. Innocents are not in my line.' He put his hand on her knee, above the sheet.

'Don't mistrust me,' he murmured, using the familiar second person singular.

'I shall never mistrust you.'

It was the first time he had used the familiar form ever since that distant day when, after their first kisses, he had ventured an occasional tu which she had promptly put a stop to by saying: 'I don't know how to say tu.' Supposedly a young girl, yet a woman. Supposedly respectable, yet travelling with a lover. Supposedly Catholic, yet prepared to by-pass the Church to get married. Supposedly honourable, yet ready to kill. And indeed, this is what a man likes in a woman. Mme X 'says' nothing to him. But suddenly she takes to robbing and killing, and at once he begins to desire her. Ten minutes earlier - supersaturated with the flesh - Costals had been loath to touch the body lying at his side. Now, suddenly, he slid under the sheet and covered her. He was embracing the child-killer.

Next day Solange was due to leave, and Costals gave an extraordinary proof of his exhaustion. Since it was still raining, they remained in his room, and after a while, as though by mutual accord, each of them picked up a book. Costals' eyes began to close ... He was re-reading, without noticing, the pages he had read the night before ... Suddenly, with a start, he saw close by him Solange's amused smile.

'Well, do you feel better?' she asked.

'What?'

'Yes, nature's sweet restorer ...

'Did I fall asleep?'

'You've slept for exactly twenty-five minutes.'

He never slept in the day-time. Never. Not even in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Who do you take me for! He had only done it during the war. So this was what she had driven him to! He who was in the prime of life and the pink of condition, he who was always on the alert, always so keen never to waste his time, he had fallen asleep in an armchair at four o'clock in the afternoon, like a decrepit old man. He felt humiliated, and took it out on her. The new-found warmth he had felt towards her during the past two days vanished in an instant, like the warmth of a room in which one opens the window in winter. Ah! if only she had realized, she would never have given him that amused smile. Small victories are dearly bought.

But Costals was never to know that Solange, next day, herself exhausted by the nervous tension of that fortnight, would lie down fully dressed on the bed in which Mme Dandillot was having her after-lunch siesta, and fall asleep too, curled up and snuggling against her mother, who dared not get up for fear of waking her.

At seven o'clock in the evening, after seeing Solange off, he left the station, went back to the hotel, and ate. It was the first time for a fortnight that he had eaten wholeheartedly. For when he was at table with Solange he was preoccupied with what to say to her, what she was thinking, whether she was bored, how they could kill time that afternoon, etc., and could not eat wholeheartedly. Afterwards, no sooner was he undressed than he drifted off into a sleep as opaque as wine (the sort of wine he loved).

He slept until two o'clock the next afternoon. And from three o'clock until nightfall he lay stretched out on his bed, his eyes closed, trying to recuperate his strength and bring back his soul, which the woman had devoured.

And when he woke up next day, before he had even washed he had himself driven back to his flat. And he felt the pressure of his creation knocking inside him to be let out, for his strength had returned. He was himself once more. He was a man once more.

And no sooner had he arrived, without opening his suitcases or anything, than he picked up from the table all his notes and drafts and files, and scattered them over the floor. And he said: 'Now I'll show them!'

And his work-room was the smallest room in the flat, so that its exiguousness might concentrate his thoughts, send them back to him, so that he should really feel cornered. And it was in a state of disorder worthy of the gods.

And he stripped off his jacket, his waistcoat, and his shirt, and threw them on the floor as well, and remained in his aertex vest. And he took off his shoes, and remained in his stocking feet. And he ruffled his hair with both hands. And thus, neither washed nor shaved, he sat down at his table. And with one deep breath he filled his lungs with air, like the big bad wolf in the Three Little Pigs. And whatever he may have looked like, he certainly looked a brute; and he was one. And he uttered his war-cry, his 'Montjoye and St Denis!' at the top of his voice: 'B— the lot of them!' (For is not the creation of novels a violation of nature?) And he bent over the blank sheet of paper. And he plunged back into his work, hungrily. And his integrity was restored to him.

And the first sentence took shape, sure in its sweep, its curve and its aim, rejoicing in its promised length, with the coruscating coils of its which's and its what's, with its parentheses, its grammatical errors (deliberate), its commas and its semi-colons (he scanned it aloud: 'comma ... semi-colon ...': it was the text breathing; if the text did not breathe, it would die, like a living thing) - took shape, coiled and uncoiled its spirals, its rugosities, its softnesses and its iridescences, with sacred deliberation; and when it had satisfactorily exercised its which's and its what's, and its parentheses, and its grammatical errors, and its commas and its semi-colons, it raised itself up for the final image, as a king cobra, with lazy strength, glides at its leisure one way and another, though always with a single end in view, then raises its glittering head above the rocks and strikes.

He wrote for nine days running, at the rate of twelve hours' work a day. He dipped his pen into himself, and wrote with blood, sperm, fire and sweat. He drained the girl dry, as one sops up a dish of food, as one dredges a silted pond. He pumped her dry and disgorged her into his novel. She was far away and thought herself safe. But from afar he drew off her fluids and depersonalized her by the intensity of boredom that emanated from her. And he doubly depersonalized her, by distributing her traits among several of the characters in his book. She ceased to be an individual; she ceased to be. 'Ah! so you wanted to devour my soul, did you!'

And on the evening of the ninth day he received, with the author's compliments, a little book that had just been published, by a colleague he admired and detested. He would have admired and loved him if this colleague had lived eighty years earlier, but he detested him because he was alive and in his way. And he read:

EBLIS

'Jesus came to a city at the hour when the heat of the day is at its strongest, and the city was deserted. And hearing a noise of flutes that sounded fearsome in this light, he asked what it was. A stone answered him: "It is Eblis weeping for himself."

'Now Jesus, some time after this, met Eblis, and said to him: "Prince of Delights, it is said that you weep. Is it true?" Eblis answered: "Men have a strange idea of what they call the gift of tears. Demons weep too. And what does that prove? And I too weep, at times." Jesus said: "Why do you weep?" Eblis said: "I weep for the ingratitude of men, to whom I reveal evil and who do not love me the more because of it. Now I know that men do not love happiness." Jesus said: "Is that all you weep for?" Eblis said: "I weep because I, the demon, am forced to believe in God, and I suffer from it." "I too am forced to believe in you," said Jesus. "But is that all you weep for?" Eblis said: "I weep, too, for myself."

'Eblis said: "I have flown above battlefields, and urged on the combatants, for my contempt for them was great. I have pierced with my caresses the flesh of human bodies so tender that they were torn apart. I have crouched beside warm beasts, and killed them by marrying them. When I withdraw to my caverns in the depths of the perfumed desert, I have commerce with no other creature but the objects of my fornication. I need only them. They alone cross my threshold: it is known only to them; I never hesitate when they knock. They do not love me, nor I them. We mingle in silence, like shadows. That is all I do, and it gives me no pleasure."'

'What a fool!' Costals exploded. 'He "has commerce" and gets no pleasure from it! A neurotic devil! From everything we know of God, from the words, the sentiments, the acts which all the religions have attributed to him in saecula saeculorum, we know that God is stupid. The demon being his antithesis, one might therefore expect him to be intelligent; and indeed he gives plenty of proofs of this. If he is stupid too, whom is one to trust!' He went on reading.

'Eblis said: "There are also things about me that are known only to myself. Often I help a stumbling child to carry the burden that weighs him down. I whisper in a girl's ear that her flatterer is deceiving her. When a sleeping man is threatened by his enemy, I bark and he awakens in time. I lie down beside a shivering old man and warm him with my great wings. I love men, strange though it may seem. And I love my round-headed damned, crawling along on top of one another like worms, their hearts beating precipitately...."'

Costals stopped reading, and his own heart-beats quickened at the electric contact of this sentence. He felt an affinity with these round-heads, as with children and animals.

'Jesus said to him: "You are full of the heavens, and that is why you are the Tempter. But can one believe you?" Eblis said: "Why should I not be believed?" Jesus said to him: "Do you not know that it is the punishment of demons not to be believed? I thought that you spoke out of pride." Eblis said: "I have no pride." But Jesus thought to himself: "Do not let us give him his due, for that would give him pride."

'Jesus, having withdrawn a while, began to weep. He returned to Eblis and said to him: "I wept, because I believed you at last. O Lucifer, you who were created in rejoicing, you who were so beautiful in the heavens, offer up a prayer to my Father, that he may recall you to those meadows of grace where once you shone so resplendently." But Eblis said: "That cannot be." Jesus said: "Why? You have said that you did evil and that it gave you no pleasure. You have also said that you did good." Eblis said: "When I do good, it gives me no pleasure either." At this, Jesus left him.

'The beasts came out of the woods and drew near to Eblis, to see him suffering. When it was the hour at which men leave their houses, because the heat subsides, those of the beasts who pray for demons (they are like flowers without stems) said to Eblis: "Go away, for men will see you, and might stone you." So Elbis went off to the cities, and did good and evil there.'

Costals closed the book, placed his fingers on his eyelids, and began to write again.

And he wrote for twelve days, at the rate of ten hours' work a day, full of creative naivety and coarseness, and full of creative amusement. And what he wrote was good.

And then he wrote for four days, at the rate of fourteen hours' work a day. And then he rested, and went hunting woman for three days, and had two adventures.

And then he wrote for fifteen more days, at the rate of twelve hours' work a day. And then he rested: he hunted for two days, and had no adventures.

And then he wrote for fourteen more days, at the rate of thirteen hours' work a day. And then he rested: he hunted for three days, and had no adventures.

And then he wrote for six more days, at the rate of nine or ten hours' work a day. And on the evening of the sixth day, he snorted like an ox. And looking at what he had done, he laughed and said: 'Well, that'll show them!' It was his own substance that he had poured forth, and yet it remained intact in him: in work as in pleasure, he was always full of what he had given out.

And then he wrote for eleven more days, at the rate of fourteen hours' work a day. And on the morning of the twelfth day, which was the seventy-first day of his creation, he had had enough, and returned to Paris.

Table of Contents

Title page

PART ONE

PART TWO