THE LEPERS

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

PART TWO

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

EPILOGUE

1928

1929

1930

1931

APPENDIX

PART ONE

1

If the dead, in the Beyond, were not entirely absorbed in jockeying for precedence (ditto the heavenly hosts - the Thrones pushing themselves forward to become Dominations, etc.), the late M. Dandillot would have squirmed and twisted himself into knots during that month of October 1927. Ever since their return from Etretat, his widow and daughter had been engaged in altering everything in the flat, and their efforts were almost entirely directed towards counteracting the tastes of the dear departed. It was chiefly his bedroom and his study that they were determined to transmogrify - that study in which M. Dandillot, catching his wife 'meddling with something' one day, had said to her: 'Here you're only tolerated.' Three months after her marriage, Mme Dandillot had not yet unpacked her personal belongings, imagining that she would not be staying long, that she would soon be returning to her parents; and when she had eventually resigned herself, she had not so much mingled them with as added them to those of her husband. Now it was the turn of M. Dandillot's belongings to be withdrawn from the communal hoard. Even his sporting files and his photographs of athletes had been burned (in spite of the fact that Mme Dandillot felt some gratitude towards sport, convinced as she was that physical culture had accelerated her husband's death by ten years). The sober grey wallpaper had been replaced by something pink with a pattern of nightingales. M. Dandillot having been anti-Christian, the mantelpiece now sported a Virgin, flanked (in order to 'soften this austerity') by a pastel drawing of some mimosa and a charcoal sketch of a King Charles spaniel - products of Mme Dandillot's girlhood - and a 'pretty thing' cut out of l'Illustration and framed: Exquisiteness - a woman in a cloud of muslin, signed Domergue. And Sacred Hearts and Calvaries and First Communion cards: for Jesus Christ was everywhere in a place of honour in this household ready for civil marriage, divorce and abortion. Not to mention innumerable other more or less unspeakable objects, mostly presents - for it was a household so lacking in personality that every present they had ever received was kept and displayed in a prominent position. In the same way a French literary man invited to Morocco will admit that although he has no desire to make the journey he will go nevertheless because 'he likes free trips'. Doing something one has no desire to do because one can do it gratis, making use of an object one dislikes because one has got it for nothing - and this when one is very comfortably off - is a characteristic, and infallible, sign of mediocrity.

Solange Dandillot had returned from Genoa rather down in the mouth. Genoa should have settled matters. What had come of it? Nothing. And now he was out of range, and for how long? A man who has just received a severe blow, and needs to think about all sorts of urgent and important matters, is often inclined to fling himself into any mechanical chore: even sew on buttons or clean his shoes in order not to think. In the same way Solange tidied and tidied, 'finishing' an old dress, wearing gloves in order to protect her hands (though in fact it gave the impression that she did not want to touch anything that had belonged to her father), glued to her task, which she complicated unbelievably, in accordance with the natural propensity of the female of the species; at once meticulous, niggling and disorderly, in accordance with that same propensity. Apart from the distraction it provided, she experienced from this tidying the sort of voluptuous pleasure one feels on seeing a void take the place of the objects one has eliminated - an intellectual gratification, one might say. The thing became an obsession. More! Still more! Now let's have a go at this corner! Reducing whole sectors of bric-à-brac as passionately as a general reducing an enemy pocket. And, by evening, overwrought, with circles under the eyes as after a sleepness night, but conscience at rest in a way one rarely experiences after having performed a good deed or some high and arduous duty. With certain women it is a good sign when they start tidying: it means that the crisis is over, and they have begun to cherish their home again. With others, however, it means that they need to find an escape in some meaningless task. Solange dreaded the day when everything in the house would be in order. To put off the evil day, to draw out her task, she invented household errands in every direction, going out, coming back and then going out again: more parsimonious, however, than before the trip to Genoa, as though something inside her had tightened up. Finally, vegetative by nature, she had always slept a good deal, but now she was in bed with the light out by nine o'clock.

Meanwhile, the physical space occupied by M. Dandillot in the establishment went on shrinking until in the end, of all that this man had woven round himself in sixty years, there remained no more than the equivalent of a small packing-case, which was relegated to the attic: similarly, of an incinerated corpse there remains nothing but a handful of bones. If the dead take possession of the living, as they say, the living repay it with interest.

Solange participated in this operation against her father largely unconsciously, though not entirely so. In diminishing her father's physical traces, she was not unaware that she was diminishing his moral traces in the process. Women always want to diminish a dead man, as they diminished him when he was alive. If a man has been a free-thinker, a mother, a sister or a wife will climb on to his grave and relentlessly seek to prove that he was a Christian 'without knowing it'.

When Solange received Costals' first letter, in which he complained of the weather in Genoa, spoke in pathetic terms of his solitude, and, without saying precisely that he missed her, recalled her presence with a touch of nostalgia, she had a feeling she had never experienced before: she was rather glad that he did not seem happy. It did not even remotely cross her mind that Costals, in Genoa, between his work and his amatory adventures, might be as happy as a king. If he had adopted a slightly pathetic tone, it was because, guessing that she was discontented, he did not want her to think him contented - partly out of charity, and partly because, like the Athenians of old, he often made sacrifices on the altar of Envy. Solange's reply was consolatory, and ever so slightly patronizing; mention was made of 'a taste of ashes in the mouth' - the pity men feel for women is matched by the pity women would like to feel for men. Costals guffawed when he read this shop-girl's cliché. It was the taste of Mlle Bevilacqua's saliva that he had in his mouth.

She thought of him now with a touch of acerbity. Her fervour had been crushed, the spontaneity and integrity of her love corrupted. No longer, she told herself in her still rudimentary parlance, was she willing to 'trust to appearances'. She deliberately made him wait two days for her reply: she must not appear too eager. . . . Perhaps, too, since living alone with her mother, she had become morally less sound. Whether man, woman or child, a person always changes for the worse by living only with women.

The author pauses … Describing mediocrities always gets you down in the end. 'And now, Madame Baudoche, back to the kitchen!' cried Barrés, exasperated with the principal character of his novel. If only these two Dandillot women were sufficiently highly developed in one aspect of their mediocrity to be caricatured. But they even elude caricature; and besides, photography is better than caricature. Costals had often thought what a sad and pitiable subject for a writer a young girl was. True, her face and her body, if they are beautiful, are at their best at that age. But underneath! ... 'To introduce them into his work, look at the treatment Shakespeare is obliged to put them through. He remakes them. He invents them. He forces himself to romanticize them. A young girl has to be idealized in order to make her possible at all as a subject for poetry. Byron admits it quite openly. [I have always had a great contempt for women; and formed this opinion of them not hastily, but from my own fatal experience. My writings, indeed, tend to exalt the sex; and my imagination has always delighted in giving them a beau ideal likeness, but I only drew them ... as they should be.' Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron (Author's note).] And Dante's Beatrice is pure Theology. When a writer does not transfigure a young girl, she is a failure. Molière's are failures.... Balzac's are failures.... '

The author has made no attempt to transfigure Mlle Dandillot. A failure? True to life, at any rate. If she bores the reader it must be because the author has reproduced her faithfully, since she was by nature boring.

One Sunday in November, as they were preparing to get eleven o'clock Mass 'over and done with', Mme Dandillot stared at her daughter:

'Why are you putting on such acres of powder?'

'No more than usual.'

'But yes, my child, look at yourself, you're like a clown.'

Solange rubbed the powder off with her handkerchief. Her face remained deathly pale. Mme Dandillot's clouded over.

Some days later, leaning her elbows on a table, Solange noticed that her wrist-watch had slipped two or three centimetres further down her fore-arm than usual. Only then did she realize why, for some time past, she had felt that her hands were literally swimming in her gloves. She said nothing: she was ashamed. But soon afterwards Mme Dandillot saw the light, and a bottle of tonic appeared on the dining-room table. The Dandillot household thus became even more representative: a bottle of patent medicine is a feature of the armorial bearings of the bourgeoise. (They need a doctor to tell them to eat less. They need a doctor for their 'rest cures'. They consult the doctor if they are putting on weight. They consult the doctor if their child starts playing with himself.) Solange also bought some rouge. And she altered her hair-style, because the existing one was very 'young girlish', and with her drawn features the 'young girl' style gave her a look of an overgrown virgin, while the new one made her look rather more the 'young woman', and a young woman has a right not to look all that fresh.

Costals' letters went on arriving two a week, still full of tenderness. 'But is he sincere?' wondered our neophyte of mistrust. She had some difficulty in answering these letters. Since she expressed herself awkwardly when she was at her most fervent, it may be imagined what it was like when that fervour had waned. 'You have carried away a part of my being, a fairly recent me which you yourself created, which had taken a predominant place, and which now leaves a great void.' That was true enough, but she remained too detached not to end up with a bit of literature: .. 'like finding oneself alone in a house in the evening, when the child has gone.' Or again: 'My plush rabbit awaits you, still the same, with his boot-button eyes and one ear drooping like a weeping willow.' Excellent, but then she added the following, which was pure invention, designed, it would seem, to titillate both the sentimental streak and the satyr in Costals, always prone to be aroused if ever she evoked her childhood: 'I took him in my arms and laid him on my pillow, as I used to when I was a little girl, not so long ago.' (Every woman up to the age of fifty likes to pretend she is a little girl; there is not one woman in a hundred who has not said at least once to a man: 'You know I'm only a little girl.') Solange had deliberately waited before answering the first letter from Genoa. Now it was because these answers had become almost a drudgery that she often put off writing them for several days. Mlle Dandillot belied the cliché that a woman becomes more attached to a man who has made her unhappy, and also that other cliché according to which a woman expects the man she loves to yield to her in small things and resist her in great. The truth is that every human being has a certain capacity for love, hate, suffering, application and patience. In Genoa, Solange had launched the longest wave of her love. Now that love was imperceptibly withdrawing, like the tides.

In these circumstances, how are we to account for her not throwing in the sponge? Let us try. She was a girl who, up to the age of twenty-three, had desired little, and had never had to exercise her will. But now at last she wanted something, and it was as though all that unused will-power had gathered itself together for a single onslaught. Ah! so I haven't any willpower, have I? Well, I'll show them! Her lack of desire in all things was taking an enormous revenge. She was as tenacious in clinging to this marriage as she was docile in submitting to 'impossible' behaviour in order to keep the man who was the master of her fate. She had committed herself totally. Obstinacy is not so far removed from morbid indecision: weak-willed people are as slow to stop as they were to get started. And then there is the feminine addiction to chimeras. What could be more different, at the outset, than an Andrée Hacquebaut and a Solange Dandillot? Yet both ultimately arrive at the same point: a belief that sheer obstinacy must prevail. For obstinacy is the blind and crude opposition of the self to a reality which it fails to grasp; and this opposition is a feminine thing. People talk of diseases of the will. The will itself is also at times a disease.

And yet, beyond all this, the desperate persistence of these two women in wanting something so obviously foolhardy remains incomprehensible. But why write novels at all unless to show adults as they are (and as children see them), that is to say arbitrary and incomprehensible? The intrigues of women to get themselves or their daughters married usually spring from self-interest, ambition, etc. They can also be simply the result of stupidity, and this was perhaps the case here. But what a betrayal of life, so desperately to want a loveless marriage!

Solange was not suffering from unrequited love; she was suffering from frustration, and that uncertainty from which women suffer so much more than men. Her resentment sometimes had a touch of rather sly aggression: the fighting bull is especially dangerous at the end of the fight, after he has been wounded. When Costals wrote her an enthusiastic letter about the beauty of Italian women (at a time when she herself was wilting), she felt the lack of a private life of her own, a past which she could use as a weapon against him. Having come across an unpleasant article about our hero, she took a great delight in sending it off to him. She needed both to hold on to him and to punish him.

In mid-November Costals announced that he would be returning on the 25th. In the following letter he postponed his return, without specifying a new date. Solange took this letter calmly, but a little later, caught sight of her typewriter and burst into tears. She was feeling unwell at the time, and her imagination was always more impressionable at such moments, as with those men of the people who start writing poetry when they are ill. She had bought this typewriter three months before. Convinced that she would type Costals' manuscripts when she became his wife, she had wanted to learn to type. On her return from Genoa, the machine had been relegated to a corner.

Exasperated by the knowledge that he did not need her, she began to wonder if he had not falsely announced his return with the sole object of making her feel how self-sufficient he was by later postponing it. And also to see how much she would put up with. Would there never be a day when it was she who called the tune? How tempting it would be, if ever he made the first move, to take a step back herself and play with him a little!

Often she had the sensation of being bereft of all feeling; it was as though she had ceased to exist since no one was paying any attention to her: scenes, contemptuous remarks, insults - anything would have been better than this nothingness. She was even more silent than ever, or left her sentences unfinished, as though speech were a futile waste of effort; and she no longer wanted to see anyone, starting involuntarily and even turning slightly pale whenever the door-bell rang.

'I know perfectly well why I no longer want to come out of my shell. No, no! relations with other people are too difficult! Altogether too wearing. To think that, even with those one loves most, everything has to start again from scratch.... '

'There's always me, darling, you know that,' Mme Dandillot had replied. Solange must have thought: 'Parents, that's not the same thing....'

Mme Dandillot's efforts to interest her in lectures, in a political group, were met with remarks such as: 'What for?' or 'Why complicate one's life?', etc. And it was true that the slightest little effort created a vacuum in her brain, like an air-pump: tidying a cupboard, unravelling a ball of wool, were things that occupied her completely. Her handwriting began to disintegrate: she scribbled the ends of her words, skipped accents and punctuation. The maid's presence exasperated her, as though it distracted her from her obsession and her ruminations, and because it made her think up orders to give which she would never have thought of if she had had to ring for the maid, and she was incapable of giving orders without endlessly verbose explanations. Her lips were dry and her breath smelt. Finally she developed two boils on one of her buttocks, and then another on her thigh. Cold weather had always stupefied her; her whole character changed in winter; how much more so now that her vitality had dwindled. Sitting sideways on the radiator, her sick buttock in the air, beside Madame Vigée-Lebrun and her daughter (the two tabby cats, who always slept entwined), she spent hours knitting sweaters for some charity (Costals had indignantly refused her offer to knit one for him), not so much because she was interested in making garments, or out of sympathy for the poor, but for the sort of distraction which the manipulation of the needles provided. So absorbed was she that she would fail to hear Mme Dandillot speaking to her, or fail to understand what she said. The wrist-watch had moved no higher up her fore-arm, in spite of the tonics. But from time to time her eyes would come to rest on the veins of her wrist which Costals had once told her he loved, as though to re-assure herself, with astonishment, that there was still something about her that he had loved.

In Genoa, Costals went on writing the novel into which he was putting Solange. (Feeling all these things as he did, he would have gone mad had he not written them down there and then.) Everything of her that he put in the novel he took away from her: that was a hold stronger than any carnal hold. The day he dotted his final i and crossed his final t, Solange did not die, drained dry, but she felt, at the dinner-table, something hard in her mouth, and spat into her fingers the crown of a broken tooth: she was so run down that she was becoming decalcified. 'Madame de Chateaubriand, whom I made to spit blood at will…' (Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe).

Costals announced his return for the 2nd of January, a date chosen in order to 'skip' the New Year celebrations, and made a date with Solange for the 3rd. But on arrival in Paris he found a letter from Mme Dandillot. She wanted to see him urgently, before he met Solange.

Also a letter from Andrée Hacquebaut, which he did not open, but put away. He had a file for letters which he kept without having read. And a file for letters which the (female) senders had marked: 'To be destroyed'.

2

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

30 December 1927

I have been sulking for six months. I am obliged to acquaint you with the fact, since you refuse to do me the honour of noticing it yourself: you ignore my very indifference. But I cannot let this date pass without wishing you a happy New Year, Costals. Is it undignified of me to write to you again after six months of silence, now that I no longer ask anything of you? You have bled me of my love - there is no other word. You will never know what you refused: I would have given you Love with a capital L - something full, round, compact, glittering, like a loaf, or a cake. But don't let's go back over all that.

I am writing to you. The door of the mirror-wardrobe, in which I keep everything that concerns you, is open, and it is as though I were in a tiny little room face to face with you alone. One can scarcely see, because of the gloomy weather. It was inevitable that I should start writing to you again on a Sunday. There is such a piercing sadness about a rainy Sunday in Saint-Léonard. So many Sundays wept away outside my window!

I am calm but I am not cured. A little music (I now have a wireless set), a little insomnia, a little rain ... or, on the other hand, a ray of sunshine, is enough to cast me back, body and soul, into everything that hurts me. I am bored to distraction. Waking up dejected, with one thought alone: getting through the day as fast as possible, like holding one's nose as one swallows a dose of'medicine. Ever since my sinister 'holidays' in Cabourg last June, I haven't been away from Saint-Léonard except for twenty-four hours in Orleans. I no longer want to go anywhere. No one awaits me anywhere. No one, anywhere, wants to see my face. If one knew that one's face pleased someone - how one would be reborn! If one knew that one's face existed for someone in a world full of dead men who neither look nor love - what a fragment of immortality!

I am not in the least embarrassed to be writing to you. I still have the impression, as strongly as ever, that we ... how shall I put it? ...that together we know things that others don't know, things that you have not even said to me but which nevertheless you've said to no one but me.

A.H.

This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

3

The great French novelist said to one of his fellow-writers one day:

'I've had fourteen books published. And if I were a bachelor, I should only have published seven.'

'In other words: one book in every two to keep the pot boiling. Don't you think the proportion ...?'

'Ah, but I've got three children.'

And yet the great French writer is rich....

Everything they do that is vile or second-rate is blamed on their families. One would think they only married in order to have this excuse, just as there are people who only volunteered for the war in order to be able to boast of the gesture for the rest of their lives. Mme Dandillot, in the taxi that was taking her to Costals' house, felt sustained by her clear conscience as though by a steel corset. Her clear conscience was her love for her daughter; in the name of that love, she would have been prepared to rob. We know, moreover, that her love was firm and true. When a boy reaches puberty his mother's love slackens: she can no longer go near this monster, about whom she understands nothing. The metamorphosis of the little girl into the adolescent, on the other hand, makes maternal love blossom and develop into friendship. Later, the transformation of the adolescent girl into a woman brings a new blossoming. Since Solange had become a woman, Mme Dandillot loved her more than ever.

What she wanted from Costals today was a 'yes' or a 'no'. If he continued to prevaricate, she herself would say 'no'. But when Costals appeared she felt intimidated. It was the first time she had come to his flat, and she felt disorientated, like a football team playing away. Moreover, the absence of worry in the past three months had given Costals a healthier appearance (he had also drawn sustenance from Solange - whence, perhaps, those full round cheeks). Outwardly calmer and more assured, he over-awed her a little. For some while, keeping her most telling arguments in reserve, she confined herself to repeating what she had often said before.

'You hunch yourself up, instead of bracing yourself against the wind. You balk at the hurdle. You're afraid of making a mistake, afraid of failure. One must throw oneself into the water to learn to swim.'

'Don't you think that if a man who can't swim throws himself into the water, the chances are that he'll drown?'

'The truth of the matter is that you don't love Solange enough.'

'Exactly, I don't love her enough. Don't turn that against me. Heart! One needs a great deal of heart to love even a little.'

'But love will come, I tell you. It always happens like that.

'So you want a man for a son-in-law who admits he doesn't love your daughter enough.'

'I appreciate frankness more than anything,' said Mme Dandillot. She was thinking what all women think: 'Let him keep his frankness to himself; it only diminishes and degrades him.' How often had she not said to Solange: 'A man's frankness is a trap that makes us drop our guard. When he tells you he doesn't love you "deep down", beware!'

'There's no need for a great romantic love,' she went on. 'You love Solange enough, it seems to me, to provide her with the help and support which every woman has the right to expect from her husband.'

'Excuse me,' said Costals firmly, 'I don't live for other people. I am, if I may say so, perfectly natural. And nature does not demand that we should devote ourselves to others. It only demands that we should live.'

'Solange is natural too. And yet I can assure you that if ever you found yourself in trouble....'

'I'm never in trouble.'

Mme Dandillot laughed. The more embarrassed she was, the more relaxed and cheerful she appeared. She thought: 'I shall go away without having done what I came to do, without having delivered my ultimatum. I can see it already.' She also thought it would be a mistake to emphasize Solange's determination, because that would make Costals dig in his heels, and so, before each sentence, she was careful not to draw attention to it. But she was so intent on what she ought not to say that eventually she blurted it out: 'She has a will of iron, that child. She's told herself: "This is the man I want".' She had gone slack, as an organism in the last stages of debility no longer retains its faecal matter: Solange had infected her mother with her own exhaustion. Costals' riposte was immediate: 'I like refusing,' he said. She fell silent, checkmated. Through the silence, from the floor above, could be heard the noise of children rolling a ball about, and a dog scampering across the floor-boards. Mme Dandillot massaged the pouches under her eyes with her fore-finger. The telephone rang. Costals went to answer it.

‘…’

'Do you think the novel is an outmoded literary form? No, monsieur, it's lack of talent that's outmoded. Talent can sustain any literary form. Besides, you know as well as I do that the novel's in splendid condition. So don't you think we're wasting our time?'

‘…’

'Meet you? Why? I've just answered your question. But will you allow me to ask you a question in return? I should like to know whether, in your opinion, the telephone interview isn't a journalistic form that should be considered outmoded?'

‘…’

'A gentleman whose opinion is presumably of some value, since he is asked to state it with a view to benefiting the human race, must be engaged in doing something important: thinking, or having a rest from thinking; or deciding things, or controlling someone's fate, or making love, or having a rest from love-making. The telephone hails him brutally, doubly disturbing him - in his mind, by interrupting its train of thought, and in his body, which has to move in order to get to the receiver. And it turns out to be a total stranger, who wants to know if he thinks the novel is an outmoded form and who, as likely as not, will not even publish his reply, because he already has too many contributors, or because the enquiry has been dropped in the meantime. Well, my dear confrère, I say this sort of behaviour is - I'm searching for a mild world - is unworthy of savages....'

From time to time there was a rattle of machine-gun fire from the adjacent flat (water-pipes?). Mme Dandillot played with her necklace, her mind a blank. She stared at the globe of the table-light, which Costals had switched on while telephoning - the glowing kernel at the heart of this nebula - or at the windows of the neighbouring house, lighting up one after the other in the gathering dusk, like people's faces when something nice is said to them, or when they are spoken to about themselves. She could not have explained why these interiors, revealed for a few seconds between the switching on of the lights and the closing of the shutters, made her dreamy: it was because they suggested to her that unknown interior in which Solange, in the company of this man, would spend her life in happiness.

Costals, having hung up, went on where they had left off.

'I cannot understand why custom, which demands so many precautions, signed and sealed, in defining the material rights of intending couples, and their property, demands so few as regards the respective rights of the mind and personality. Today, every government in Europe has adopted a code of morality under which everything you and I understand by morality is trampled underfoot the moment the good of the State is in question. Personally, I consider a work of art as important as a State, and deserving of equally great sacrifices. Salus operis suprema lex. I'm behaving badly to you by leaving you in suspense, but I'm justified in behaving thus, because this suspense saves me from marriage, which would be detrimental to my opus. Citizens allow their rulers the morals of highway robbers in the interests of the State. Allow me, then, in the interests of my work, those departures from commonplace morality which I permit myself when it is at stake. Loving an artist must, for a girl, be as though she loved death....'

('Fie, madam Nurse, how you do prattle on!' But he had not finished yet.)

'There are two categories of men: those who lead, and those who are led. The first are the creators - literary, artistic, scientific, political. In short, the conquistadors: the conquest of thought by the writer, of beauty by the artist, of truth by the scientist and the philosopher, of power by the politician. Conquistadors need peace of mind, which marriage dispels. Let other men marry. Let them have children to make up for all that they fail to contribute to the patrimony of the human race. But let the conquistadors take from coupling, and from paternity, only what may be of use to their economy.'

'Allow me the last word,' said Mme Dandillot. 'Besides, chivalry demands it,' she simpered, with a forced smile (this simpering, at a moment when she was deeply moved, was somehow monstrous; but it too had materialized in spite of her). 'You, my dear sir, you have your work. It is, if I may say so, your tether, you who loathe being tethered. But I have my daughter. Happy women are fond of their children; unhappy women love them desperately. And moreover, all the affection M. Dandillot failed to give his daughter, I have had to give her myself; I have had to love her enough for two. And now look what's become of my daughter, thanks to you.'

She took from her bag one of those slips which chemists give their customers after they have been weighed, and handed it to Costals. He read:

9 December        -   59 kg.100

16    “               -    58 kg.100

23    “              -    57 kg. 200

30   “              -    56 kg. 300

She saw him raise his head. His expression was grave.

'Do you know what it means to have boils? People get boils when their blood's gone wrong. Solange has had three boils since last month. Do you realize ... do you realize what this means?'

She took a folded piece of tissue paper out of her bag. Costals put the chemist's slip on the table, and took the piece of paper and opened it. It contained the crown of Solange's broken tooth.

'You know what's meant by decalcification? You can imagine the extent to which an organism must be affected to produce all these symptoms: loss of weight, boils, and decalcification. And when the only disease it's got is moral rather than physical ...'

'Have you a good doctor?'

'From the fees he charges I presume he's a good doctor.'

'And she told me nothing about this in her letters!'

'I can see you don't know her.'

(How to stifle the voice of conscience, as one stops a woman from screaming...)

There was a ring at the front door. They fell silent. The manservant brought in an express letter. Costals sniffed it.

'Excuse me, but this missive has the little crooked look of a blackmail letter....'

He read it, and handed it in silence to Mme Dandillot, who read it in her turn:

Dear Sir,

You must surely feel, as we do, that the time has come to reconsider the Universe. Studio 27, a team of young people, has taken upon itself the most delicate of these essential investigations: to take the measure of mankind. Our Council has therefore decided that the first pre-requisite is to open an immense debate on that most urgent problem: God, the Revolution, Poetry. A Congress, to which the thinking Youth of the entire World will be fraternally invited, will be organized by us in March. At the end of these sittings, during which we shall have compared our conclusions and weighed up our desiderata, we shall make proposals - and if necessary demands.

A preliminary enquiry is needed to provide us with the tools for our task. We would ask you therefore to reply to the following questions (N.B. since Studio 27 is so far able to appear on a limited number of pages only, you are requested to confine your replies to not more than four typewritten pages.)

Questions:

1. What is God?

2. Do you not think that God is the permanent message of the revolution? If so, what place does this thought occupy in your life?

3. Are the gratuitousness of God and the gratuitousness of the revolution inter-dependent?

4. Does the doctrine of Studio 27 - God begins where poetry ends - seem to you calculated to condition your vocation as a European?

5. Reasons for your despair.

We remain, dear sir, etc.

P.S. We go to press at nine o'clock this evening. May we hope to have your reply in time?

'I must confess I hardly understand a word of it,' said Mme Dandillot, handing the letter back to Costals.

'But Madame, there's nothing to understand.'

'Ah! good. Perhaps they're schoolboys?' she asked, remembering that her son used to write stuff of that sort at the age of sixteen.

'Oh no,' said Costals. 'I know some of the signatories. They're men of between thirty and forty. But there are certain intellectual circles in Paris that can hardly be called precocious.'

He put his hand to his forehead.

'So you see, we haven't been able to devote half an hour to serious matters without being twice interrupted by those whom I shall call the Fools, because they are people who, first and foremost, lack that decidedly cardinal virtue: common sense. French life is continually shot through by the Fools. Women living fantasy lives, semi-intellectuals for whom words are everything, bourgeois blinded by the blinkers of class, proletarians blinded by their ignorance, students blinded by their stupidity - all of them, for one reason or another, out of touch with reality. Yet all of them having a say in the tragicomedy, and - you sense the Shakespearian grandeur of the thing - the Hero, he who holds all our destinies in his hand, whatever he may think in his own mind, not daring to decide without their approval. But the ones who astound me most are these Fools of the intellect who have just burst in on us and buzzed around our ears while we were having a serious discussion. Their race is ours through and through. They are the descendants of the Sorbonagres of Rabelais, the Précieuses and the Médecins of Molière, the Idéologues of Napoleon: intellectual quackery is one of the eternal characteristics of France. With us, they say, everything ends in a song. Everything also ends in a students' jape, but a jape that takes itself for something extremely important....

'Where were we before all that? Ah yes, decalcification.... Well, it's agreed, I marry your daughter.'

Mme Dandillot had swallowed with equanimity the reading of the express letter, the digression on the Fools.... She had reached a stage where it seemed to her that the verdict had been given long since, and given against her. She did not leap at Costals' words; it was as though she were henceforth beyond reach. She simply said:

'For the past half-hour you've been maintaining to me that you couldn't marry because of your work. Have you changed your mind once more, then?'

'That attitude was thoroughly sound. But other attitudes towards that same subject are thoroughly sound, too. Nothing is easier for me, therefore, than to switch from one to the other. Like the different rooms of a house: the furniture is different, the exposure is different, but it's the same house. To know how to use a house is to know how to live in one room or another according to one's mood, the time of day, or the season. Now, why have I changed? Because that (he pointed to the broken tooth) is not a jape. A girl pining away because a man keeps her in suspense, it's anything you like to call it, but it isn't nonsense. Solange is faced with a real problem, unlike those nincompoops who want to reconsider the universe but stand in mortal terror of their concierges (he tore the express letter into tiny pieces). The reason for her suffering is not a laughable one, as are the reasons for three quarters of the moral sufferings of humanity. And as for your being sad because your daughter is losing calcium, nothing could be more reasonable than your sadness. Whereas I, when I reply salus operis, though I know salus operis is a powerful and respectable position, I know, too, that there's a side to it which is also a jape. So I stop japing, and I marry. I'll telephone my lawyer first thing tomorrow morning, and tell him to get in touch with yours.'

The telephone rang. Costals flung himself at the cut-off switch, which was in the hall. 'Hold your tongues, you idiots!' he bellowed.

Mme Dandillot had followed him into the hall. Like a cat with a bird in its jaws, all she wanted was to enjoy her prey on her own, in the depths of the family den. Anything she said would be superfluous; the only thing to do was to go. The water was still gurgling indefatigably in the neighbouring WC (the flush being out of order), like a fountain in a Moroccan patio. Mme Dandillot took Costals' hand and gave it a squeeze: 'You're a real brick,' she said. Her agitation was such that she added: 'I hope you have a nice evening.' 'So do I,' said Costals, aware of what he had let himself in for. To cut short their mutual embarrassment, she departed hurriedly: 'I'll telephone you tomorrow.' The moment Mme Dandillot had told him he was a real brick, Costals realized he had let himself be duped.

4

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

10 January 1928

I wanted to take up cycling again, not having done any for more than a year, and I went slap into a bench. My knee hurts, and I'm afraid I may have water on the knee. That's what comes of trying 'to come to terms with the outside world' when one isn't made for it.

You have left me to stew in my ignorance, my uselessness, my cerebralness, my desiccation, whereas true intelligence should broaden life, not constrict it, fertilize not sterilize it. Under the umbrella of our love I would have branched out, spread circles around myself, like a stone thrown into the water. And yet you needn't feel guilty: my misfortune both pre-dates you and post-dates you. The fatal thing about me is, at one end of the scale, that encounter with the bench, and at the other end my inability to encounter other people. I have lived too much alone, lived too much in books, to know how to make contact with my fellow-creatures. I keep telling myself that I shall know tomorrow. I make resolutions: 'After my thirty-first birthday.... Yes, after the 23rd of April.... Between now and then there's no point in trying, because I've made up my mind that in three months' time I shall start being a new woman.' In my cowardly way, I give myself this extension, this respite. But I know quite well that on the 23rd April I shall feel the same impotence, the same inhibitions. And I'm young and healthy, my face - whatever you may think of it - is not repulsive. What will it be like when I am withered and infirm!

People tell me I should get married. But I'm not marriageable unless my love can be boundless. I shall never be dominated physically except by a man who has first dominated me in every other way. The phoenix of these phoenixes having fled, I shall not seek another love. To build up from scratch, to work oneself up over nonentities, to feel one is always the senior partner, not to know why one loves except out of a need to love - the very thought of it fills me with nausea. People say to me: 'You don't know what to do with yourself. Go to Orleans, or even Paris, and get a job.' Having no training, I should have to work in an office, and life in town, having to pay all my own expenses, wouldn't leave me with any more money than I have here; and on top of that a less healthy life, less leisure, and a soul-destroying job. And meeting more human beings wouldn't in itself teach me how to break the ice, or, if by some miracle I did break it, how to manoeuvre in such a way that there would be a second time. 'Attempts at a break-through' was the phrase they used during the war; I can never manage to break through this hellish circle of loneliness. I wander on the perimeter not only of the world of men but of the world in general; I look around furtively, I eavesdrop. My awkwardness is such that if there's someone with whom I'm 'on good terms' but whom I don't often see, I avoid a meeting because there's a good chance that if we met I'd manoeuvre so successfully that I should alienate him for ever.

Women? They find me antipathetic. Besides, they don't interest me. Men? I don't know how to attract them, so that settles that. If a man is middling, and by chance does not disgust me, I seem to him too intellectual; 'affected', one of them put it (me, 'affected'!...). Last year, during the summer holidays, I happened to say to the young brother of one of my girl-friends, a schoolboy: 'You do nothing from morning till night. Why don't you read, take notes, improve your mind.' This phrase 'improve your mind' was a great hit; it appears it's a typical blue-stocking's remark. As the only intelligent man I've ever met, you know better than I do. . . . Children? They don't attract me. I belong to the race of lovers, not to the race of mothers - two very different races in my opinion: a woman can be a mother several times over, and yet be only a lover, whereas another woman or girl who loves a man may in reality only love the children she hopes he will give her. So I am not of the race of mothers, but there have been times when I regretted not being a mother. What maddened me far more than being deprived of children was not having experienced all those things that go with it, among others that immense revelation about life - life seen from an entirely new angle - which maternity must be.

But that was no more than my old regret at not having had. What is new is something I experienced in October. I had to spend a day in Orleans with my uncle, in order to sign some documents in connection with a great-aunt's estate. And there, in the square where I had sat down for a while, I found myself surrounded by toddlers who came up and gazed at me with an affection and trust that quite bowled me over (after all, I might have been a wicked fairy!), putting their grubby little paws in my lap. So, they had not sensed the curse with which I am afflicted, and I was so touched. But I had no idea what to say to them, or if I did say something they promptly went away: I couldn't hold them, any more than I can hold anyone else. One of the mothers, who was sitting beside me, was longing to start a conversation, but I slipped away. I should have been ashamed to admit I was a spinster, and if I had lied, if I had said, as for a moment I thought of saying: 'I too have a child', I should soon have given myself away by my ignorance of things maternal: I'd be no more capable of talking about nappies and feeding than you must be. (Indeed, what am I capable of talking about, apart from books and love? Just as I can't swim, or drive a car, or ride, or sing, or play the piano, or cook, or dress-make, or even ride a bicycle without attacking benches: I know nothing about anything. To understand Bergson is to believe oneself to be on a level with Bergson, but to make good jam is quite another matter.) So I got up quickly and went away in despair. And now, when I hear the kids calling 'Mum!' it's like a dagger in my heart. All these women who are not a patch on me, most of them stupid, yet to whom these children belong, whilst here I am perpetually hovering on the periphery of closed Edens, exiled from all that is human, carrying around with me wherever I go an atmosphere of chilliness and suspicion and absurdity.... Woe betide homeless women, who are obliged to pursue other people's husbands, or other people's children, to fulfil their need for love! Or stray dogs and the neighbours' cats. Our neighbour's cat, when I smother it with kisses, looks at me in surprise, and seems to understand.

One fine morning in the middle of all this my uncle and I each received a most unexpected cheque from the lawyer, a legacy from my great-aunt. Fifteen hundred francs for myself, out of the blue!

This money arrived just at the moment when I was most preoccupied with my regrets at not having any children. And immediately I had an idea: to give it to the day-nursery run by the nuns of Sainte-Opportune here. Fifteen hundred francs is a tidy little sum for Saint-Léonard. I would become the 'benefactress'. I could go into the day-nursery as I liked; they could no longer refuse me anything. Incapable by myself of finding a place among normal human beings, I would buy my way in. I would be paying for the right to take an interest in these children as though they were my own. I would be paying for something to live for. It was a horrible idea, if you like, but since there's no other way....

And then, after thinking it over, I saw what would happen. They would accept my money, and gradually I would be eased out. Why? Because I would be out of place in that little circle, awkward, useless, in fact an embarrassment. They would say to one another: 'What's she doing here, what does she want?' They wouldn't know what to think.... Oh, I saw it all so clearly! The embarrassment of the good nuns, torn between the respect due to the 'benefactress' and the aversion they would feel towards me, a justifiable aversion, since I am indeed not one of them, since I do not and cannot belong to any human community. So I gave up the idea. When I try to fasten on to other people, in order to draw my happiness from them, and they resist me, it's bad enough. But to be rejected when I try to make them happy, ah! that would be another dagger in my heart.

Let's be honest. I know perfectly well that it wouldn't have been the happiness of those wretched kids I was after, but my own, always my own. They would simply have been the means I used to get away from myself. I'm well aware that self-sacrifice is not in my nature. At thirty years and nine months the best thing one could do would be to be a big sister, to help others. And apparently (it's something one hears people say) when one's unhappy it's a way of becoming less so. But to do that one would have to have one's life behind one, one would have to be a woman who has experienced life, who is throwing into this second-rate existence, into these petty responsibilities on behalf of second-rate people, the skin of a well-sucked fruit...

This little episode has taught me one thing at least: to understand a certain category of people, and to pity them - those who have lots of money and throw it around without ever succeeding in finding happiness. That must be even worse than being penniless and unhappy. If one is penniless and unhappy one can always console oneself by blaming one's unhappiness on lack of money; one's self-esteem is not affected. When one is unhappy with money one has to admit to oneself: 'There's something in me that alienates people and life.'

Of the fifteen hundred francs, eleven hundred are still intact. Four hundred have gone on a dress, some bindings and some books (I've bought the whole of Sainte-Beuve!). I wanted to exchange money for life, but there's nothing doing: I can only exchange it for non-life. One makes an effort to be something other than what one is, then one gives up; being oneself is least difficult in the long run. The dog returns to its vomit.

A.H.

This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

5

After his 'yes' to Mme Dandillot, Costals returned to the drawing-room and fell into an armchair. His first thought as a fiancé was an optimistic one. The door into the hall was open, and the lavatory cistern continued its Moroccan gurgle. 'Lavatory cisterns - that'll be your pigeon, Solange, old girl.' The weight slip was still lying on the table. He re-read it, and was touched. 'Poor little thing! Now we shall see her swell up again, as though she were being pumped full of air.'

The struggle between his intellect and his heart was constant. Every time (or almost) he was generous, he felt sad about it afterwards. The consciousness of duty done had spoiled a lot of fun for him. He had done something decent seven years ago, and for seven years he had regretted it. He had done something decent twelve years ago and for twelve years had regretted it. One night he had dreamt that war had been declared, that volunteers had been called for, and he had offered himself; and as he marched off with the columns, tears ran down his cheeks. But these tears were not prompted by the horror of going off to the front; they arose from dismay at having chosen to go when he could have lain low; it was really goodness that he was suffering from.

Once the nuptial 'yes' had been pronounced, Costals therefore expected to undergo a fit of depression. Nothing of the kind. The die was cast. With the uncertainty, the disease had evaporated. There was a difficult situation; but now it was simply a question of facing up to it, manipulating it, making the best of it. That was a man's job. And his folly left him strangely calm. 'One way or another, this parenthesis will be closed in two years. I'm thirty-four (the age at which Jesus Christ died; tradition says thirty-three, but I imagine that, following the general practice, Jesus knocked a year off). At thirty-six I shall be free once more. And it wasn't till the age of fifty that Tiberius began to lead a really agreeable life.'

He ate a hearty dinner, to build up his strength for the coming ordeal. He waited all evening for a telephone call from Solange. How her voice would thrill at the other end of the line! He smiled in anticipation, and the words he would say to her sprang to his lips: 'Well, my little one, your obstinacy has triumphed! The "fireside mule", so dear to shoe-shops, that's you … And now I shall have to start hiding my manuscripts from you, like Tolstoy … ' But no ring came. He was surprised, and somewhat disappointed. 'Perhaps she wasn't dining at home.'

Next day, when, at half past nine, he telephoned his lawyer to make an appointment, Solange had still not rung. After lunch, the same silence. 'For eight months she has been intent on this "yes". I come out with it, and it gives her no pleasure. If I had twopence worth of knowledge of the human mind, I might have guessed it. But I haven't. We know what the "psychology" a novelist puts into his books amounts to: sheer bluff from A to Z. Whatever happens hereafter, this can never be wiped out: that when I gave her what she so frantically desired, it never entered her head to pick up the receiver and say a word to me.

'She, so unromantic, finds herself sucked into a romantic adventure. And I, so wary, allow myself to be taken in. Waverers shilly-shally for months, and then, exasperated with themselves, make up their minds at random, and usually take the most dangerous course. Flight into danger is the reaction of the weak. Yet everything I know of myself convinces me that I am neither weak nor indecisive. But she has lured me on to a terrain which is not mine, and that is her great advantage. Put the bravest infantry officer into an aeroplane or submarine, and he will probably lose his head. Each of us has his element, from which he must not be drawn.'

The stupidity and incompetence of certain famous generals or marshals of France (outside their own speciality) is a source of amazement to intellectuals who have had occasion to meet them; but this suffocating secret must be kept, otherwise it's good-bye to the Academician's uniform: such is the intellectual's martyrdom. Gallieni, according to Lyautey, seems not to have been of that stamp. Lyautey cites one characteristic of his from which all of us should profit. Once while they were on the march in Tongking on the eve of going into battle, Lyautey was talking shop: 'Do stop fussing about all that,' Gallieni said to him. 'The orders are given, the necessary steps have been taken. What good will it do to ratiocinate about it? You've just as much need as I have to keep your grey matter in good condition. Let's talk about John Stuart Mill and we'll see what happens tomorrow morning.' And he took out from his greatcoat pocket a John Stuart Mill and a d'Annunzio. There's a man for you, and I bet he organized his troops well, seeing how well he managed his personal economy: master of events as he was master of himself. Costals was to see Solange that evening. Since the decision was made, let it at least offer him the benefits of decisions made: that of leaving one's head and one's time free. From two o'clock till seven, Costals worked on the revision of his novel as though nothing had happened. Remembering his way of loving women, he even found a title for it: The Contemptuous Lover.

When Solange appeared in Costals' flat he was taken aback. Her clothes hung loose over her bust and hips. And her face! The neck too thin, the skin clinging to the jaw-bones, the features drawn. On top of all that (one realized why she had felt the need for it), heavily made up. It was the first time he had seen her made up. And what make-up! A 'foundation' of dark powder badly put on - in slabs, and her ears full of it - which in taking off her hat she had smudged over her forehead, so that her forehead was partly yellow and partly white - the papal colours! And her new hair style; so much 'the young woman' already! He kissed her with a sort of tender pity. They sat down side by side on the sofa, and he gently pinched the skin of her elbow. Embarrassed, he said jokingly: 'My poor pet, what has become of you! But we'll soon see you fill out: a real Jewish fiancee from Tunisia - they fatten them up like poultry over there....' She smiled wanly, and they fell silent. He did not know what to say to her. Yet it seemed to him that the words should have gushed from them both. But nothing came, and he felt stiff and shy in front of his wife, as he had not been since the beginning, in the box at the Opéra- Comique. 'Well, are you pleased?' he asked at last, awkwardly. She did not answer, but he felt her cold hand sliding into his, as a reptile slides into the snake-charmer's sack.

She stood up.

'Do you mind if I fetch my coat?'

'Are you cold?'

'It isn't very warm in your flat.'

'I worked here from two till seven, without moving, and I didn't feel cold...'

'I'm not in very good health, I'm afraid, you must excuse me. As for you! Superb! The whole of Italy in your face.'

Before he could forestall her, she had reached the hall. He sensed the reproach in her last remark. Yes, she was cold, in blood as in heart.

They sat down to dinner, and he sighed:

'What a difficult and perilous bit of coastal navigation we're undertaking together! To sail our boat along the shore of life without foundering....'

She turned her face towards him with a look of pity, of slightly weary disdain:

'I'd so like to have convinced you that it won't be so terrible.'

'Of course it won't be terrible. In any case we've talked enough about that; we've nothing more to say to each other on the subject. One last word only. I want you to give me your solemn word, I appeal to all that is best in you, never to seek to harm me, and I hereby promise you the same. If there are solemn words on this earth, this is one of them.... But after all, is it a solemn word? How many solemn words must have been given ever since the world began!'

'I've already given you that solemn word, and I give it to you again. And now, you're right, let's drop the subject.'

They ate in silence. The silence went on and on.

'Unforgettable first engagement meal,' he thought. 'Obviously my "yes" hasn't filled her with joy. I turn my life upside down for her sake. And it doesn't make her happy. Of course I always knew it; it's the rule. If, risking one's livelihood, one's job, etc., one carries off a minor, the moment one clasps her in one's arms after weeks of anxious scheming, she "resumes" so simply, so coolly, that one is rather put out by her apparent failure to appreciate all that this moment has cost you.... After all, our honeymoon being over and done with (in Genoa), it's true that the daily grind is all we have left. And it has its good side: the less we have to say to each other, the less she will need me, and the more time I shall have for the cherished things which aren't her.'

Mlle Dandillot ate in silence, shading her eyes with her left hand from time to time as though the light hurt them, but in reality to hide the decline in her looks. No, she did not feel happy: it was a wingless victory. First of all, naturally, because she had left the paradise of the thing coveted and entered the limbo of the thing obtained. But mainly because for the past eight months she had propped herself up on the resistance of this man; and now this prop had yielded, she was thrown a little off balance. Yielded! He had yielded! And now, how shy and unsure of himself he was in front of her! How weak he was, this man whom the newspapers always described as a 'strong man'. Would he be capable of defending their home, their interests, if he let himself be manipulated like this? She had perhaps ended up by respecting him because she had been unable to do what she wanted with him. And doubtless she respected him still, for a different reason: because she saw that he had acted out of generosity. But it was a dubious respect. The constant duel in the male's psyche between his generosity and his egoism, between his blood and his sperm, creates an atmosphere of confusion in him that terrifies and fascinates women and moves them to pity. At this moment Mlle Dandillot was rather at the pitying stage. And she turned it all over in her mind as she ate in silence, making an effort not to scratch her hands and wrists, since for several days now the nervousness born of her anaemia had given her an itch on her wrists, her thumbs and between her fingers, which were covered with the scratches she had inflicted on herself.

Thus did their first (unforgettable) meal as an engaged couple go by. Like the statue of the Commendatore at the banquet, a spectre was seated opposite them, a hydra-headed spectre: the head of Boredom, the head of Embarrassment, the head of Duty, etc. Casanova tells us that princes are always bored in the company of their mistresses. Is this trait peculiar to princes?

That evening, Costals felt no desire to possess this dismal, emaciated, furunculous and faded girl (even though, from time to time, she showed a sudden and delightful gleam of life). Nor did she herself have any inclination in that direction, not only because it gave her no pleasure, but because she foresaw Costals' disillusionment; and now she was beginning to calculate, to try to be clever: after two cold showers, the icy water had opened her eyes a little. When she excused herself because of her boils and suggested the cinema instead, he acquiesced willingly enough. The everlasting cinema. But which film? Well, they would buy la Semaine à Paris.

People go to infinite pains to kill time hour after hour. Even so, they are incapable of managing it alone - they need guidance. A magazine has been created with this end in view: to call the attention of Parisians, in a methodical way, to the opportunities available to them for wasting their time. This magazine is incidentally extremely well conceived: when one sees that it is edited in a thoroughly practical way, when one sees that one can really find what one is looking for in it, one is amazed that it should be run by Frenchmen.

'There's The Admirable Mr Fane,' said Solange, flicking through la Semaine à Paris outside in the street. 'It's being talked about a lot.'

'An American film! Do you want me to bring up my dinner! Technical perfection in the service of cretinism - what greater sin against the mind?'

'What would you say to Brigade Mondaine?'

'How often must I tell you that I refuse to go to a French film at any price? Isn't there something English?'

'Here's one: Rainbow.'

'Let's go.'

When the taxi dropped them at the cinema in Montparnasse, Costals first of all sniffed around outside it.

'H'm. It looks a bit sentimental. And when the English start getting sentimental.... I'd better find out what it's about.'

He asked the cashier to let him look at the programme.

'Are you taking tickets?' she asked.

'That depends on what I see in the programme.'

'We only give programmes to people who've bought their seats.'

'I'm not asking you to give it to me, I'm asking you to sell it to me.'

'The programme isn't for sale, it's gratis. Buy your tickets and you'll be given one. You only have to do the same as everyone else.'

Foaming with rage, Costals spun round and left, dragging Solange after him.

'Isn't there an exotic film of some sort? At least the scenery would help one to swallow the plot.'

'There's The Sorcerer of Sacramento - that must be South American…' [sic]. 'Then there's Waikiki Night…'

'That'll do. Driver! Take us to Waikiki.'

They drove towards the Champs-Elysées. From time to time he took her hand in a rather convulsive way. But no sooner had the taxi stopped than he shouted:

'You didn't tell me that filthy whore was in it! Ah! that'll be really something. In disguise, striking plastic poses in the virgin forest. No, Solange, I don't care what you think, but it's literally more than I could bear to watch that female ape for a full two hours. Have another look at la Semaine à Paris. Isn't there a single Russian film? I promise you, if there's a Russian film, we'll go and see it and stay to the end.'

'The Volga Boatmen, on the grands boulevards.'

'That's the thing!'

The taxi drove off again. Solange hummed the song of the Volga Boatmen, as in Genoa she had hummed 0 sole mio. Costals thought that in every woman there was a tart waiting to get out, and who did get out whenever she hummed.

On the Boulevard des Italiens they got out and examined the posters: all the actors were French. It was indeed a film about Russia, but shot at Joinville.

Solange had stopped in front of one poster, Costals in front of another, a few yards away. He whistled to bring her across to him, like a pimp.

'Are we going in?' asked Solange, who had given a start.

Weariness made her features look more drawn than ever.

'Not on your life! ... All that French riff-raff! ... Tramps disguised as Russian princes....'

He stamped his foot with rage. It quite often occurred to him to stamp his foot - literally stamp his foot - like a small child or an oriental potentate.

'Let's go to a cafe,' she said. The boil on her bottom, after being shaken up by the taxis, was throbbing painfully. And she was weary of this man, weary to death of his spoilt child whims - or were they bachelor eccentricities or aesthete's poses? And of his punctuality: Phineas Fogg! . . . And of the cigarette ash he dropped all over the place - on her coat, on her gloves - like bird-droppings. And of his coarseness.

'No,' said Costals vehemently. 'We haven't driven round Paris in order to end up in a café. Let's walk up the boulevards. There are cinemas every fifty yards. We're bound to find something.'

She took his arm (horrible gesture: 'I've got a good grip on you.') and he closed his hand over her wrist. He felt no more pleasure in touching her skin than if he were touching the smooth surface of a rubber cushion, whereas had he but touched the wrist of any one of these passing women! ... He never looked at her; he looked into himself, and outside himself, at the women he did not possess. It was not Mlle Dandillot he loved, it was a moment of Mlle Dandillot's life he had loved.

The neon sign of an Austrian film brought them to a halt. But when they drew near they saw there was a queue - a dense queue - at the box-office. Costals declared that he would gladly have seen this film but that he absolutely refused to queue. 'Queue for a theatre or a concert, well and good, but I absolutely refuse to queue for a film.' (We know how dear class distinctions in the arts - some being more noble than others - are to the French.)

They walked on again. Costals' exasperation vented itself in laughter and joking. Here he was, a man who believed in ordering his life, a man who believed that every hour must give proof of something gained or accomplished, and look how he had spent the last two hours! Yes, one had to laugh at it if one didn't want to lose one's temper.

On the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, a little cinema was showing a Russian film with Russian actors. But it was a three-franc flea-pit. 'After all, I can't take you to a three-franc cinema.' He hoped she would say 'What does the price matter, if we've found a film that interests you at last.' But she merely gave a little laugh, in obvious agreement. So she too suffered from that base love of luxury, that base subjection to the 'done thing.'

'Let's go back,' he said.

They walked back along the boulevards. Costals became more and more desperately animated: the evening could only be made bearable by turning it into a gag. Every true artist at times develops more of a liking for the personality he puts on than for his real personality. And it is at these moments that he should say, like the stage Marseillais: 'Hold me back!' For, with 'the wittiest people in the world', an author cannot sacrifice his solemnity without sacrificing his prestige, despite Victor Hugo's line:

L'Olympe reste grand en éclatant de rire.

They passed a news cinema close to the Madeleine:

'Well,' said Solange, 'what about this one? Newsreels are harmless enough!'

'It's half past eleven,' said Costals, pulling out his watch. 'And you've got a bad backside. It would be a sin to put that backside to bed at some unearthly hour. It's quite pointless to go to a cinema for half an hour.'

This remark was so superbly typical of a husband that it took Solange's breath away. Ah! he was cut out for it far more than he thought! She dragged herself along for another few steps, and then flopped down on the stone ledge that runs along the foot of the railings of the Madeleine.

Costals sat down beside her. The passers-by, numerous at that hour, turned and looked with astonishment at this respectably dressed couple sitting among the crowd on this freezing January night at the foot of the Madeleine railings, like exhausted provincials on the stairs at exhibitions. They both burst out laughing. Costals took off his hat and held it upside down between his knees.

'I hope they'll start throwing coins into it.'

A penny,

A penny,

To set up our home!

They sat there for a while. Their laughter had subsided and they no longer spoke. Solange began to tear la Semaine à Paris into little pieces, which she carefully arranged on the ledge beside her. Costals felt that at all costs this scene must be prevented from turning to melancholy. He burst out gaily:

'A literary man, yes, a nice present to give to a little girl! You see, almost without thinking, I've been turning our first evening as an engaged couple into a scene from a play or a film. You must admit my gags have been a success. And now you're joining in the game! It was your idea to sit here, and then tearing la Semaine à Paris to shreds like that - the sentimental note after the comic turn.... We were made to get on together.'

'Why, of course, we were made to get on together,' she repeated, tenderly.

He escorted her home. As he was about to leave her at her front door (he no longer accompanied her up to her landing - ah! how remote they were, those long conversations of theirs on that landing, while the time-switch for the electric light had to be pressed three or four times), she asked him: 'When shall we be seeing each other again?' And he thought what torture this question can be when it is asked by somebody one does not care for. Oh, how sweet it is to be able to leave a person without having to arrange a 'next time'!

Back home, he noticed in his bathroom mirror that there were red smudges round his mouth. He wiped them off, leaving the towel stained pink. So, not content with wearing lipstick, which he loathed and despised, Solange was still schoolgirlish enough to buy a cheap brand. Not only did she do something stupid, but she did it stupidly. And for four hours she had let him walk round with lipstick all over his mouth! Either she did not see it, in which case she was a fool. Or she did not dare tell him, for fear of annoying him, which was worse still. 'To think that this mouth has given thousands of kisses which never showed. And a single kiss from a clumsy girl betrays it!' He heard again the little laugh she had given when he had spoken to her about the flea-pit, that laugh that was so profoundly revealing of her mediocrity, the little laugh of the woman-who-doesn't-go-to-three-franc-cinemas. He saw again the pink smudge on his mouth, like that of a wounded soldier who has just vomited blood. And he felt like a wounded soldier himself - badly wounded.

6

And he goeth after her straightaway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter. Proverbs 7, 20

'Is there anyone with whom you have as little conversation as with your wife?' - 'Almost no one.' Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 3, 12

And now, religion and myth, literature and history, help me! Let's really get ourselves worked up, for God's sake! How can one still complain about culture when it helps to gild the pills of daily life? In the Bibliothèque Nationale, while the guardian angels of the establishment discharged enemas of sweet perfumes into the atmosphere (impossible, though, to counteract the organic fetor of the thinker), Costals devoured tome after tome, sheathed in dust like bottles of vintage wine, describing the customs and legends of marriage in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, in the East, etc. Methodically he squeezed the phenomenon of 'marriage' to extract from it the last drop of true or false poetry it might contain; pen in hand, and making copious notes, for the foundations of every 'working up' need to be as solid as rock.

Afterwards he went to see his solicitor. The latter, who had already received a telephone call from the Dandillot lawyer, could not refrain from observing that Mme Dandillot was proving very generous in this matter (she too, with her 'magnificent negative qualities': neither ill-natured, nor conceited, nor self-seeking). Whereupon Costals realized that, if Mme Dandillot had never asked for details as to her future son-in-law's means, he had never asked for details about the family he was about to join. For all he knew, Mme Dandillot might have been fished out of a brothel and the late lamented brother might have skipped to Madagascar because he was in trouble with the police. On both sides they were marrying in the dark. But it was a little annoying that Mme Dandillot was being so 'generous': a man of quality, when striking a bargain, must ensure that he gets the worst of it.

On the advice of his solicitor - appalled by his ignorance about the married state - Costals called at the town hall, where he was handed a yellow leaflet: 'General information concerning marriage'. But this leaflet, a masterpiece of French administrative prose, was incomprehensible: it reminded him of an income tax form. The only thing that was clear about it was that marriage must be regarded as a 'bond issue'. Costals would go back to his solicitor the following day for an exegesis of the yellow leaflet.

On all these matters he could seek advice. But there was one question on which he could not seek advice from anyone: the question of his son.

Solange, who was irritated by boys, would not like Brunet. Brunet would take a dislike to Solange. Or, on the other hand, would take too much of a liking to her, and it is too great a blessing to be able to think well of one's child for one to endanger it in such a way. In any case, how horrible it would be to have this outsider coming between father and son!

Why had he kept his son's existence secret? Because he loved him. Because he did not want him criticized. Because he did not want his way of bringing him up criticized. He clung to this secrecy inordinately, irrationally, as Arabs cling to the secrecy in which they guard their wives. Once he was married, everything would change. There could be no question of Brunet appearing to be kept at arm's length. So he would be prostituted to this rabble of mediocrities, this vapid, brainless young woman, that ludicrous old hag, and all the cousins and aunts. He would no longer be hortus conclusus.... And then, what was the use of having resolved the difficulty foreseen by the sages ['Must one then agree to subject oneself to woman in the hope of having children?' - Djâmi, Beharistan (Author's note).], what was the use of having succeeded in having the child without the woman, only to take on the woman after the event?

And how was he to break it to him, how was he to foist this 'mother' on him? To Solange, Costals would say bluntly: 'I warn you, I have a son.' If she didn't like it, she had only to give up the marriage. But to him? Write to him and say: 'I'm getting married. She's this, that or the other. You'll be delighted, etc.'? Monstrous and impossible. So he would have to go and see him. With Solange, perhaps. How painful the interview would be! The idea that finally kept running through his mind was this: that he should never have committed himself until after having consulted his son.

Costals had leapt the hurdle of decision. He no longer wavered, no longer suffered from it, scarcely thought about it. But he had not yet taken this other hurdle: the Brunet-Solange problem. And faced with it he wavered and suffered. Since Solange was near at hand, he would begin with her. Tomorrow, under the pretext of showing her his family, he would run through his photograph album with her. When he came to the photograph of his son, he would first pass him off as a young cousin. According to her reaction, he would either speak or not.

Every other day, the fiancés spent the afternoon and evening together. Costals gazed at this stranger, at this face which, in Genoa, he had seen as though diluted by love, this face of a sleeper awakened, now cold, hard and dry (the girl's handwriting, too, had become more angular). He had forgotten Mme Dandillot's words: 'She has no will-power, you'll be able to do what you like with her', and remembered only that slightly different version: 'She has a will of iron, that child. She's said to herself: "He's the man I want".' He concluded that he had been had. Thyroid glands, injected into a sheep, will make it bite the bars of its cage. Hippogriffical glands, injected into a vigorous man, will make him as weak as a lamb. By dint of harassing a man, stuffing him with worries, responsibilities, obligations, scruples, decisions to be taken, self-questionings, one can stupefy and wear him down to such an extent that he no longer offers any resistance to another's will, even when he knows it to be inimical. Women know this, and that is why to introduce a woman into anything is to introduce strife and confusion: like warships, they proceed behind their own smoke-screens. In the past Costals had been 'bewitched' by the pall of boredom that emanated from Solange. Now he felt equally bewitched by her will, more potent than his own. He felt a sense of inferiority, as with a dangerous chance companion, a tough customer who seems more mobile, more vigorous, more active and aggressive than oneself. And the fact of being armed, when he is not, only adds to one's shame the shame one feels at cheating. Costals no longer dared to say to Solange what he had to say to her, particularly on the subject of his son; day after day went by without his saying a word about Brunet. He was continuously obliged to make an effort in her presence. When she looked him straight in the eyes he no longer thought: 'What magnificent honesty!' but 'She's challenging me. She wants to get the whip hand.' It seemed to him that the way he looked at her was softer, that his very features were softer, and that she must be able to read in them how dominated he felt - at times almost annihilated, for she made him sleepy. In certain parts of Moslem Algeria - and in the South of France, too, apparently - custom demands that in the course of a ceremony the fiancé should step lightly on the tips of his fiancée's toes, to indicate that he will keep the upper hand in the household. 'The opposite happens too,' he thought to himself.

Since the decline in her health, Solange had been more preoccupied than before with her creature comforts. And she ate more, thinking to build herself up, the more so as she had been forbidden wine and coffee because of her boils. Perhaps, too, soured by a sense of disappointment, although victorious and moreover full of confidence (whereas her mother was still doubtful, she no longer feared a new volte-face by Costals), she was more or less unconsciously taking her revenge by lolling about, by being a dead weight, by forcing him to overspend. Costals became exasperated by the fact that she could not get through an afternoon without wanting to go into a tea-room. Whatever they might be doing, however important, everything had to be dropped there and then while they went and had tea, like cats that stop dead in the middle of an apparently determined gallop in order to lick their behinds. Having tea would be stretched out over an hour: it was probably just a way of killing time. No sooner was tea over (so it seemed) than they had to start looking for a restaurant for dinner. Out of politeness, as in front of the scruffy little cinema in the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, Costals pretended to find such and such a restaurant not 'good enough'. And Solange would never say, any more than she had in the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle: 'What does it matter! Let's go anywhere.' He could tell that she preferred luxury restaurants, or so-called luxury restaurants; and in his view, with few exceptions, only people of doubtful quality can like luxury. 'The waiter pisses in the soup, the bellhop spits in the oysters, not to mention the scullion, who cleans his fingers with the lemon; the service is inefficient and interminable; the prices are scandalous; but there is plenty of fake gilt and fake marble, a basket for the wine, pretentious music, menus on which the names of dishes are embellished by the unemployed definite articles laid off by literary gentlemen who have no more use for them in the titles of their works (no! no! there is nothing more grotesque than a smart restaurant!), and given all this, she purrs, she is in her element. She would happily spend the whole afternoon there. . . . But at least the music allows us to be silent. Orchestras in restaurants must have been invented for the benefit of couples.'

And how she ate! Choosing, too, as though deliberately, nearly always the most expensive dishes. 'She orders expensive drinks. One can tell she comes of a good family, that girl,' Costals had once heard a man naively remark of a woman at the table next to his in a café. Costals, on the contrary, when he saw Solange peel her banana with a knife and fork so that her precious fingers should not touch the coarse substance, thought: 'Bogus refinements by which vulgar people try to make believe they are arch-dukes, when in fact they only proclaim the gutter.' She, so slender and light, whose weight 'would scarcely hold down the flap-seat in a cinema' (so she said), the amount she could swallow! Mockingly, to see how far she would go, he tempted her: 'You'll have another Peach Melba, won't you? Don't you fancy the rum pancake?' Then he would see a look of hesitation on her face, a struggle between her greed and her awareness that he was teasing her. She would push out her lips in a pout that signified 'no', while her eyes said 'yes' and always ended up with: 'All right... just to please you.' At these moments, she filled him with such disgust. As she did when she would say apologetically: 'I have to eat a lot to feel completely myself.' That's it, he thought, she has no reserves.... In the end he would fold his arms and stare straight in front of him in silence, while she swallowed and swallowed, his tongue itching to reply to her interrogatory look: 'I'm waiting for you to eat the rind of your cheese.' He thought despairingly that all the money he would ever draw from his intelligence, his skill and his hard work would flow down into the intestines of a woman. 'Can one be both greedy and worthy of respect? I almost think I would have preferred the money to be wasted on clothes and cosmetics.' Thus did the hours go by, annihilating the inestimable boon of time. And Costals parodied the words of Alexander swept away on the waters of Hydaspes: 'O Society, the things one must do to merit thy praise!'

'It is often said against Donjuanism: "Ah! one sole woman, whose depths one plumbs ever more deeply, from whom one draws ever more marvellous harmonies!" And this is indeed tempting, provided one is given the recipe for finding a woman in whom there are depths to plumb, and from whom these stupendous harmonies can be drawn. Because one sole woman who is a void.... I'd much prefer a thousand and three voids. Look at this one, clinging on to me, although she loves neither me, nor my work, nor making love. What has she done to adapt herself to me? How can one love a person if one doesn't modify one's own life, add to or subtract something from it because of that person? She sullies me by condemning me to so-called gourmet's food, which I don't want and which I disapprove of, by dragging me to so-called luxury establishments, which I dislike and disapprove of, in fact thoroughly abominate. This tartishness that potentially exists in almost every woman, even the best (like her humming in the taxi)! Eating, always eating. Sprawled in armchairs for hours on end. She wants to turn me into a typical French capon, a pot-bellied bourgeois with his aperitif, his brandy, his cigar, his motor-car, his "good living". Frigid herself, she wants to emasculate me, out of jealousy. Lacking vitality, she wants to devitalize me. Then there are the shops, the buying of useless objects, the cinema, the theatre, anything as long as it's idiotic, for the only object is to stupefy me here as it is to emasculate me there. All this with endless precautions to avoid being seen, because one's in deep mourning, because one's joyously trampling on the grave of dear sweet papa; civilization run by women: everyone watching everyone else, guided by others, inspired by fear of what others may think. And always ingurgitating. Now she's really getting down to the job of sucking the life-blood out of her prey. Women always claim to give, when they do nothing but engulf. Think of their position in the sexual act (such a ridiculous posture, too: froglike). She sees me as a being specially created for her (every woman's dream!), destined to make her happy, to bring her, together with a "position" and material security, something to keep her occupied and distracted; charged by Providence to prevent her from being bored. How much of my strength, my substance, my time, my money, has this once so simple, or fake-simple, girl already forcibly sucked out of me! The engulfment of valleys.... The woman-valley.... A valley in her embraces, a valley in her organs, a valley in her very essence, cut off from the world, seeing no further than the end of her nose, surrounded, hemmed in by walls which sometimes may be the walls of her love, and sometimes not even that. And the enervating climate of valleys....

'Not knowing what to say to each other. Not knowing where to go. Dragging from place to place, desperately trying to dredge something up out of one's brain and one's heart. And always by taxi, because of course no woman can go anywhere except by taxi. (All that putting on of airs: the simplest of them is the Queen of Sheba for life. They can't understand how much good they would do a man by allowing him to treat them casually - and how much they would gain thereby.) And always with the same one: "Always the same one! Always the same one!" like the baby pelican's "Tripe! always tripe!" And always that snap of the clasp of her hand-bag when she closes it, which irritates me in the same way as did the rustle of that Spanish amiga's fan when she closed it at least thirty times a minute (for which, in the end, I had to get rid of her). And each of these wasted, deadening, soul-destroying days costing you several hundred francs, money with which so many persons ... so many things....'

It was at the end of one such day, eaten up by chatter, vacuousness, sterility, by the futile and exhausting task of trying to work up some enthusiasm for insipid remarks which he would have condemned as such had they issued from other lips than those of a 'beloved' woman, of trying to make someone intelligent and lively when she was neither, a day when all the meaningless words he had uttered had left a kind of dough in his mouth, that Costals, in one of his notebooks, came across the following reflection by his beloved Abbé de Saint-Cyran: Any converse he may have with a man without due necessity, or without appreciable purpose, is ample cause to prevent a priest from sacrificing the next day. Ah! fellows like that were capable of reconciling a man with Christianity. However little store one set by Christianity, the cloister was after all a bit better than a fiancée.

As though to make up for all this, he began to treat her with less ceremony. Sometimes, when they left each other, he would proffer her his left hand, as though he were withdrawing at the same time as giving himself. And he no longer looked at her, in fact he avoided looking at her: there are women with whom one lives, with whom one sleeps, and yet whom one never looks at, about whom one knows no more than a passenger who has spent the whole crossing in his cabin knows of the sea.

She had kept her make-up and her 'young woman' hair style, although he had expressed his irritation with it, and had even said one day: 'Go and wash your face before I kiss you' - because she liked herself so, and because she thought it was high time she had her own way a little. He no longer desired her physically, and he knew that she did not desire him, nor ever had. Marriages, for a time, are sustained by desire; a day of scenes and silences is balanced by twenty minutes in the dark. But if there is not even that? Nevertheless, on no account would he have had her believe that her boils and her drawn face were the cause of his coldness. Besides, he was a little ashamed of loving her less because she was less pretty; he had been moved by the gesture she had made once when he was looking at her closely: she had put her hand over his eyes to prevent him from seeing the decline of her face from so near. So he took her, he caressed her, with his nerves severed, as it were, like those of the 'énervés' of Jumièges. [There is a tomb in the Abbey of Jumièges, Normandy, which is said to be that of two sons of Clovis II, King of the Franks, who were punished for having rebelled against their mother Bathilde by being hamstrung (Translator's note).] To beslobber each other's mouths, when one isn't particularly keen to do so, is no joke. (And outrageous thoughts came into his head, such as this, when she threw back her head and opened her mouth during the act: 'Does she want me to pull one of her teeth out?') How exhausting it was to simulate desire! To what extent would his body lend itself to the farce? One day, like a stubborn animal, it would simply refuse. The camel remains on top of the she-camel for a quarter of an hour thinking of something else. The cameleer belabours it with his cudgel. The camel gives a thrust or two, grunting the while, then relapses into contemplation. Another whack. Another burst of passion. And more contemplation. After the fashion of this absent-minded beast, Costals…Drudgery for them both, enough to disgust you with the flesh for ever - or else plunge you into every sort of frantic debauchery. But Charity demanded it, Politeness demanded it, Duty demanded it. One can hear the derisive laughter of the Daemon of the Good as he presides over these sublime and sinister gymnastics.

During the hours when he was not with her, he flung himself into his work as others fling themselves into alcohol or drugs. He was hungry for his work; it was his life-line. He gathered up and filtered into it everything he was living through with Solange: art is a quintessence of life, it purges it of its waste products and offers only the undiluted blood. Had he not worked in the morning, he might not have been able to endure Solange in the afternoon and evening without falling really ill himself. His lucidity, his creative power, were what they had always been. As soon as his fiancée ceased to exist for him (otherwise than in his art), he became a man again.

He constantly put off showing Solange the photograph album or mentioning his son. He put off writing to Brunet. The preposterous idea he had toyed with for a moment - flying to England with all Solange's letters and photographs and the diary entries he had written about her, and spreading them all out for his son to see, talking to him about Solange for two hours, and then asking this youngster of fourteen and a half, whose character was that of a thirteen-year-old: 'Do you want me to marry her? If you don't, there's still time' - this idea had evaporated. In becoming engaged, he had reached the limits of his will. Now he had given up the struggle.

The two of them were sinking, as though drowned, their faces already those of another world, into ever darker depths, a few feet from each other, without touching.

One day, however, a shaft of light pierced momentarily through the gloom. Some cad (a man from the sixteenth arrondissement, as might have been expected) asked Costals with a playful wink: 'Who's that ravishing girl I saw you with in the avenue du Bois?' Whereupon Costals realized that people would find his wife ravishing, and preened himself on it, and was ashamed of doing so. Everyone speaks against the world, and everyone has it in his heart.

7

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

22 January 1928

All alone! Yes, yes, come quickly. I'll open the door. Oh! how cold you are! You have a nice wintry, frosty smell. I must warm you up. Get rid of your overcoat, your hat, your scarf, and let me get a good look at you, you whom I've merely imagined for so long. How I love it when you stretch out all five fingers at once in your big fur-lined gloves! Such a man's gesture.... But look, a ray of sunlight on the snow! Let's go out. Go and wait for me for a few minutes by the fountain, while I change. Which dress shall I put on?

My little town, so calm and peaceful. I'm glad you've seen it at last. And it's so sweet of you not to be afraid of people seeing us together. Let's go for a long, long walk, until I beg for mercy. Me, cold? You keep me nice and warm. Me, annoyed because you ogled old Bernardeau's daughter? Jealousy's a shop-girl's emotion. Don't talk; you'd only talk about yourself, and what more could I learn? I know you like the back of my hand. I don't feel the need to talk to you either. I'm going to keep you with me for a while, just breathing you in and feeling myself throbbing with life close beside you. Let's walk in silence. You are the only man who never bores me. How could I ever get bored with this soul-to-soul between us?

You make me happy, very happy, and so you should: I've deserved your kindness. And then, this certainty that at last you have understood. You realize at last that you love me.

Life is wonderful.

They're celebrating the return of one of my cousins from his regiment at Didier-le-Petit, and I have to be there with my uncle on Wednesday and Thursday. For two whole days, no more Sainte-Beuve, no more wireless, and cousins by the score. The restfulness of being with simple people, oh yes, I'll say! Before I loved you, all this drudgery was somehow bearable, but now it seems beyond my strength. On Friday I shall be back, and we'll go for another walk together.

Much love,

A.

This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

8

Costals was due to have lunch at the Dandillots'. In the ten days since he had become engaged, he had met Mme Dandillot only twice, both times at her solicitor's: they had only talked 'business'. This morning, he was confronted with a tiny problem which, greeted at first in a light-hearted vein, had gradually taken a serious turn: what to call his mother-in-law when he had to address her?'Call this stupid and rather vulgar stranger, this Pulcinella, this police horse, "mother"? Not that I subscribe to the convention that regards the word mother as sacred. There are women of every kidney; and as the majority of women are mothers, there must be mothers of every kidney. But I personally had a very nice mother. To give this stranger the name I gave her is something I will not and cannot do - it wouldn't come out. "Dear Madame" is insulting. "My dear" - we haven't reached that stage yet. The only alternative is not to call her anything at all. Very convenient! ..." The thought of this luncheon was torture to him. Incapable this time of taking refuge in creative stupefaction (work), he ended up by stretching himself out on his bed - the bed in which, a few hours earlier, while asleep, he had dreamed of these two women: it is not the ghosts of the dead that haunt us, it is the ghosts of the living. 'It's also essential to fix a date for the wedding. It's also essential and urgent to come to some decision about Brunet. And all this for what, FOR WHAT? Because there's no sense in this marriage.'

At first, the idea of the fiancé prostrate on his bed also seemed rather a joke. His laughter subsided when he felt himself in the grip of a real physical malaise (occasioned, no doubt, by his mental distress but also perhaps by the cigarettes he had been nervously chain-smoking for three hours - Caporal cigarettes, which taste as if one were smoking arse-hairs). He got up to fetch some Eau de Cologne, poor fellow, and saw himself in the mirror. In ten days his face had aged, and had taken on a permanent expression of melancholy. 'I shall grow thin while she grows fat: communicating vessels.' He thought he looked ugly. 'No, she can't love me. It's all a ridiculous farce.' His head really began to spin; his face was as pale as death; he lay down on the bed again. 'I shall have to get drunk before going to the registry office with her. The instinct of self-preservation might easily arise in extremis.'

'If I could only say to myself, as I've sometimes done: "It's only a parenthesis. A bore with whom one finds oneself in a railway compartment, and one thinks: ten hours to get through." But no, she'll refuse to divorce me. One can see it in her face - in everything she's transformed herself into today, her new hair-style, her new handwriting. Perhaps I shall end up by becoming attached to her, because of what I've given her. I've nurtured the little feeling I had for her, which God knows what would have become of (nothing at all) if I had left it to itself, if I hadn't fed it with charity, as one metal is fed with another at the mint to make the coins more durable. The disease is in me - this charity - and that is what's getting me down.'

By noon he had neither washed nor shaved nor dressed. He got up once more, and once more was quickly obliged to lie down. Dramatic! To have to spend one's life with people the anticipation of whose mere presence for the space of a luncheon was enough to nail him to his bed with a face like a corpse - and when there was still time to say no - yes, that was no joke, it was really dramatic.

He telephoned to say he felt unwell and would probably be late. (Mme Dandillot thought he would fail to turn up. She herself, often enough, had feigned a stomach-ache at mealtimes when she was in a fit of sulks with her husband.)

A splash of cold water on the temples, a sniff of Eau de Cologne.... At half past twelve he managed to get to the bathroom, and at half past one he was ringing the bell at the avenue de Villiers.

'From now on, consider this house your own,' said Mme Dandillot as he entered the drawing-room. These are words to which it is pretty well impossible to reply when one's heart is not in it.

On a table there were photographs of Solange and Costals, jointly framed. The day after his yes, Mme Dandillot had asked the fiance for a photograph of himself 'which hadn't appeared in the papers'. Faced with these likenesses, so full of idealistic implications, Costals was reminded of the 'He' and 'She' whose effigies were discovered in mosaic among the ruins of Pompeii: She, a goose. He, a nincompoop - so ineffably the Eternal Couple, even then. Representing, more or less, for the Couple, what Goya's Family of Charles IV represents for the Family.

Oh! as far as the grub was concerned they had certainly put themselves out. It was the betrothal feast to end them all. Caviare, duck, truffles, and extremely enticing bottles. Materially perfect, morally lamentable, like American films. The police horse caracoling as gaily as one could wish. Solange with a look of severity and constraint as on the day he had visited the Dandillots for the first time, when they were still pretending to be semi-strangers: 'Good morning, Mademoiselle,' 'Good morning, Monseiur.' And as for Costals: 'If only a trapdoor would open and swallow me up.' However, he soon perceived that the watchword was not to broach that subject, and was duly relieved.

After lunch, there was a period of embarrassed silence. To have nothing to say to one another, but never to show it, is the whole art of the drawing room. The wireless and the gramophone were invented for just such circumstances: it is then that the hostess puts on a Mozart record, casts a withering eye at anyone who dares to venture a word, and a dozen puppets hold their breath in the interests of musical conformity; for to feel anything for Mozart is of course inconceivable in a man of 1928, but the humbugs of society get together on Mozart as intellectual humbugs do on Racine. But there were none of these machines in the Dandillot house. So Solange, to keep herself in countenance, stroked the grey cat (and a rasping purr reverberated through the flat), gazing at it as one gazes at a flame, though this did not prevent her from darting in Costals' direction, from time to time, one of those furtive glances characteristic of little girls and bull calves. 'Do leave that cat alone!' Mme Dandillot burst out, and one might have imagined oneself back in the days when Mme Dandillot, who detested her husband, nevertheless became hysterical whenever he stroked one of the cats too fondly. At last Mme Dandillot had a brainwave: still at a loss for something to say, she picked up one of Costals' books and began to read aloud a passage she 'adored'. 'Is it going to go on for ever?' he wondered, his eyelids drooping with boredom: there are writers who find something indecent in their prose being read aloud. Mme Dandillot closed the book with cries of 'Admirable! Prodigious!' She made such a din one could have sworn she was a real society lady.

Now will you allow me to ask you what you meant by this sentence, which I don't quite understand?'

She re-read a sentence. Hearing it out of context ten years after having written it, Costals could not immediately recollect what he had meant to say, and admitted it frankly, as though he were talking to intelligent people. Whereupon the two women shrieked with laughter. And he realized that neither of them had for a single moment assimilated the air he breathed and lived by. He remembered a remark Solange had made to her mother and which the latter had repeated to him without any suggestion of malice: 'I would love him just as much if he were a wholesale grocer. And besides, he'd have fewer women clinging to him.... '

Mme Dandillot had to go out. They remained alone. If the question 'When do we meet again?' is destructive, 'What shall we do?' is its brother. Solange volunteered that she would gladly go to his flat to look through an album of Egyptian sculpture he had told her about. 'Of course she doesn't give a damn for Egyptian sculpture. But she has to kill time somehow. And pretend to be interested in what interests me.'

She went into her room to change. She continued to forbid him entry to it because she was ashamed of her little girl's things, which she thought ridiculous but could not bring herself to throw away. Ashamed, too, of the perpetual mess the room was in. Costals had constructed a theory on the subject: 'No doubt she considers that room more sacred than herself. Just as a man may not respect himself, but respects an object of worship. Transferring on to an external object what should be dedicated to oneself alone. It has happened to me, having worked out a routine for myself, to become such a slave to it as to detest anything unexpected, however agreeable.'

As they leafed through the album at the avenue Henri-Martin, Costals suddenly felt tempted to pass from this album to another. The temptation grew, like the noise of a shell approaching. Then the shell burst, the decision was made: he went to fetch his photograph album.

As she looked at the pictures of his parents, of his grandparents, of his childhood, she spoke nicely about them, with sweetness and tact. As they went on turning the leaves, Costals felt a strange calm take possession of him, a most mysterious calm. It was the sort of calm that grips a runner in the hundred metres, during which he stops breathing. He turned a page, and two photos of his son appeared.

'It's a little cousin of mine. They say he looks like me at that age. Don't you agree?'

'Oh, no! You must have looked nicer than that.'

'Don't you like him?'

'Frankly, no. He has a rather bumptious look that I don't care for.'

Costals turned the page.

Peace. It was no longer a calm, it was unutterable peace. Sudden peace, like the outer harbour for the liner once it has crossed the bar out of a heavy sea. He remembered also the remark she had made in Genoa: 'It's lucky you haven't a son.' Anyone observing him then would have seen his face, tightly drawn ever since waking, relax and light up, like the face of a martyr in the midst of the flames, at the moment when, expiring, he imagines he has seen his God. For the first time since his return from Genoa, he took Solange in his arms with genuine feeling.

9

Next day, at about five, Costals awaited Solange. He had sent her an express letter that morning: 'Come to my flat at five. And be brave, my sweet. I have some extremely unpleasant news for you.' Afterwards he had switched off the telephone.

Each time he recalled her face, it was as if it were reappearing above the surface of the water with an imploring look: 'Save me!', and each time he thrust her back under with an oar. 'Yes, it's true, I'm murdering her' (he caught sight of himself in the mirror) 'and I look it. What I'm doing is abominable. Nevertheless I'm right, a hundred, a thousand times right to do it. I'm right to prefer myself to her, since I don't love her.'

She rang. He went to the door. He was moved, and yet he had great difficulty in repressing a desire to smile - not a smile of affection but the smile of someone who is amused - so much so that he paused behind the door to compose his features.

He opened the door. She was without make-up or powder. He knew she had understood. There was that tiny moment of immobility that occurs immediately after one has been wounded and the blood has not yet begun to seep out.

In absolute silence - no greetings - he led her to his bedroom. The lights were off, he did not switch them on. She-who- stares-at-the-sun collapsed into an armchair; her hand-bag slid down her legs and fell on the floor. He knelt beside her and kissed her frozen hands, her deep-blue veins, flowing like a river with several tributaries under the bridge of her wrist-watch. The cat whose kittens have just been taken away from her, and whose neck one scratches to make her purr. He noticed that some of yesterday's dust still clung to her black suede shoes: 'Slovenly - and an ill-kept house.' He kissed her face a little, too. She did not return these kisses, and he wondered whether it was out of ill-humour or because she was prostrate with grief. Her face was white in the darkness, like a glacier at night; the blow she had just received gave her a vague, cloudy, sunken look. Several times, in a touching, silent gesture of despair, she raised her fore-arm and let it fall again on the arm of her chair (when a man makes this gesture of discouragement, he does it with his fist clenched). He had always had the knack of retrieving painful situations, of making an angry woman smile in spite of herself; but faced with this gesture of despair he was left speechless. Presently he began to feel that her eyelids were moist under his lips, and he spoke for the first time: 'If you want to cry, you mustn't stop yourself.' Whereupon, springing up suddenly, she threw herself on the bed, face down, in that little girl's posture she loved to adopt, and sobbed.... Suddenly she cried: 'No, no! I don't want to lose you.'

Now it was she who was kissing him, running her hands over the contours of his face, stroking his hair, thrusting her hands between his jacket and his shirt, and always, when he said, 'My little darling . ..' she answered with one word only: 'Yes.... ' Just as a cat which you talk to answers each of your sentences with a single brief little miaow. In a voice that was barely perceptible she murmured: 'My heart's overflowing with tears....' All her recent hardness had melted; she was full of gentleness, like a dying dog that wags its tail in a final farewell. She knew it was all over now. And she loved him as she had not loved him since his return. She loved him because it enabled her to plumb the depths of her despair, she loved him because he was no longer a bewildered chicken, because he was resisting her once more, because he had become her master again. When he had stopped enumerating - as in a dream - his never-ending reasons 'against', she said:

'Do you remember what Paul says in The Holidays: "Whatever you may do against me, I shall never do anything against you"? Well, that's what I say to you. Try as I may, I can't bring myself to blame you. I can't do anything against my love for you. You would have had to be very nasty to me, and you haven't been.... '

'I don't blame you either,' he said. He knew what he meant, but Solange did not, and drew herself up: 'That would be the last straw!'

'After all, when you think of the power you gave me, I could have used it more harmfully than I have. I've given you seed for the dreams of your old age: you'll see how splendid they will be when you see them flower. I've taught you to live, I've provided you with a destiny. Thanks to me, you've discovered yourself, you've plumbed the depths of your nature. So many women never go more than half-way.'

'Being where I am now is staying half-way. And to think that it might have worked, that we didn't try, that we suffered in vain!'

'You haven't suffered in vain. A man may suffer in vain, not a woman. I have tormented you: what more do you want? Women need suffering. Take their suffering away from them and you kill them, more or less. There are women who go mad because they haven't suffered enough, normally suffered. If, some day, women come to have their babies painlessly, they won't love them. Which is why almost all women are unhappy, and it's right that it should be so. And anyhow, what does your despair amount to? Think of the eight million war dead. Think that it might be your mother dying, instead of a man you didn't know eight months ago disappearing from your life.'

'So I haven't been hurt enough yet. Do you want to hurt me more by speaking about the death of my mother?'

But her actions belied her reproaches: she went on kissing and stroking him; and there was that same way of turning her face towards him every so often with a look of tenderness still, but which he did not quite understand.

'When I was a little girl, it shocked me that St Martin should only have given half his cloak to the beggar. What could one do with half a cloak? You've never given me more than half your cloak. And you shouldn't do that. You should give the whole of it or not give anything at all.'

'I gave what I could,' said Costals. He was not being fair to himself. He had given what he could, but only to the extent that she seemed to him to deserve it.

'With you I should have had a personality that otherwise I shan't have. Without you I'm nothing much, I know.... But all the same, I'm worth something,' she added.

'What would you like me to do for you? Whatever you like, I'll do it. Would you like me to relieve you of my presence by leaving France once more? Would you like us to go on seeing each other? Look, here's what I suggest: that we go on with everything that was decided as to our future, with the exception of the registry office. In other words, I fix up a room for you in my flat, and you come and live there several days a week. In fact, marriage without a zero hour.'

'Become your mistress! Oh, of course, that would suit you. But it would ruin my life. I find it hard to believe you're seriously suggesting it.'

But... haven't you been my mistress for the past eight months?'

"I've never lived with you, at least in Paris. In Genoa no one knew. Here! ... And besides, at that time we could have said we were engaged, which we can't any longer. I'm sure there are lots of women who would accept your proposal gladly. I suppose I must come from a different background. And I can't see myself repaying my mother's affection and understanding by agreeing to a way of life which would make us both outcasts, would close all doors to us, those of the family as well as those of society.' ('What society?' Costals wondered, contemptuous once more.) 'Furthermore, uncle Mercadier would disinherit Mummy on the spot if he heard I was living with you: the situation of the gentleman would make no difference. It's odd that you don't think of all that. What sort of women can you have known, you poor dear?'

Ready to flout conventions when she thought it necessary in order to get herself married, Mlle Dandillot was very much the bourgeoise when it was merely a question of flouting them for love.

Costals was rather pleased to detect in her a hint of self-interest.

'This sort of talk seems to me a bit new on your lips,' he said gently. 'But one cannot help approving. In that case, there's nothing left for you but to get married. Would you like "the gentleman" to try and find you a husband?'

'Are you mad! It will be years and years before I get married now. To ask me to marry would be like asking me to turn my head back to front - an appalling outrage.... Marriage with you was the only marriage which didn't seem like death to me. For the tragedy is not so much that you don't love me as that I can't love anyone else. How many women have never met an intelligent man? Where shall I ever find again such maturity combined with such freshness? Where shall I ever again find someone who understands me?'

This last heart-cry, which might have been uttered by an Aristotle or an Einstein, on the lips of a sort of shop-girl, froze Costals, who up to then had been moved. He plunged into that well of sadness into which men are forced by women when they would so much like to be able to take them seriously, and cannot. Although nothing was more foreign to him than the desire to 'mould' a woman (he had never thought of 'moulding' anyone but his son, and even then only rather desultorily), Solange's remark had touched him at first: 'With you I should have had a personality' (it was extraordinary that she never flattered him, incredible in fact). Now the remark irritated him, reminding him of those comic articles in the women's pages of weeklies, in which Sylphide or Cousin Annie provide their 'sisters' with the recipes for 'developing their personalities'. These efforts to inject a semblance of life into what has none are the most astonishing and depressing thing in the world.

'But... would you say I had understood you, then?'

'Of course,' she said. Costals was a bit flummoxed by this, thinking that there was so obviously nothing to understand in Mlle Dandillot.

'Are you then so different from the rest?' he asked treacherously.

'Haven't you ever noticed?' Every woman, so cruelly similar to her companions, believes herself to be different.

'The important thing is not to be different from others, but to be different from oneself. And you are always like yourself.'

There were flowers shedding their petals in a vase, like a man dropping women from his life.

'All the same, it's stupid,' he went on. (Like all men, often unexpectedly modest, he thought that since she had given herself to him she must be prepared to give herself to anyone.) 'Women only become attached when they're not intelligent. Come, be a little intelligent, like a cat that pushes a half-open door with its paw, in order to get out: learn how to get out. There are plenty of Costals in the world who are made for you, whereas it's obvious that we weren't made for each other. Quite apart from the fact that your experience with me will have stood you in good stead; now you'll be on your guard; until you met me you let other people think for you. Besides, what you want is not love but marriage. We'll deceive your husband as much as you wish.'

'What if I'm incapable of leading a double life? You know perfectly well I shall never be unfaithful to my husband, whoever he is. I'm not made that way.'

'Well, what do you want? What can I do for you?'

Suddenly he had an idea, a typically masculine idea, in the worst possible taste, but the outcome of which proved that it was an excellent one.

'As you know, I've never doubted that we'd get a divorce, and I wanted it to be as solemn as our marriage would have been clandestine. Divorce is the cardinal instrument of marriage, it's there that the emphasis ought to be put, and I could even wish that the Church would make it a sacrament.... But no doubt that will come one of these days....'

She smiled, and he was pleased to see this first ray of sunshine. Oh! there's nothing more stupid than a psychologist. As if one didn't smile when one suffers!

' ... Which is why I told you that I'd give you an engagement ring when we divorced. Let me offer it to you now. The diamond on it is a solitaire: symbol of the destiny of your friend.'

'I'm not going to accept a ring from you now!'

He went to a jewel-case and took out a rather handsome ring which had belonged to his mother. Shortly before she died, his mother had said to him: 'As for my rings, you can give them to your girl-friends.'

The room was still in darkness. But when Solange, with the ring in her hand, switched on the light in order to examine it, he knew that she was feeling better.

She made as if to give the ring back to him.

'Don't you want it?'

Silence.

'Please!'

She pouted her lips as she had done when 'refusing' the Peach Melba:

'All right, I accept. But not as a present - that wouldn't be very dignified of me. As a souvenir of you.'

'Of course! I never meant it otherwise. It isn't at all a present.'

She flashed the ring in the light.

'It's a pity the setting's a bit old-fashioned.'

'I'll get a modern one put on for you.'

'She's a pathetic little tart,' he thought. 'The girl who didn't like jewellery! Prostituting herself in order to get married, and when that goes phut, quite ready to accept the price of her disappointment. Just like all the rest of them, in fact, for there isn't a woman who doesn't prostitute herself. And a sponger, too; in the eight months we've been going out together, she's put her hand in her purse only once - to buy herself a reel of cotton. All that remains for me to do is to write out a testimonial for her, with her five out of twenty for sexual capacity, and the dates of enrolment and departure. But what could I want better? Now we're quits.' As a potential wife, then as a fiancée, she had dragged him into a 'sublime' element, which was not his. As a tart, she put him at his ease once more: they were back in the world of reality. And he had paid her, as a prisoner bribes his warder in order to escape. One pays women to come, one pays them to go; it's their destiny. His old rakishness reappeared. Besides, he was incapable of taking his misdeeds seriously for long.

'When you marry, you can tell your bridegroom it's a diamond you inherited from your grandmother, who used to wear it at Napoleon III's balls. Warn your mother, so that she doesn't betray you.'

"Betraying is your forte, it seems to me.'

'In my family, we've always betrayed. Betrayed for the sake of betraying, as we waged war for the sake of waging war. For five centuries. It's in our blood. But if you had been a daughter of the house of France, I should have treated you differently - because you would have been different. You like to think you're a phenomenon. It's now that you'd be a phenomenon, if a man hadn't betrayed you.'

Somewhat brutally, he asked her to undress. For the first time since Genoa he wanted her. Because he no longer feared her. Because she was no longer his wife to be. And because he saw her as a tart.

"Do you want me to undo my hair?' she asked, as though nothing had happened.

He took her twice, buoyed up by the excitement of the whole scene as though by a wave. And she too, for the first time since Genoa, seemed to find some pleasure in it. Unresponsive when he was an absent-minded lover and a pusillanimous fiancé, she warmed up a little when he was once again forceful in his decisions and his caresses. And besides, they were nothing but lovers now: they might as well be good ones.

As she was leaving, Solange slipped the box of Abdullahs Costals had just finished into her bag - a final souvenir of her engagement! But he had spotted it.

'People who keep my letters or my old packets of Abdullahs for sentimental reasons exasperate me, in the same sort of way as people who pray for me. You have the ring, dear Solange, that's enough.'

He took back the cigarette packet and threw it into the waste-paper basket.

On the telephone, after dinner, Mme Dandillot was 'perfect'. How easily they had given up, these women! How quickly they accepted everything (the docility of Frenchwomen)! Where was that determination which women talk about so much and which wears out so soon? Four times the mother forbids her child to do something, but after the fourth time she gives up, and the child can break his leg in peace. To Costals' question, 'Shall I go on seeing Solange?' Mme Dandillot, with apparent firmness, answered in the negative.

It was the answer Costals had hoped for, and he had planned in that event to go to Morocco to join his little girl-friend Rhadidja, whom he had not seen for eighteen months. There was a boat leaving for Casablanca in two days' time. The next day he took the train to Bordeaux without having seen Solange again. 'Not only have I always known how to escape, but I've always known how to escape in time.'

He was closing the brackets.

10

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

27 January 1928

I've brought back from an antique shop in Orleans a sheet of Chinese rice paper with a bird painted on it. It's the only original work of art in my room and even in the whole house (the rest are reproductions). I gaze and gaze at it.... And I think: it was a man who painted that. I remember a little wood carving in the Musée Dennery: a snake coiled round a tortoise. The snake's body was slightly flattened where it rested on the edge of the shell, and that single detail was enough to give it life. Thousands of miles away, hundreds of years ago, it was also a man who had carved that. Brought up in uncultured surroundings, for a long time I believed that art was superfluous, fit only for women and school-children, and elementary education was hardly calculated to change my ideas. When I began to realize that art was almost exclusively male, and the highest form of masculine activity, I was so dumbfounded that I probably haven't got over it yet. So, when I see a work of art that moves me, when I read a passage that makes me turn pale, I remember that it was a man who did it, and I am filled with respect and gratitude, and feel that we women ought to keep our mouths shut. The Virgin in the sculpture museum at Autun, Andromache holding Hector's son. the Jungle bidding farewell to Mowgli, Chartres, the Parthenon - all these, in the last resort, were born of love, of that love of other men which men are capable of giving otherwise than by taking someone in their arms. But for art to transmit to me fully the love with which it was conceived, I should have to have been in those arms once at least, to know what it means, to be able to take it or leave it. Once I had experienced this, the world of art, which at the moment I have only an inkling of, would really be mine, I should be swept into the vast, slow current that circulates between the artist, his fellow-creatures and the world of things, instead of being condemned to remain on the edge of it. By your pitiless and unjustifiable veto, you have thwarted me of a whole world, and yet at this moment I do not bear you any grudge.

Next day.

You know how it is with me: I have to get things off my chest. So I will not try to conceal from you the fact that you have hurt me. Already, last autumn, I knew from the papers that you were in Italy, and I realized that you wanted to put an even greater distance between us. This time, you deliberately choose to speak on the radio on the day you know I shall be with my cousins, who have no wireless set. I remember quite clearly writing to you and saying: 'Wednesday and Thursday, no books, no wireless - that's going to be fun.'

My uncle has just come in. Good-bye for the moment....

Listen to this. Just now, on the way home with my uncle, exactly at the corner of the rue de la République and the rue des Tanneurs, I had the impression that someone had kissed me. The illusion was so strong that I actually blushed. It was the wind, a little puff of wind, but since I'm one hundred per cent woman, that is to say ripe for the loony bin occasionally, I believe more or less in telepathy. I come back home and what do I find in the newspapers? An announcement that your radio talk did not take place on Thursday but has been postponed until the day after tomorrow. Can I assume, am I too presumptuous in assuming, that you had a fit of remorse for giving it on the very day I couldn't listen? If so, slip the word remorse into your first sentence the day after tomorrow. For example: 'Ladies and gentlemen, the date of this talk has been changed, but I should have felt too much remorse had I not found it possible, etc.'

Having written my letter, quickly, quickly, I hurry to the post, as though it must get to you forthwith. In fact you will no doubt receive it tomorrow morning, and it will be a crumb of pleasure to start the day with.

A.

p.s. I enclose a sample of the material of the costume I'm having made, so that you can choose the same for your lady friend of the moment.

A.

This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

11

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

29 January 1928

Costals, dear Costals, ah, no, you're not much of an orator! How I waited for your 'turn to sing'! I was so afraid you might begin five minutes early. By seven o'clock I was already listening in, and that's how I learnt that the Lapps eat cod seasoned with paraffin, that M. Claude Farrère is a 'great writer', and that Febo shoe-polish 'would put a shine even on a ball of wool'. You see the things I learn, thanks to you.

I waited to hear the word remorse on your lips. I didn't hear it. But it's possible I may have missed it, you articulate so badly. On the other hand, when you quoted - when the quotation did not seem to me to be relevant - the remark of the mother to her daughter in Purple: 'I love you so much that I never think of telling you', I took it as being addressed to me, I thought you had perhaps said it on purpose.

Yes, you articulate badly, you get nervous, your voice becomes strident and your delivery hurried. Do you know what the best moment in your talk was? When you whispered to the producer: 'Am I talking too fast?' Whispered! A hundred thousand listeners must have heard you. Afterwards I thought I oughtn't to have told you I'd be listening in. Perhaps it was this that disturbed you. I upset your life. My letters waste your time. My thoughts, perhaps, injure your love-life (for I love you for myself; others can give you your pleasure). Forgive me.

But it's funny. I saw you as a splendid intelligent brute with rough hands. At last I could get rid of the wretched feeling of superiority which I was forced to get used to in my dealings with all those weak men, the only kind I came across before you. And yet, every time you make a mistake, how my heart goes out to you. I am happy when you are happy, it consoles me for having to kick my heels waiting, but happier still, I think, when you do things that bore you, or when you are bored, because then I feel more of a sister to you. That heart of yours that is continually deafened by the roar of its victories, perhaps it deigns to listen a bit when they fall silent. There can be no doubt that your somewhat feeble talk on Radio-Paris will have disappointed your admirers. Throughout the length and breadth of France people will have been saying: 'Why does he talk, since he talks so badly?' Perhaps, even, some will have felt, as I myself felt, that even the substance of your talk was not up to much. I feel I ought to warn you that you're beginning to repeat yourself a little, my friend. So much so that at the moment I have the impression that thousands of men and women must have turned away from you slightly. And because of that, I feel closer to you than ever. I at least am faithful to you. How cosy we are, huddled together, aloof, in the midst of that crowd of deserters! (Blast! My uncle is calling me to dinner. 'Dédée!' Dédée, at thirty years and nine months! If only it were you who called me that!)

9 p.m.

I have switched on again to tell you this: when the light went out in my room, my arms went up as though to encircle a beloved form, my face became transfigured, and I said: 'I am near you.'

1 a.m.

My beloved love, I write to you now, while I wait for the infusion which will bring me, perhaps, a little sleep, to tell you how much I love you. My love, my darling.... For I cannot possibly die without having said those words once, die without having said anything or done anything, die without having experienced what the poorest of the poor have experienced, and which would cost no one a penny, would do no one any harm. You can so easily find happiness in anyone's embrace, whereas I can find it only in yours - and you know this, you who love me and are yet so dishonourable as to give me nothing! And yet tonight my room is full of you, of your voice, of your presence. It was you who came, it was not I who called you. You came out of that wireless set, like a genie out of a magic box, looking a little crestfallen (your colleagues had made catty remarks to you: 'No, no, it wasn't bad at all! You'll find it easier when you get used to it.... '). I was so hungry, so terribly hungry for you. When I gave no sign of life, I was waiting for you. When I wrote to you, I was waiting for you. When I hurled insults at you, I was waiting for you. And here you are at last, your presence is not an invention of my mind. O my God, may I prove worthy of it!

There's an electricity breakdown. I've lit two candles as in the last act of Werther, and they make everything look so fantastic in my room. It does not seem like my room, but like a completely strange room. I'm in pain. If you only knew the pain I feel. You have shaken me to the core. If you only knew how she strains towards you, this woman whom you wanted thus, whom you created thus, for, before you, she did not exist. Sit down here, and let me stay motionless against you, simply telling myself that it's you, that these are your clothes. Now lift me up, lay me on this bed which I no longer recognize, which is not Dédée's bed, which is not the bed on which I used to twist and turn as though I were pinned there by an arrow. You take my head between your hands, burying your fingers in the hair on my temples (how cold your hands are ...). How gravely you unstiffen my legs! Why doesn't the electricity come on again? We need bright lights: I'm not ugly at this moment, as you can see; and I want to see all of you, now that you are identical with the man I dreamed of. It is no longer that imperceptible infiltration of you into me which has been taking place until now, at once ineluctable and acquiesced in. I feel that you are bearing down on me, you, Pierre Costals, with your whole body, your whole work, your whole life. Your caress, so deep, deep, seeming to search beyond me, to seek me out I know not where. How it fulfils me. How well it calms this flesh that you have bruised in exorcizing. Just like those little cuts one gets on one's fingers and which one only has to squeeze hard for the pain to subside. Hug me, crush me, until I scream and beg and moan with so much happiness. And you listen to my moans; you know that you make me happy, and you are too. And you show no sign of exhaustion. You stay as long as I waited for you. Now, my friend, you know what it is to love.

And afterwards you will speak to me the words I ascribed to you, dictated to you so often in a whisper, in solitude, words which bind the future a little, words you used to speak to me long ago when I loved you before I knew you, as the mother-to-be loves her unknown child in advance. And I shall remain at your side, all limp with happiness, I shall protect myself from myself against your flank, as a little ewe, to protect itself from the sun, presses against the flank of the ram of the flock.

And then I shall lie back again and say to you: 'More! I'm not cured yet.'

I'm closing the envelope of this letter quickly. I no longer wish to know what I have written to you.

My happiness deserves some punishment. I inflict upon myself that of not writing to you before next Saturday.

A.

This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened. However, the stamp not having been cancelled by the post office, M. Costals removed it.

PART TWO

12

'How did that happen?' he asked.

'The heat.'

'The heat! In February, in the Atlas, with snow all around! And when even in this heated room you can see the vapour coming out of our mouths!'

'At noon, the sun is hot.'

There were neither shutters nor curtains on the window (if that small aperture deserved the name) of Costals' room in this old military post of Tighremt which was now a shabby fondouk  [An Arab inn (Translator's note).] run by a retired sergeant-major. Costals had draped his big travelling coat over the pane (a window-pane in the Atlas, wonder of wonders!), through which there came an icy blast. And they raised it now to look outside.

Three hundred yards below them, the bushes were ablaze; a belt of fire, some fifty yards wide, beleaguered the village, with its houses of pale mud, in tiers, like giant steps mounting to an altar. At the edges it was gaining ground, advancing like a wild beast, with the same life-like appearance as the clouds yesterday on these slopes, as Costals watched them crossing the track a few yards away from him, skimming along the ground with the speed of a car. From the extremity of the cordon, the smoke was rising to an absurd height, veiling the flotillas of stars, until finally it was absorbed by the vast absence of light that created a void in the upper sky. Above the snow-capped peaks the sky was lighter, as though a halo emanated from the snow.

'Is your house outside the kasba?'

'Yes, over there.'

'Do you think it's in danger?'

'Oh, no!'

('If I had to save Rhadidja from the flames at the risk of my life, would I do it? Answer: "Yes".')

She was draped to the calves in two lengths of grey wool, tied at the waist by a girdle of blue wool and fastened at the level of her 'salt-cellars' by two heavy brooches of wrought silver. Her neck, bare from the throat, and her arms, bare almost from the armpits, emerged freely from it. Costals smelt her spicy odour, that odour of another race which had greeted him, spellbound, on the quay at Alexandria the first time he had landed in Africa. He would have liked to sink his teeth into the dense heart of that odour, like a mad dog into the dense heart of a jet of water.

And all the words he addressed to her in solitude, but which, when she was there, she rendered stillborn by her silence and inertia.... Thus, he would have liked to tell her what the cordon of fire reminded him of. He remembered that other cordon of fire he had faced one day in 1924: Abd-el-Krim's men firing. He was blazing away with the French. A civilian, he had followed them into the front line, as Peter, on the Mount of Olives, had followed the soldiers taking Jesus away, 'to see the end' (Matthew VII, 58). And he had taken a gun simply because a gun is man's second membrum virile. In fact, he did not give a damn for the French. Nor for the Moroccans either. He was more on the side of France because he understood the French language, and life was therefore easier and pleasanter for him in that country than in another. Now, at moments, he wanted to talk about that time to Rhadidja, and about the feelings he had had. Then he realized that it was pointless. Words are pointless, and the Rhadidjas of this world are right to remind one of the fact.

She let the overcoat fall, and sat down again on the only chair in the room. Costals poked the wood fire, which responded by hurling itself at him, like an animal provoked, in the shape of a billow of smoke that enveloped the room. Then he sat down on the bed. Rhadidja snuffled continuously, like a child. 'Got a cold?' 'Yes.' She blew her nose; he saw that it was bleeding.

She was a girl of sixteen and a half who looked nineteen or twenty. Her complexion was light, her eyes slightly slit, her nose small and rather flat, her mouth fleshy: a face with pure and regular features, more Indo-Chinese than Moroccan. She had left on the bed the red and green scarf with which she covered her hair; this was light-brown, very fine and silky: altogether European. Although they exchanged few words, Costals was wont to prolong this expectation of pleasure. Nothing in the world would have persuaded him to fail in this courtesy, just as Rhadidja herself, when she had dressed after leaving the bed, never failed to sit down again. Indeed, one of the reasons why he loved her was that he did not feel obliged to carry on a high-flown conversation with her. He had a cast-iron belief that all conversation is futile. And especially high-flown conversation.

He had met Rhadidja four years before in Casablanca, where she was then living with one of her uncles. She had sat down beside Costals on a beach in Lyautey Park. At first he had not dreamt of desiring her, but she began picking a tooth with a safety-pin, he saw her tongue, and that was it. White-skinned and rather skinny, he had defined her as 'a chicken wing in a cheap restaurant'. Her pale complexion and hieratic features suggested Asia, the subtle smile of the bodhisattvas. He had taken her; she was a virgin. Thereafter, having acquired the taste, she gave herself right and left - or at least such was the rumour that reached Costals - provided the man was a European. Mademoiselle had always professed highly non-conformist opinions in front of Costals: to wit, that she did not like the Arabs, that she did not respect her parents, and that she did not believe in God. At first he had thought all this (leaving aside the Casablanca 'atmosphere') was simply a way of making up to a Frenchman, but gossip confirmed Rhadidja's dissident attitude: for instance, it was said that she delighted in making love during the forbidden hours of Ramadan. But in other ways her behaviour never deviated from the tact and decorum which are characteristic of the Moslems in these matters. With Costals she was always reserved, keeping her place, perfectly brought up, if one can say such a thing of someone who has not been brought up at all; a full moon of calm, dignity and deliberation. Incontestably un-Arab in her discretion, her gentleness, her immobility (hardly a gesture), her punctuality, not to mention her physiognomy: a stranger among her people. Often it is stupidity which gives a woman a hieratic look; but she was intelligent, though it was an intelligence without glitter; having taught herself to speak French, which she did very well, and to read it, and even, gradually, to write it sufficiently well to make herself understood. Of more than modest birth, and a courtesan, she had none of the reactions, nor the coarseness, that might have been expected of her station. Nor, needless to say, did she have the comportment of a cultivated Arab. She belonged to a region somewhere in between, a no-man's-land similar to that which (according to Costals) must have been occupied by the Greek demi-gods and the Hindu djinns. Having got over her puberty when she had given herself for the first time, she had spared Costals the agony of witnessing the change, the paroxysms, he would doubtless have seen in her had she been a European. Equanimity and permanence, as in semi-divine creatures. And their security. Rhadidja's motto was: calm and security.

And her absolute honesty. And her extraordinary disinterestedness. For four years Rhadidja had taken the money that Costals pressed into her hand without ever glancing at it. Even if he had given her only a five-franc piece she would not have complained, he was sure of it. She never asked a favour, never asked for money, never even asked for an 'advance'. There was never that unbearable glance of the European courtesan at the man's wallet whenever he opens it. Once she had even said: 'You spend too much money on me.' (But she never thanked him. Or rather she thanked him if he handed her a pencil or a pin. But never thanked him if it was a tidy sum.) Such was Rhadidja. No affectation, no clinging, no Christianity, no greed. And it had lasted for four years.

What was the nature of their tie?

A man to whom a woman has once said 'It does me a world of good' is really hooked. Our pleasure is the pleasure of the other person. Rhadidja had never said anything of the kind to Costals, nor the bogus equivalent of the phrase ('You make love like no one else', etc.). Nor had she ever made the slightest allusion to her relations with him or with anyone else. But her face, and her famous 'earthquakes', [Cf. Hippogriff: 'Terremoto' (Author's note).]  proclaimed her pleasure in the act. Her face lit up instantaneously when one went into her, as, in the telephone booths of some cafés, the electric light switches on automatically when you open the door. Costals travelled over a thousand miles to see her face at that moment.

The writer, as we know, had no great desire to be loved, and even preferred not to be loved, because this non-love left his heart, his mind and his time free. With Rhadidja he was well served. She was apathetic in everything that was not sensual pleasure. Costals thought she had no feeling for him. Perhaps an affection born of gratitude, but even then very superficial. And no pretence of tenderness. He found this to his taste, since he hated to be pawed. (As a child, when a little girl wanted to kiss him, he would say: 'All right, then, go ahead. But be quick, and not too hard ...' and he had taken a dislike to his grandmother because she kissed him too much.) Rhadidja was a catalyst; he reacted, and that was enough for him (not forgetting that she too reacted physically). He was, however, perplexed by her apathy, which incidentally extended to everything, for it was so extreme that it seemed to him almost inhuman. It was as if he had picked up a stone and fondled it, decked it with flowers, covered it when it was cold, put it in the open air when it was hot, washed it, smothered it with perfumes. Rhadidja, except in bed, was that stone. And it was perhaps this inhuman quality in her, and in him too, in feeling this attachment for her under such circumstances, that kept the attachment alive. The ways of men are various.

Attachment. From the second day, trust (she wandered alone round his quarters with every drawer unlocked). From the third day, respect. Then liking. Then something between attachment and affection, where it had settled down. No love, of course, and not the slightest jealousy of his numerous rivals. Was she capable of making him suffer? Yes, but only from the fear that some harm might befall her. This was the only tremor in the stillness of his affection, like the quivering of the sea in a flat calm. He did not love her, but she was the preference of his heart and marrow.

Of his brain too. She gave Costals what he wanted from women: mutual pleasure, embedded in indifference and remoteness. Wherefore there was something pure in their relationship which it is almost impossible to achieve with a European. It is not the sexual act that is vulgar and impure, it is everything people surround it with. There is less stupidity in a man's flies than in his brain and in his heart.

'I die at those hands of pale bronze, so pure.' He took them in his, which in comparison seemed like the hands of a labourer. He noticed then, on the ball of one of her thumbs, a brownish patch surrounded by a circle paler than the skin of her hand. 'Syphilis? Since it's taken for granted, according to the medicos, that eighty per cent of the Moroccans of these parts have it. But benign: family syphilis.'

'You've got a funny spot there.'

'It's el djem.'

'What's el djem?'

'I saw the doctor when he came by. He gave me a bit of paper...'

From the pocket of her white under-skirt she drew out a wallet, and from the wallet a sort of leather scapular containing a little papyrus on which some Arabic characters were inscribed. She smiled her delicate smile:

'A marabout gave me that.'

'You told me you didn't believe in God.'

'Yes, but he gave it to me.'

Costals had received the same answer from one of his friends, a notorious unbeliever, when he had expressed surprise at seeing a St Christopher plaque on his car: 'Someone gave it to me.' Universal flabbiness. People talk about 'non-resistance to evil'. There is non-resistance to stupidity, too.

The scapular also contained a folded piece of paper, which she handed to Costals. He read:

Name:                     Rhadidja ben Ali.

Age:                     16 (?)

Place of birth:               Ait Sadem, Tighremt.

Disease:               Leprosy. Haemorrhagic coryza. Macula

on left thumb.

Treatment:               Specimen nasal mucus taken. Send Rhad. Marrakesh if confirmed.

Observations:              Genl. condit. satis. No sympt. syph.

Date:                     29-1-28

SIGNED: DR MAYBON

He re-read the document. His heart began to throb so violently it was as though the wall of his thorax had grown thinner, as though each heart-beat must lift up his ribs like a lizard's.

'But, Rhadidja, it's a very serious disease! And you never told me....'

'The doctor said that it could be cured nowadays. He will bring some injections the next time he comes.'

'And you just sit there as though it was nothing!'

Costals knew nothing of leprosy except the commonplace images and schoolboy memories the word conjures up for the man in the street. The flesh coming off in strips, the 'leonine fades', the contagion, the isolation. Also - he remembered from an illustrated book of his childhood - the monstrous devices of the Church a few centuries ago, more monstrous than leprosy itself, which is at least natural: the leper assisting at his own Requiem Mass under a pall, having a spadeful of graveyard earth sprinkled on his head (sometimes in the grave itself), being declared dead to the world and led outside the town after his house had been reduced to ashes.

'And the doctor didn't tell you to take any precautions?'

'Yes, not to let my family eat where I have eaten.'

Costals remembered the famous doctor, the director of a TB centre, who, when he asked him what the centre did for patients who remained at home, had replied, with some embarrassment: 'We give them a spittoon.'

'What do your parents say?'

(Emotion was making him idiotic.)

'Nothing.'

'Have you any other patches on your body?'

'No, only this one.'

'So you've been in contact with lepers?'

'Our uncle was one. Not the one in Casablanca, one who lived with us. But he died three years ago.'

'He lived with you! ... No special precautions?'

'No.'

'No treatment?'

'Twice a year he went to the Mosque of Sidi Bennour, in Marrakesh.'

The eternal instinct of humble people to believe, for preference, the one who lies. Between the Pasteur Institute and the bone-setter, one chooses the bone-setter; if one doesn't actually go to the priest.

'I'll speak to the doctors at the hospital in Marrakesh, so that you're properly looked after when you arrive there.'

For the first time, Rhadidja's face, so serene until then, showed alarm.

'No, don't do that! If they know that you know me, they will tell my father.'

'The doctors in Marrakesh don't know your father. And I'll ask them to keep it absolutely secret.'

'No, no!'

'I won't let you be looked after just anyhow, when a word from me will make them take an interest in you. I want them to do everything they possibly can to cure you, you understand? We'll send you to France if necessary.'

Still seated, she had bowed her head so low that he could only see her hair. He tried to lift it up again, but she resisted, like a sulky child. Completely indifferent to her horrible disease, but petrified by a non-existent danger. And there is no need to go to the Atlas to see this in a young person... .

'All right, I won't say anything about you,' he said at last, determined to intervene but anxious to calm her down.

He looked at the document again. The fate of this beloved creature in the seven letters of a word scribbled in pencil. And perhaps his own fate too. His desire for her had subsided. Not that he felt horror or even disgust for this poisoned body; but he was overwhelmed by his emotion. And perhaps this was a good thing. Perhaps it would be wiser to abstain from intimate contact today, and tomorrow to go to Taoud, four kilometres away, where there was now an infirmary with a native attendant (for the men who were building a bridge not far from there). At least he would get some idea from the attendant of the degree of contagiousness of leprosy - enough to judge whether or not it would be sensible to risk it tomorrow night.

He informed her of his plan. The look of terror, which had vanished from Rhadidja's face, reappeared.

'If you mention leprosy to Haoucine and he knows you are from Tighremt, he is sure to guess that you came about me. And he will tell my father....'

'Then I won't go.'

This time he was sincere: Rhadidja's fears seemed justified.

Well then, he would make love to her. He could not see himself making a journey of four thousand kilometres there and back to meet a woman he was fond of, and not going near her because she had a touch of leprosy. It was not physical desire that prompted him. Nor a sense of duty, towards her or himself. Nor even, strictly speaking, the feeling that it was the 'right' thing to do. It was a feeling that it would be at once pusillanimous and inelegant not to do it. Send her away like that! Besides, any man in his place, unless he were a total wet, would do the same. As for the risk, quite apart from the last war, or the next, in his everyday life, at the mercy of all the fathers and brothers and lovers of his mistresses (mostly minors, to boot), he was perpetually running risks; and he had slept hundreds of times, without any precautions whatsoever, with syphilitics and consumptives. So it was only a risk like all the others, not exactly alluring, but necessary. Another one more or less!

'Undress, little one. Will you?'

It gave him such pleasure to say this to her. His heart began beating furiously again, but calmed down after a moment.

He had intended to examine her body. But she immediately felt cold, and quickly tucked herself into bed. How could he get her out?'Turn round. To the right. Now to the left,' while she shivered: just imagine it!

'The medico examined her nine days ago, and only saw one patch. Very unlikely that another will have appeared since. As for her genitals, he must surely have taken a look at them since he suspected syphilis.' Nevertheless, as he undressed behind the back of the bed, he had something of the sensation of a soldier adjusting his equipment just before going over the top.

He dived under the sheet, as one might dive into one of those greenish stagnant ponds in oases, traversed by a snake swimming with terrifying speed.

But when he was in her warmth, all his uneasiness evaporated. What was there was Rhadidja, the faithful, the excellent Rhadidja. (And he felt the outline of a recent tattoo on the inside of her arm, the ink still new on the surface of the skin.) She whom he knew to her very bowels, the sack of flesh into which he poured his seed. The haven of his security, even the security of his flesh: not once had he deigned to protect himself from her (one cannot possess by protecting oneself!), although she had twice infected him with gonorrhoea, in 1924 and 1926; the fiction of security governed - he wanted it thus - his relations with this woman who consistently poisoned him. The towel he had wrapped round the dangerous hand as a safeguard came undone and was lost between the sheets: well, let it stay there! However, he avoided her mouth.

Scarcely had he begun to caress her than Rhadidja's face drifted away into a dream-world. Sensuality took possession of her instantaneously, overpoweringly. Her eyes moved while her face remained immobile, her nostrils flared like those of a rocking-horse. And when, her eyes glazed, dead, like dead planets, she sought his mouth, he seized hers - hers, that mouth which yesterday was lined in so supernatural a pink, like the calash of a pair of newly-weds in Algiers, and which tomorrow he visualized with the palate perforated as though by syphilis. He took her mouth, and worked on it slowly and attentively. He was sucked in by this woman as a river is sucked towards the sea. His love of danger, absent until then, now entered him. Clinging to this mouth, so close to the 'haemorrhagic coryza', he felt like a parachute jumper during the moment of his fall when the parachute has not yet opened. But there was nothing more to it, after all - and he was aware of this - than when he drank at lengths from the mouths of advanced consumptives, and drew life from their death. (How he loved to kiss them in that depression in their cheeks that was reminiscent of the gentle hollow between two dunes, and on their sweating temples with the damp locks clinging to them! How he loved to see their pleasure weaken them a little more each day! How he loved to take them as they coughed, like those perverts who take ducks as they decapitate them! Edmonde, her mouth hideously dry ... holding Edmonde's tongue between his lips, it seemed to him that he was holding in his mouth a reptile's tongue, and he liked it.) And just as, then, he used to say to himself: 'Consumptive, me! So what?' so now he sneered: 'A leper, me? Nonsense! I'm well known to be a lucky dog. As lucky as the Devil.' He had an almost mystical confidence in his constitution, like the airman in his pitching bus, or the skipper in his old tub, rolling, shipping water, but always making harbour.

'One would think you hadn't done it for a long time,' said Rhadidja naively.

Later, he was ashamed at not having given her his greatest proof of affection - that kiss on the mouth - until carried away by sexual excitement. He took the tainted hand and kissed it devoutly, not far from the leprous spot. He experienced no sensation (of horror, audacity, etc.); his only feeling was the affection he had for her.

When she had gone, in the utmost silence, he waited for a long time, half dressed, his ear pressed against the door, to make sure that she was not coming back, that there had been no trouble with anyone in the londouk. Finally he gave up listening. Another clandestine assignation that had gone off successfully! For fifteen years and more, his life had been a constant succession of risky ventures that had gone off successfully. ...

He went and drew back his overcoat from the window-pane. Men and children passed by, all in their big hooded jellabas, a little reminiscent of monks and monklets. The fire had spread. Visibly. As leprosy spreads. Under that sprinkling of stars.

Then he flung himself back into bed, still half-dressed, the room was so cold. The bottom sheet had kept a fold, a cil [Crest of a dune, in Arabic (Author's note).]  where it had been caught between Rhadidja's thighs.

A feeling of contentment crept over him then, as though he had performed a good deed. He remembered an anecdote he had read in some cancionero in which the daughter of the King of France and 'Queen Constantine', abducted by a knight and wishing to preserve her maidenhead, tells him that she is a leper's daughter, so that he does not molest her. Costals despised this knight, and this added to his contentment. Motionless, his eyes fixed on the undulating pattern of the ceiling, it seemed to him that he could feel the poison she had injected into him already stirring in his blood. He had two clear feelings. First, that if he had caught the disease, well, he did not regret that hour of tender pleasure in spite of it all. And secondly, that the horror of the disease would be mitigated because it had come to him from her. He thought: 'Ah! let her give me leprosy!' as a woman thinks of the man she loves: 'Ah! let him give me a child!' Meanwhile his fate was in the lap of the gods.

13

to Pierre Costals

Paris

[Letter forwarded from Paris to Marrakesh.]

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

20 February 1928

I have recovered my balance, and I'm glad of it. A bit disconcerted, though. A woman restored to equanimity always feels as though she were missing something. Don't think I'm embarrassed by my last letter. After all, if you don't want to disturb women, you shouldn't come and seek them out in their homes through the radio. It's as simple as that.

Yes, a bit sad. Reaction, no doubt. And they've delivered a dress which I thought would be nice (I never see you, and yet I dress for you alone) and which makes me look such a fright! I dress badly, but at least I know when something doesn't suit me. And I feel crushed. And then there were the fittings, and seeing one's face repeated in half a dozen mirrors. My face always surprises me in the mirror, and I try to recapture the other, the one I used to have, my first face. My passion - my passion for you: I dot the i's and cross the t's because you might not understand - my passion exhausts me and ages me more than a dull and empty life would have done. What was the use of changing! Oh, to be able to age peacefully, having laid down one's weapons with good grace. The day when one will at last be at peace with one's face.... But for that, one would have to have obtained something, however little....

You destroy everything for me, everything. But I insist: I want nothing else but you. And yet at the same time weary - weary of you: once more I dot the i's and cross the t's. Often, now, when I feel the urge to call you, I put my head in my hands, I close my eyes long enough to faint a little, and it goes. The feeling I have for you will die; it will die, as all useless things die. Gradually the determination not to write to you again is building up inside me. What have I to lose from you that might not just as well be lost immediately? (Reflection of a woman who has an occasional glimmer of sense.)

My sexual springtime was put back ten years by my mother's exaggerated frankness. One wonders which is better: to leave children in the dark about sex, or to show them things as they are before 'guilty conversations' have yet corrupted them. Both ways end in disaster. When the revelation comes too early, as I know from experience, it retards sexual development. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, the couples I met filled me with repulsion because of the act. The mere thought that a man might speak to me made me bristle. Already solitary by nature, this revelation increased my shyness. If that was what all the hand-kissing, all the simpering, all the social whirl was for! Dances, social calls, casinos, I refused them all. I even pretended for some time that I was engaged, so as to keep people at arm's length. On the other hand, until I was thirty I was ignorant of the psychology of sex. My mistake about you (M. de Charlus! ...) started me thinking, and in the past six months I've bought a whole heap of books on psychology and psycho-analysis. Well, now that I've read these books, I cannot help thinking that there's a certain anomaly in your life, which is the price you pay for your talent, as there is in mine. Wagner, as you know, told Liszt that if he had been happy he would never have written a note. One puts into one's art what one has been incapable of putting into one's life. It was because he was unhappy that God created the world.

Before I knew you, I attended a lecture at the Lamartine Society in Issoudun by an obscure poetess with nevertheless a certain talent, Claude Violante, who is in reality Mlle Marie-Alix de la Roche de Villebrune, a youngish spinster of some forty-two or -three summers.The title was somewhat ridiculous: Must a great writer necessarily be a virgin? But the idea was not. This woman maintained, with plenty of scientific proofs to back her, that the more eloquently an artist spoke of a thing the less he knew about it, that many famous laureates of women, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Poe, Pierre Louys, were impotent, that d'Annunzio had certainly remained a virgin until an advanced age, that Byron was repressed, and preferred young men to women, as is evident from his odd friendships with Eddington, Niccolo Giraud, Lord Clare, etc. ... and that the real Aziyadé 'was a small boy' (the remark, it appears, is Mme Juliette Adam's); in short, that the more splendidly a writer celebrated women, the safer it was to assume that he knew them very little in the flesh. I thought of all this again as I listened to your talk on Radio-Paris. The obvious embarrassment you felt at speaking in public made me think that you were shy, and that this shyness must extend to many spheres. And this confirmed what I have always thought, guided by that feminine intuition that seldom fails: that your insistence on emphasizing the carnal act in your work was an indication that your experience of these things was limited. And as I have never understood why you persisted in denying us both an innocent pleasure - which is sheer lunacy.... Perhaps that might help me to understand a little: not only have you never dreamed, in making love, of giving pleasure to the other person  [In one of the preceding volumes, Costals says: 'Our pleasure is the pleasure of the other' (Author's note).] (which is why you cannot imagine that to desire a woman is to give her a proof of love), but you yourself do not like pleasure, you do not like sex.

There is no need for me to tell you that the less you have, the closer I, who have nothing, feel you are to me. My theory about you helps me to live. Therefore it is true.

A.H.

Perhaps you try to pray, and cannot. Poor, poor child, it's fantastic how unhappy one can be. All the same, how much happiness one would create, when one has nothing, with the non-happiness of one who has everything, like you!

This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

14

For the next five days Costals, each night, when darkness fell, received Rhadidja and knew her.

Save for that blissful hour, a trying time. Appalling weather, and telling himself all the time: 'Rain, disturber of assignations. She won't come. It's raining too hard.' The little room was sinister, with its walls decorated with ornamental patterns (native) almost invisible under a layer of dirt, with its pillar carved with a knife, unconvincingly supporting a battered ceiling, doomed to collapse under the first heavy snowfall. The sea of clouds floated past at window level, like waves at the level of a port-hole; above them the snow on the peaks, like foam above a raging ocean. He always hoped that one morning the mountains would have disappeared, as mirages did not far from there; but no, there they stupidly remained. Sitting in this room which the kanoun entirely failed to heat (never within living memory has a fire been known to give out any heat in North Africa), a blanket over his legs, a scarf round his neck, Costals tried to work; and eventually, tucking himself up in bed fully dressed, he continued his paper-work there. ('Nothing but mistakes! Nothing but mistakes!' Rhadidja would exclaim on arrival, looking at all his crossed-out drafts.) His relations with the landlord, a great patriot and a certified brigand, were an additional ordeal for him, because of the efforts at cordiality he had to make. For although the fondouk had the advantage that one could come and go without anyone being the wiser, Rhadidja was liable to be noticed. Hence, to avoid a fuss - she maintained that her parents knew nothing of her behaviour - the necessity to soft-soap the patriot a bit. If the price of pleasure can never be too great, it is nonetheless fairly steep. If it sometimes forces us to restrain our arrogance, if it teaches us to make a concession or two, that is the measure of its power.

As soon as he arrived in Morocco, Costals had written to Solange. He wrote to her again from Tighremt, a letter which he would post in Marrakesh in a few days' time. Generally speaking, as regards letters, he was exactly like a child - sweating over them as he never did over a page of one of his books, because he never knew what to say in them; or else putting down anything that came into his head as long as it filled up space; dropping them and taking them up again, like a cat with a mouse; and finally giving up the ghost on the pretext that he had told enough lies for one day. What, then, is one to say of his letters to Solange? He wrote them out of a sense of duty: already the torrent of oblivion had begun to flow through him. He had reached the end of this woman as one reaches the end of a cigarette; she had served her time. Whenever he thought of his bad behaviour towards her, it was as though he were pulling at a dressing: it 'pinched', and began to bleed again. But the rest of the time, no pain at all. However, he had made up his mind to soothe Solange, conscientiously to keep that little flame alive.... He affected an extreme tenderness in his letters: protesting too much, like a husband; alas, 'a long speech is not a long love' (St Augustine). In the event, these letters were not so long. He cut one of them short on the pretext that the bus was waiting to take it to the post. In the middle of the other his fountain pen ran out of ink, and it's so tiresome writing in pencil. In both of them, full of self-congratulation, like a businessman paying his debts, he emphasized how astonishing it was that he should be writing to her at all, pointing out that he was writing to no one else at the moment, that he had put all his friends into cold storage. With marvellous dis-ingenuousness he wrote: 'And yet you complain!' He felt some regret at having had to do what he had done to her, but no remorse. Why had she wanted him to marry her? (Why had Andrée wanted him to take her?) He was like a motorist who is grieved at having run someone over but cannot help saying to himself, in all good faith: 'Why did he throw himself under my wheels?'

On the day of his departure for Marrakesh - he planned to stay six or seven weeks afterward in the Sous, and then in another sector of the Atlas - a few minutes before Rhadidja left him, he said to her:

'You know I'm very fond of you.'

'I know.'

'I think I've said everything I wanted to say to you. And you, have you nothing to say to me?'

'No....'

There was no ill intent in this 'no', which was merely a simple and sober expression of the reality - that she could think of nothing to say to him. During these six days Costals had heaped kindness (and money) upon her. He had given her a proof of no ordinary kind, if not of love at least of 'something', by not allowing himself to be put off by her disease. He had promised her that he would do whatever was necessary to see that she was given the best possible treatment by the doctors. Nevertheless she had nothing to say to him. When she had left, he gave a sort of shudder; not a shudder of grief but a shudder of amazement: 'Incredible ... incredible....' Yet it is better to receive no gratitude for something that deserved it, than to see someone (nothing is more embarrassing) show gratitude out of all proportion to the little one has done for them, and that with bad grace. Then he sighed - a sigh of relief that their meetings in the fondouk should have gone off without a hitch. The inveterate clandestine lover, each time he leaves a love-nest, each time he is finally parted from a mistress, each time a further stage in his life comes to an end, is wont to sigh: 'Another flagrante delicto avoided!' A bittersweet compound of melancholy and relief, like cool wind and raw heat on the seashore. And his motto might be: 'As long as it lasts!'

'Are you Pierre Costals the writer?' asked Dr Lobel, physician in charge at the Marrakesh hospital. 'Do sit down. You'll forgive me, I hope, but my profession is all-absorbing ... and then, we become such savages here ... anyhow I must confess that I've never read any of your books.'

That's all to the good,' said Costals, with an insolence that was for once unconscious.

'But one of your friends has talked to me a great deal about you.'

'H'm.... In that case I foresee the worst.'

'M. Richard, a professor at the lycée in Rabat. But you mustn't think I haven't read anything of yours. I remember a particularly stimulating article, in which you made an eloquent defence of the Eiffel Tower.'

'What! ...' said Costals, outraged. 'I've never done any such thing.'

'Come, come, don't you remember? Three or four years ago. There was a press campaign at the time in favour of the demolition of the Eiffel Tower. You wrote an article pointing out that, whether one liked it or not, the tower was part of the common inheritance of Paris.'

'It's possible that in the course of an article I may have remarked incidentally that these sudden journalistic indignations against the Eiffel Tower, or the Trocadero, were nothing but snobbery, sheer ballyhoo, if not rather suspect. But I've never devoted an article to the Eiffel Tower,' said Costals with restrained vehemence. That he should have published eight books, forged out of his flesh and blood, and that he should be known only by a casual sentence in a newspaper column, and whose sense was distorted, at that - how typical of the relations between writer and public! And yet it was quite natural that a doctor should not have read his works; doctors have other things to do. Nevertheless everything would have gone better if Lobel had had the slightest idea who Costals was. As it was, the latter glided gently, by a familiar process, from the fact that Lobel had not read him to the presumption that Lobel was a dismal nincompoop. The power of doctors, not only over our bodies but over our minds, is so great that we have a tendency to consider them unworthy of it. Our whole life depends, or may depend, on them; this makes us judge them severely; it is as much as we can do to allow them different tastes from ours, whether literary, political, erotic or gastronomic.

Dr Lobel was a man of about fifty, with the hair of a photographer and the moustache of a drawing-room actor; that is to say rather long hair - though not long enough for a bad painter's - and a few close-cropped hairs on the upper lip, like one of those actor-counts whose whole life would be ruined if he did not have the sensation of being hairless, but who keeps a few hairs to appease the countess. The beauty of Lobel's face lay neither in the intelligence nor the character it expressed, but in its heredity: it was the face of a man of the end of the reign of Louis XIII or the beginning of that of Louis XIV; one was moved by this if one noticed it. But if one's eyes, descending from these fine features, fell on his hands, they were held there startled: those pink and podgy fingers, those thick, coarse wrists, were the hands of a man whose father must have wielded a plough for half a century. The disharmony was similar to that which one sees among certain working-class adolescents, who have the faces of angels, and the hands of old blacksmiths. But the most striking characteristic of Dr Lobel was that he wore a bar of the Legion of Honour pinned to his hospital overall, which created the same effect as if a footballer were to wear one on his jersey.

Costals, having extricated himself from the Eiffel Tower, said what he had to say. When he had finished, Lobel said:

'I once knew a French official, in a remote spot where I was the only doctor, who, when his native mistress fell dangerously ill, did not send for me because he was afraid I might find her unprepossessing. I always tell this story to Europeans who consult me on behalf of their Moors. That said, I shall now come down to brass tacks.

'Throughout Morocco, leprosy is vastly on the increase' (he said this with a rather triumphant air, as though to suggest: 'We have a nice little nest-egg tucked away.'). 'But first of all I must correct your ideas about this disease. There are diseases which the public takes lightly, but which can have very grave consequences: bronchitis, gonorrhoea, measles, jaundice, etc. And there are diseases (or actions) which are less serious than people imagine. Syphilis, if treated at once, is no longer dangerous nowadays. Sitting in a draught is not dangerous, unless one is in a sweat. Masturbation, with which we terrify poor kids, is "no different from the normal sexual act" - so Janet tells us. As for Hansen's disease' (this was a comforting euphemism for leprosy, as far as Costals could gather) 'I won't say it's not serious, since people die of it. But it isn't quite what people think. For one thing the incubation process is slow: it can last from eight to ten years. And the development, too, is slow; the disease can be, if not cured, at least alleviated. Your little Moor may have ten years of more or less normal life, without pain, in front of her - there are outbreaks, followed by long periods of quiescence - and twenty years at least before she succumbs.' ('That's the vital thing for me,' thought Costals, 'if I catch the disease. I only need another six years to finish the essential part of my work.') 'Finally, and this is what I especially want to draw to your attention, it is nothing like so infectious as people think. Much less so than TB, since it cannot be caught by chance. You're surprised that Rhadidja and her uncle aren't isolated. But not all lepers are isolated. We have special hospitals, of course, but in many places lepers are put in communal wards, when they aren't left in complete freedom. There are three hundred lepers in Paris, of whom only twenty are hospitalized (at Saint-Louis); the rest wander around quite freely. Even at Saint-Louis they have always been, and still are, in communal wards, and there has never been a case of infection. Furthermore, married lepers may have sexual intercourse for years without their partners being infected. In short, it's not medically impossible, though it's extremely improbable, that, in the six contacts you have just had with this woman, you may have contracted the bacillus which, a few days before those contacts, was not detected on her genital organs.'

('One's always right to take risks,' thought Costals. 'I knew already that, with modern prophylactics, the pox had become a pleasure. But leprosy....')

'Let's assume the worst,' he said. 'If I caught it, when would the first symptoms appear?'

'In three or four months or three or four years, that's all I can tell you.'

'Should I start taking preventive treatment right away?'

'Your preventive treatment must, in spite of everything, be to give up your relations with this person. You can't play around with mucous membranes! I'll have her brought here as soon as possible. I'll carry out another examination, although Maybon is quite categorical: nasal examination, and so on. She'll be given chaulmoogra oil injections. Afterwards, she'll have to go back to her village. We only hospitalize advanced cases here. There's a plan for an isolation hospital in Marrakesh, but it won't be ready for two or three years. Maybon will visit your protégée regularly at Tighremt; I shall see to it. The clinician at Taoud will look after her, and see that she doesn't drop all treatment at the first sign of improvement; a typical Arab dodge.'

Lobel offered to show Costals some of the lepers in the hospital. 'Many visiting men of letters, and all ladies of letters, have themselves photographed among the lepers,' he said with a wounding smile. Costals refused. 'It wouldn't do anyone any good for me to get worked up. Besides, it's something exotic, and the exotic doesn't interest me.' But he accepted the doctor's offer of the loan of a technical manual, one chapter of which was devoted to leprosy. He wanted to know, but to know without the risk of losing his composure.

However, he had to face some 'exotica', whether he liked it or not: photographs of the 'leonine fades' - wild-looking eyes, crushed noses, missing eyebrows and eyelashes. Patients whose fingers, feet, or genitals had dropped off, having rotted away. 'It would be a great blessing for me if I could stop loving her,' he thought, reasonably enough, instinctively seeking the position in which he would suffer least. 'But perhaps, when she starts being disfigured, nature will come to my aid.... Though that's by no means certain.'

It would be a week before Rhadidja arrived in Marrakesh. He debated whether to wait for her, and finally decided that it would be pointless. Next day he left for the mountains.

15

Back in the mountains, Costals nevertheless saw to it that every Thursday he was in a place with a postal service, in order to collect the airmail letter which his son wrote to him on Sundays from the little town near London where he was at school. Of the two hundred or so letters which reached him every week, only Philippe's mattered to him; the rest, according to the mood of the moment, were either impatiently skimmed through or torn up and scattered without ever being opened. One letter that you really look forward to, one letter that really gives you pleasure, out of two hundred - isn't that the usual proportion?

During the autumn term of 1927, Brunet, at the lycée in Cannes, had protested that there was nothing he wanted more than to attack once and for all the imposing mass of ignorance which had accumulated inside him, but that it was 'this rotten hole' which prevented him from working. Costals had therefore had the idea of sending him to a private school near London: England had come to mind since Brunet had been 'as happy as a king' there in September, staying with friends of his father's. Moreover, it would be a way of escaping the warping pedantry which French secondary education imposes on young minds; Costals had been thrown into a state of nervous prostration for twenty-four hours when Philippe had told him with great excitement that the subject of his French homework was: 'Racine depicts men as they are, and Corneille as they ought to be.' The Ancient has truly said that those who have children are beloved of the gods, but 'schooling', when it expresses itself in these absurd debates on questions devoid of any importance, is enough to make one regret having a son.

Meanwhile, fresh laments had been arriving from Bradborough. In Paris, Brunet had memorized in the right order all the stations on every line of the underground, more or less; he had that awful memory of bright children which registers everything, so much so that his father often felt paralysed when about to say something in his presence, for fear that it might impress itself too deeply. In spite of this, Brunet's memory rebelled against the English language; the boy realized that he would never be able to speak it, and was distressed about this, not because of the social advantages he stood to lose, but because he had boasted to his chums at Cannes about the superb knowledge of the language that would be his when he returned. At first Costals had not taken these moans very seriously. He remembered Brunet, aged twelve, weeping so bitterly over a dead rabbit that one wondered if he could possibly be suffering as much as all that, and Brunet pretending to have hurt himself one day when he had been playing the fool, in order to get the expected reprimand transmuted into endearments; so he was a bit suspicious. But when he looked at some photographs his son had sent him and noticed he was thinner, he said to himself: 'It's because he's worried about his English that he's lost weight.' Besides which, since little of the boy's charm and liveliness and fantasy appeared in his letters, he wondered: 'Is he unhappy? And if he is unhappy, isn't it my fault for having neglected him?'

'When I was a kid and we were separated from one another, I only thought of you when I wrote to you, and sometimes in bed at night. But now I want to see you again so much.' With a view to re-reading this one sentence, Costals searched his pockets for his son's letter - one of those letters which were now so regular, whereas in the past it had always been such a chore for the child to write one (childish letters, with margins and lines ruled off in pencil). And he thought (in spite of his phobia for being alone with another person, as others have a phobia for being alone with themselves): 'When one wants to cheer someone up, one should do it at once. Oughtn't I to bring him to Paris at Easter to live with me once and for all?' And again: 'How silly people are to say life has no meaning when there's always a possibility of making those one loves happy, and at the same time drawing sustenance from their happiness ... '

He thought about his son's thinness, real or imaginary, and was worried by it; about his happiness; about his quality; about his future, in face of which he was like a wrestler weighing up his opponent, wondering which 'hold' to try on him; for he knew that he himself was too unordinary for his view of life to be automatically valid for someone else. His son, in fact, was the touchstone by which he distinguished, in what he believed right, what was right for everyone, or at least for those he loved; he was the stimulus to a constant reconsideration and readjustment of his value judgements (for instance: 'For me, a knowledge of Latin is indispensable. But for Brunet? And, if so, why?')

It was in the midst of these anxieties that, one day, sitting on a stone in the snow, he jotted down these thoughts:

'St Teresa cries out about Satan: "Poor wretch, he does not love!" Agreed, the man who has never brought a woman a bunch of violets, or removed the stamps from a letter he has received from abroad to give them to a child, will always be missing something. But it must also be said: "Poor wretch, he loves!" Where love is (and here we are only talking of love as affection), no more freedom, no more peace, no more taking wing. If a man is ruined or "disgraced", he will take it philosophically if he does not love, but if he has a wife or a child whom he loves, his ruin or "disgrace" becomes a torture. If a man is about to die, all the stoicism with which he would face death if he loved no one falls to pieces if he is leaving loved ones behind, because of the anguish of losing them and the dread of what may become of them. Loving embitters and corrodes (and I repeat, there is no question here of passionate love, but of conjugal or parental affection, etc.). There can be no philosophic wisdom in the man who loves; there can be no wise men without egoism. "God is love", say the Christians. To which the unbeliever might reply that, if God loves, God is weak, God is dependent on his creatures and is therefore no longer God. A God who loved would be a slave God, and a slave God is inconceivable. Look at the smile of the Buddha and don't talk to me any more about his love for humanity: people only smile like that when they do not love.

'And yet, if non-love means freedom of mind and soul, the anxiety one feels when one loves can sometimes be one of the props of the mind and soul. A heed for the health, happiness and well-being of another human being, not continuous but constantly returned to on re-emerging from other preoccupations, is a kind of cement that finds its way into all the interstices of a person's life, binding together its more or less disparate elements and giving it cohesion and solidity. It gives unity to so many scattered lives (maternal love in widows), as well as plenitude.

'Plenitude! How occupied one is with somebody one loves! It could be enough to occupy one exclusively. But the cruel law, "art against love", does not only govern passionate love; it isn't only with Solange and other women that I have experienced it: if I have not given the best of myself to my son, it's because I have given it to my work, and there are moments when this troubles me to the point of acute anguish. "What!" you will say, "can a life be exclusively occupied in thinking of and wishing for another person's well-being?" I who have spaced out my meetings with him to keep myself fresh, to want to see him again and to look forward to seeing him again, to avoid getting too accustomed to him, or to loving him, I reply: "Yes, why not?" I can perfectly well imagine myself having done nothing else for the past ten years except devote myself to bringing up my son (his schooling, of course, remaining in the hands of specialists), and that would have been an education, in the only valid sense of the word, that would have been loving him, in the only valid sense of the word. I had a choice between creating a man and creating a body of work; I chose the latter - as Rousseau abandoned his children to write a book about childhood. With ordinary fathers, it's earning money, or position, or playing cards, that keeps them from their children. In my case, it's my work that has kept me from loving and educating my child, that has made me betray my child, made me "put him off till tomorrow" - whereas at other times, on the contrary, I find him dissipating my energies, making me devote by fits and starts to the perishable what my most imperious instinct tells me I should devote exclusively to the eternal (for every artist worthy of the name should behave as though his work must be eternal). Like the sea upon the shore, now my son gains ground in me, and now he withdraws. But is this not the motion of all love? And ought one to complain about it? How intoxicating to live on those restless waters, which never run dry, which are never constant, never beyond hope! As for the discrepancy between art and love, it's probably just a particular instance of a universal discrepancy. If one wants to do things seriously, one cannot - in my case, for example - create, cultivate one's mind, pursue adventure, pursue glory, and love, all at the same time: there is always one of these activities that will suffer.

"... It isn't the ties of blood that speak in me when I love him, or rather it isn't only the ties of blood: such ties alone could never be enough for me. Nature gave me this child, but in such conditions that I could have refused him had I wished, as I refused F. [Another bastard of Costals', whom he had refused to recognize (Author's note).] He was given to me, but I also chose him; just as I loved him, but also wanted to love him - wanted to love him as the (intelligent) Christian wants to believe. When he was still in the insubstantiality of childhood, I took a gamble on him: I gambled on his being worthy of my love, and of the time this love would cost me ... '

Thus he reflected, amid the beauties of nature, so insipid to whomsoever has seen into a human soul. And he smiled to think that the literary world spoke of his 'solitariness' - solitary, because I don't mix in that society! - when there had never been a period in his life when he had not been completely taken up with a person he loved - when he had spent the whole of his life loving, just as one spends the whole of one's life dying. Solitude? Yes, sometimes. But a solitude always illuminated by the affection he gave, as the solitude of these highlands was illuminated by the soft sunlight on the snow.

16

He used to meet her every Sunday evening on the train coming back from her Aunt Charlotte's. One day he had told her who he was, and said that he had noticed her long before. He had asked for permission to write to her, and had accompanied her to her door. He had written to her several times. She had thought he wrote well; his letters enchanted her. The enchantment subsided when she saw him, every Sunday evening: her 'dream' was so much more beautiful from a distance! Finally he had proposed to her. His proposal was centred not so much on himself as on an exquisite little eighteenth-century house which was about to become available … It was thishouse that had brought things to a head. That evening, he had sat down beside her in the train, instead of in his usual place on the opposite seat. After having inquired whether the gesture would displease her, he had kissed her on the forehead. She had felt nothing, literally nothing, and had not flinched. 'Won't you kiss me?' he had asked, with a rather constrained look. She had turned her face towards him, brought it closer.... and then, when it came to the point, had been unable to bring herself to take the plunge: her face had turned away. Her hands lay inert in her lap, and she had begun to cry (tears came easily to her).

When Mme Dandillot recalled this scene, she always thought that at that point M. Dandillot 'had turned very pale'. Let us not exaggerate: M. Dandillot had simply looked as all gentlemen look in such circumstances. He had promptly regained his original place, on the seat opposite. He had said a few banal words. They had parted. Next day he wrote to her: 'I realize that you do not love me,' and withdrew his proposal. Whereupon she wept more than ever: she imagined she had been happy. It was not this man she missed, it was his letters - so tender and so respectful. She had no need of him; she needed to wait for the post. Her disappointment went through two phases, both equally familiar: one phase during which she wrote poetry, and a second phase during which she took to religion. The day she spoke of entering a convent, her father rushed round to the Dandillots. At first Charles Dandillot stood on his high horse: he did not like sourpusses, and his desire had waned. But the little goose's golden eggs smelt good, and a few weeks later one more 'eternal couple' was born. Nénette and Rintintin for ever!

Her youth whisked away, and her life as a woman completely null. But how our love can sustain us! If a person's life, however null, embodies a love for his children, that is enough: his life is fulfilled and justified in his own eyes. The person is never more poignantly aware of this than at the crucial hour, in the face of death. At that moment, all the great problems and pretensions of his existence, all that he has built up, his 'message' if he had one, seem to him derisory. But the fact that he loves, and the object of his love, do not appear derisory. They endure terrifyingly, with all their power for good and evil, while the pillars of the temple crumble. Mme Dandillot loved her daughter, and was saved. At the summit of the hierarchy of love, one would doubtless have to place the love of a father for his son, if such a love existed. But it does not exist, or rarely: men are usually too preoccupied, and moreover too dense, to pay attention to their sons otherwise than in a rough and absent-minded way; boys are only really loved by a few born educators and a few pederasts of the better sort. So that it is in a mother's love for her daughter that we see the most perfect form of human love.

For the third time that night, Mme Dandillot awoke. And instantly, with a sublime impulse, her dawning consciousness pounced upon the person of her daughter, as though some sort of right of occupancy were at issue there which it was vitally important to establish. It was not total consciousness, however, but those confused moments wherein, like river and sea at the bar, those two equally formidable adventures, sleep and wakefulness, meet and mingle and grapple with each other. Her heart was beating with morbid violence. The memory of some family keepsakes she had found in a cupboard the day before came back to her, moistening her eyes: they had reminded her of desertion and loneliness, harbingers of the desertion and loneliness of her daughter. And her whole day had been filled with a sense of inferiority: a visit to the hairdresser for another of those perms that never stayed put; a visit to the dressmaker for one of those two-thousand-franc outfits that never suited her. Suddenly, from this gelatine of bitterness, something broke loose - a certainty, an absurd, blazing certainty: Solange had gone. Gone? ...Where? Why? Between the moment when the two women had kissed each other goodnight ('If you get into a sweat tonight and want to change, call me. If you change all by yourself, you're bound to catch cold') and now, Solange had dressed, hurriedly collected her things, and left the house. Mme Dandillot switched on the light, got up, and walked distractedly to her daughter's room. On the way, she kissed one of Solange's coats which was hanging on the wall, burying her face in it for a moment.

Solange, too, was awake in the dark. (Both needed a little happiness to bring them back their sleep.) She recognized her mother's form. The form came up to the bed: 'Is that you?'

'No, Mummy, it isn't me!

'I thought you'd gone.'

'Gone?'

'Yes, that you'd got up and dressed and left with your suitcase.'

'Mummy! Are you going a bit mad?'

'I think I am … Let me kneel beside your bed without saying anything, just touching you with my hand to make sure you're there...Why are you putting on the light?' (smiling)

'Yes, it's you. I recognize you now. You're my only daughter.'

'But of course!'

'What would your father have said if he'd seen a light under your door at this hour? When I used to read after eleven, I was sure to see him come in and ask: "Can't you sleep?" Since you're awake, won't you make room for me beside you? I'd like to be warm.'

'You know I haven't enough warmth even for myself.'

'It's not really to be warm, it's just to be near you.' (She settled in.) 'Have you been awake long?'

'I don't know. I woke up once at a quarter past twelve, then at two o'clock, and then just now.'

'I woke up at exactly the same times. I've noticed before that we nearly always wake up at the same time. It's strange. ...You haven't got a pain anywhere, have you?'

'Of course not! Oh, please don't worry about me the whole day long. A few minutes ago I'd "gone"; now I'm supposed to have a pain somewhere ... '

'Your father used to say that the whole world would be full of milksops if one always imagined that the people one loves are about to be run over. Personally I think that if anyone who loves another person stops imagining they're about to be run over, well, it simply means they don't love them so much.'

Slipping her hand under her daughter's arm, she felt the crook of the elbow, in which the nocturnal perspiration of sickly people (which had seeped through the night-dress) stagnated like damp in a fold of the ground where the sun never penetrates; looked at the veins of the fore-arm which had exactly the same contours as her own, as though they had been traced from hers; and placed her other hand over Solange's forehead, as if to gather up and expel the evil spirits. 'To think that, behind this forehead, nothing has ever been or will ever be conceived against me!' This person - this face and body - who for her was the most precious thing in the world, was the same person who made Costals yawn with boredom; the same person whom thousands of men and women passed or jostled in the street with indifference; the same person for whose body other men would have risked damnation, without loving her soul: all and nothing, supreme and defenceless. Solange was in the habit (which is that of all Arabs and many Spaniards) of sleeping always with her mouth covered, even in summer. Mme Dandillot recognized from its dampness the place where the sheet had been resting on her daughter's mouth, and buried her face in it with a little moan. She was 'Nénette', she was the 'police horse': and yet at this moment she reached the summit of all that was truly strong in her, all that was most valid. Solange looked with pity at this face, slightly swollen by sleep, in which the pouches under the eyes had sunk, like the pouches under the eyes of cockatoos, and the lines of which were criss-crossed by the creases of her pillow - and the pathetic expression of avidity and exhaustion which that gesture had suddenly given it. It is well known that desire, in the instant of gratification, assumes the mask of death; it must be said that maternal tenderness, on occasion, can assume it too. Mme Dandillot let her head fall back on the bolster (her daughter was on the pillow) and lay silent. Then she said: 'My little darling.... What else need I say to you when I've said that?' After a while she must have come down from the heights to which love had borne her for an instant, for she said (her eyes raised towards the arch of the ceiling):

'There are flaws in the wall-paper. [It was new wall-paper put up during the alterations made to the flat after M. Dandillot's death (Author's note).] Your father would never have allowed that. He may have been this and he may have been that, but as a hanger of wall-paper he hadn't an equal. At Limoges he hung a frieze in the drawing-room that took up a whole roll of it, all in one piece, and without a hitch.'

'Your father,' always 'your father'. Alive, he counted for nothing. Now that he was dead, they spoke of him constantly. To contradict him, of course. But often to praise him too.

Mme Dandillot took her daughter's hand and raised her arm, and the two fore-arms, joined, swung together with melancholy grace.

'If life could be just that - lying beside you without stirring, without having to go out, or order meals, or dress. You know I went round to Janine. But, it's funny, the older I get, the more difficult I find it is to choose. I used to look all right in any old thing more or less. I remember a blue satin blouse I made for myself in '16, which suited me so well. I was so proud when people asked me: "Where did you buy that blouse?" I always remember how pleased I was when the Curé of Pontorson asked me if I lived in Paris - and I was wearing my blouse that day! To be taken for a Parisian! And with no make-up!'

She laid her head on Solange's shoulder, with another little moan. Her head rose with each breath, like a boat lifted by the gentle respiration of the sea. At the other end of the room, beside the radiator, the two cats, mother and daughter, slept in one another's paws.

'I would like to give my life for you.'

'But, Mummy, what good would that do?'

'To think that that pig is chasing chamois in the Atlas. [Chamois in the Atlas?...(Author's note)]  while you. 'Why do you call him a pig now? Three weeks ago, you said he was a "likeable brute". That was much better.'

'I call him a pig because he makes my little daughter unhappy.'

'Oh! please don't let's talk about that.'

'This afternoon I was looking for some curtains in the big cupboard, and I opened some boxes. Goodness, what gloomy things I found! Your grandmother's wedding ring, my wedding veil, your first tooth...But to cap everything, I came across your baby clothes. The size of a bottle, you were, when you were born; yes, just about the size of a litre bottle. Your father used to say: "The only thing to do is to call her Flea. Flea Dandillot." We had to buy your clothes in a toy-shop: doll's clothes. Did you tell him that, the chamois hunter?'

'Yes.'

'What did he say?'

'Nothing....' [In fact Costals had said: 'I see. It must have been a walking doll' (Author's note).]

'That doesn't surprise me; Southerners have no heart. I always remember the day of your christening. They were celebrating downstairs, and they'd forgotten all about me, in bed in my room. I cried. After all, not to have even thought of bringing me a glass of grenadine! So I sent out for a bottle of champagne, so as not to have to ask your father for anything. A little later he came up and found me in tears. "God, how stupid you are! We thought you were asleep".

'The day you came into the world I was also abandoned like a poor old dog. Your grandmother hadn't wanted to make the journey because of the snow! Always some excuse! Your father said: "All will be well." What did he know about it, I ask you? When your Aunt Charlotte arrived....'

Suddenly she was silent, like a little musical box which has jammed, and stops dead in the middle of its refrain. 'Are you asleep?' she asked. No answer. She switched on the light. Solange was sleeping, a little saliva at the corner of her mouth; while her mother had been meandering on, fleet-footed sleep had brushed across her face. How vast the darkness of the night is, how silent the earth, when one watches a loved one sleep! He who is obsessed by the disparity inherent in every object, and who seeks to discover therein one of the keys to the mystery of nature, must be moved to meditate on human tenderness, which is at once the height of anxiety and the height of repose. Mme Dandillot reposed in Solange, as Costals, at the end of his wanderings, always came to rest in thoughts of his son; now there was no difference between Costals and Mme Dandillot. Had they but known, they might have smiled at each other across their barriers; but they were searching elsewhere. Their two tender melodies drew near to one another, ran side by side, without ever meeting. Mme Dandillot looked at her daughter's hands, so thin that they seemed scarcely wider than her wrists, like a monkey's hands. She had an impulse to join her own hands in a prayer: 'O God, make my daughter recover from all this!', but by a not unfamiliar mechanism of substitution (which would be worth expatiating on), it was Solange's hands that she joined. No sooner had she seen her daughter with her hands joined on her breast, than she imagined her dead. She put her hand on that breast, and felt it rising and falling faintly. Then she turned off the light and lay back on the bolster. Her daughter had heard all these stories a hundred times - the doll's clothes, the bottle of champagne, the grandmother who would not put herself out because of the snow - and yet the fact that she had fallen asleep while her mother was talking to her took on a sinister significance in Mme Dandillot's mind: yes, Solange really had 'gone', as she had feared; yes, she had indeed been abandoned once more. Mme Dandillot no longer dared lay her head on her daughter's shoulder, for fear of waking her, and yet she was filled with an immeasurable hope that she would wake, that she would 'come back'; and she had to struggle with herself in order not to provoke that wakening. A few minutes went by in this way, and then she thought of her recent tears. They were waiting. Her throat tightened, her eyes misted over, and they began to flow again.

17

During February and March, Costals nomadized and hunted in the Fez region and in the Atlas. An Arab proverb says: 'A lone traveller is a devil'. He is also a saint. The long solitude, the manifold ordeals, the faces and landscapes that brush past you without ever sinking in, the enforced submission to nature's ever-disquieting dictates - what a retreat!

Lobel kept him posted. The new examination of the nasal mucus had confirmed the original diagnosis. Rhadidja was having treatment at Tighremt. She wrote once to Costals (through an Arab café proprietor in Casablanca, as she always did, so that no one at Tighremt should know she was writing to a Frenchman). The letter began: 'I am writing to let you know that I am in good health.' There's nothing like knowing, as they say. The letter passed on forthwith to other matters.

Costals still wrote regularly to Solange. Unlike most men, who are prepared to assuage all the sorrows of the world except those they themselves have caused, he wanted her to suffer as little as possible. He wanted her to make a soft landing in a smiling landscape: that of her new life, her engagement and marriage to another man - Tomasi no doubt. He was reluctant to tell her a truth she would be unable to bear. He sought to persuade her that his affection was still alive, when in fact it was not: sometimes it is this that is called fidelity. 'The greatest proof of love I ever gave you was to leave you.' (This was pure humbug, and he knew it.) 'My love for you has blossomed in an extraordinary way now that there's no longer a zero hour' (the hippogriffical hour). 'What can I do for you?' (Certain savage tribes honour the heads of their decapitated enemies.) He wanted her to believe that he was unhappy ('I cannot find the peace and freedom for my work which I came to seek here'), when he was not suffering at all except from acting this part. This play-acting did not come easily to him, and at times it gave him a slight feeling of disgust. As he filled his letters with endearments, it sometimes struck him that the paper ought to tear under his nib in protest against the abuse of these fine phrases, and to emphasize the chasm that exists between one and the same sentence when it springs from the depths of your soul and when it is an imposture. At the end of these letters, his writing quickened, became almost joyful: the horse scenting the stable. One day, however, having changed pens, he found that the sentiments came to him much more easily.

At all events, these letters - the drafts of which he filed in a portfolio marked Flute for my fiancée [Untranslatable pun. The phrase, in French, can also mean: 'To hell with my fiancée' (Translator's note).] (doubtless in allusion to Muslem weddings, which are always celebrated to the sound of flutes) - were the most touching he had ever sent her: it is well known that the most beautiful love-letters are those that have not been written sincerely. Nothing is less eloquent than real love. When Brunet flung his arms round his father's neck and covered him with kisses, saying: 'Do you love me a lot? More than last year? Do you think of me every day, or only every other day?' all Costals could think of in reply was: 'Of course I do, stupid.' Aware that this was not sufficiently warm, he tried to think of something more affectionate to add, and eventually embraced the brat with an 'I've never met such a stupid boy as you.' Such were this writer's powers of expression when he loved with all his heart. But when he did not love, the words came gushing out. 'How well you lie!' says Athene to Ulysses.

Toiling over these missives, not only did he have to struggle against his indifference towards Solange, but, mesmerized by his desire to do her harm, to punish her for the 'season in hell' which she had made him endure, he also had to struggle against this desire. Holding her thus at arm's length was killing. How he suffered, whenever he acted out of kindness! When future biographers of this author discover all he did when driven by the Daemon of the Good, they will include him in the Golden Legend, and since at that moment he will be in hell, it will be his greatest punishment to see himself beatified. He will roast twice over.

At the end of April, once more in the Atlas, he was the guest of the kaid of the Ait Arouen, a little fellow with a goatee beard, an Auvergnat mug, a crop of hair as wiry as his own sheep's wool, a bear-like gait; jovial, lecherous, an attacker of farms and adorer of planets and fire; in short, one hundred per cent bled-es-siba. [ Bled-es-siba: that part of Moroccan territory occupied by unsubdued tribes, outside the effective authority of the Sultan (Translator's note).]

One morning, as he was washing his hands before lunch, he suddenly stopped dead. On the outer surface of his right forearm there was a little patch. Exactly the reverse of Rhadidja's: a macula of discoloured skin, and around it a brownish halo.

He stripped, and examined as much of his body as he could (with a travelling mirror!). As far as he could see, there was nothing sinister.

He was surprised his face had not changed. How treacherous, to have leprosy without its showing on your face! He was also surprised that he was not more agitated.

Decision: get himself examined by Lobel as soon as possible. At lunch, on the pretext that a stupid oversight had made him forget that he was due in Marrakesh two days hence, he asked the kaid for a guide and a mule to take him to Souk et'Tnine, sixteen kilometres away, where he would no doubt easily find a bus or a car. That done, he ate, drank, talked, smoked, and belched as if nothing had happened: life must go on, after all. As if nothing had happened? Not exactly, for, exchanging dirty jokes with the kaid, he showed off a bit. This attitude was his first reaction to the threat.

Two hours later he was on his way. Then he began to think. Up to then he had not had the time.

'The spots begin mainly on the face and the extremities of the limbs.' This was a sentence he had noted in the medical manual.

What did it matter that only two months had elapsed since his last contact with Rhadidja - too short for the incubation period? It was perhaps two years earlier that she had infected him.

'How tragic it would be if one couldn't kill oneself. The absolute futility, the irreducible wickedness of physical suffering! But when I'm in a really bad way, and suffering too much, I'll kill myself. (That revolver I was so keen to lend to old Dandillot!) Say I have four to six years of lucidity in front of me - and getting them must be partly a question of willpower and organization. The only problem will be to balance, during this given period of time, my pleasure (as long as it remains possible), my work, and what I owe my son. On the work side, I shall have to conclude my opus, not where it would naturally have ended, but within the framework of the second chunk which is now in progress and which I should be able to finish if I organize myself properly; that would be the only way to conclude it without skimping it. As for Brunet, he'll be twenty when I die, so he can shift for himself. No, there really isn't any problem, except that of arranging my time even more carefully than I have up to now. I must ration myself with extreme care.

'I used to say, thinking of the next war: I must learn to dominate the war. Now: I must learn to dominate my disease.

'Unquestionably, it's painful to die at forty. But I might have died at twenty, in the war. I might have died a hundred times since the war, with the sort of life I lead. Leprosy makes me a condemned man, but no more immediately so than I already was without it.

'In another sense, this disease is a renewal of my life. A new element of interest in my life. My life loses in duration, but will gain in richness and variety, as well as being cleared of the dross which still encumbered it, in spite of my vigilant hunt after dross. Sudden death would have been fine. Death in six years' time is fine too; it gives me time to turn around. The awkward compromise would be death in two months' time: two months of useless consciousness, since two months is not enough time to sort oneself out.

'A good test. Enrichment of my experience of adversity, which was inadequate. I shall need all my humanity to face up to it.

'As for death itself, that is even less of a problem. If only they would stop bothering us about death. What will become of us after death? Sensible people don't ask such questions. They make an act of faith or they don't, and that's the end of the matter. Besides, even granting that death is something to "think" about, it will be time enough to think about it a week before I polish myself off. A healthy man doesn't think about his death until it's under his nose. Children talk of death as of a joke that never happens. There again, we should take a leaf out of their book.

'How right I've been to get a lot done! How right I've been to enjoy myself!

'During the war, I knew that from one minute to the next I might be killed, or disfigured, or maimed, or go mad. And yet, on the whole, I enjoyed myself in the war.

'This landscape is symbolic. Behind me, my life and all the people in it, like this animated valley. And in the background, my work, like the mountain. And I, a traveller hurrying against the night.'

His mule stumbled and recovered its footing on the steep track, battered by thousands of hoofs and buttressed by beams sunk into holes in the rock. The nag was led by an old man with a pale skin, a round, snowy head, and the calves of a ten-year-old child, while a younger man, unbelievably gorillalike, pulled its tail with the utmost energy. It was impossible to tell whether its tail was being pulled in order to encourage it or to restrain it; the whole secret seemed to be to pull the animal simultaneously forwards and backwards, and it was this that made it advance. O thou, Creator of the universe, how inscrutable are thy ways! The two guides worked themselves up with shouts full of vowels, which echoed and reverberated at every bend in the track. The whole landscape around them recalled those book illustrations for which the stingy publisher has instructed the artist: 'Don't use more than three colours.' The reddish pink of the soil. The white of the snow. The blue of the shadows on the flanks of the hills, and of the soft sky. On the slope of the mountain above them, forests of young trees were mirrored in the clouds. On the slope below, wadis had forgotten their mission in life ('wadis that have betrayed,' thought Costals, haunted as always by the act of betrayal) and had become tracks, littered with boulders and only distinguishable by their ribbons of oleander; and then a stream of red ice, like a stream of red-currant jelly or a trench full of freshly coagulated blood. Flocks of sheep, which were the very colour of drought, passed above their heads, flitting by like shadows, and the sheep-dog crunched the hardened snow. There were mummified shepherds who had been there for five thousand years. And grasshoppers, motionless too, and marked down by pneumonia, on the snow-clad bushes. And great white falcons wheeling and gliding with the grace of Egyptian dancers.

After an hour, as the sky changes, his inner sky changed too, clouded over a little. He felt a little afraid, not of his leprosy, but at seeing how he functioned in the opposite way to other people, in not being afraid (perhaps it was out of mere contrariness that, in circumstances where everyone would have been afraid, he had not been). He compared himself to that patient of Revault d'Allones, who seemed to see his life unfold without him, who no longer reacted, and went to ask the doctor to restore his lost feelings. Always out of line, always the dissenter, always bled-es-siba, like the old kaid. 'Inhuman?'

Aware, too, that in not being more afraid, he was being cheated of something. No doubt, as regards 'character', his insensitivity was a gain. But still, the fact remained that he was cheated of fear. (As he was cheated of jealousy with women, not being jealous by temperament: which was honourable in terms of reason, but was also a loss, after all.)

His spirits began to warm up a little - was it an instinctive reaction, to make good this deficiency?

'We laugh, we play the fool with Nature. She lets us be. We tease and provoke her some more, we pull the tail of Cybele's lioness. Whereupon, with one blow of her paw, she splits our heads open, and it serves us right. We provoke the sea by showing off with all our ships and submarines. It goes on like that for years, and then one day we sink to the bottom, and it serves us right. The airman provokes the sky, and one fine day, without fail, the sky will lose patience with this infant and his puff-puff. His aeroplane crashes, and it serves him right. Nature has punished me in whatever sphere I have provoked her. My passions have always been of the kind one pays for in one's body: war, adventure, love affairs, dangerous company. I pay. When Mephisto, in Faust, bursts out in sores all over, it's because he has gazed too long at the backsides of the angels.

'From that point of view, it was really rather scandalous that I hadn't had a dose of the pox, considering the way I live. From another point of view, it was clearly an inadequacy in my personality. Two lacks: the pox and the law-courts. Now we have something much better.

'If I'm cured, what a lesson it will have been for me! A lesson? My life will go on exactly as before.'

They passed the ruins of a massive kasha of red earth, full of the melancholy of power that is no more. Screeching like tom-cats, crows wheeled above the sleeping forests as though they took them for fabulous herds. The silken beat of their wings made a sort of rhythmical hissing sound, very like the sound of a panting dog.

'Leprosy. Like the kings and the Popes. And like the conquistadors. It's odd, the ancestry of an anomaly is always a fine one.

'Morbus sacer, that too. The Greeks, who in certain epochs tended towards the neuropathic, used to render divine honours to disease, "provided it was really powerful". Leprosy would have merited these honours.

'Trace all the great lepers in history.

'"Without the camp" - the curse upon lepers, as formulated in the Bible. But have I ever been anywhere else but without the camp?

'A heart painted on my tunic, like the lepers of the Middle Ages: symbol of the heart I lack, according to women. And the anaesthesia of the skin, symbol of my so-called (partially true) moral anaesthesia...But all this is literature, unless I'm utterly mistaken.'

Urchins went by, hooded like the infant Harpocrates depicted on Hellenistic terracottas; and sturdy, impudent-looking little girls, unveiled, but putting their hands vaguely over the lower half of their faces as they passed.

'Pack of trollops. Not Rhadidja. Nor Jeanneton, nor Marina, nor La Fleur. But the rest of them. Now we'll have some fun: I'll bung the whole lot of them full of leprosy, the sluts. For we must still enjoy our pleasures. So kiss my spots, sweetheart: they're birth-marks. "Lepers seek oblivion in an intense sexual life" - another sentence from the medical text-book. Infect the entire globe - that would be something to be proud of. Where did I read about a consumptive who spat in his wife's soup, so as not to be the only one to croak? [Cited by Dr Fiessinger (Author's note).]

'I was surprised I wasn't more upset. It's the memory of the evil I've done that prevents me from suffering.

'If only the human race could perish with me! To be able to tell myself on my death-bed that in dying I'm not losing a single person!

'Malebolge.

'I'm sure that after a time I shall wonder how I managed to live without it. One gets used to everything. I'm sure one gets used to hell.

'And let's not forget our work, damn it! Job, leprous on his dung-hill, joins Mme Roland in the tumbril [In the tumbril taking her to the guillotine, Mme Roland asked for paper to write down her impressions (and was refused) (Author's note).] when he cries: "Who will provide me with the wherewithal to write my dissertations? Who will give me the means to transcribe them in a book?" That was Job's ultimate regret - not having a fountain-pen. He ought to be the patron of men of letters. We'll write a novel about leprosy, if we have a little time to spare. And our ultima verba, of course. Besides, writing one's ultima verba is enough to prevent one from dying. And our complete works bound in sterilized leper's skin - the skin cuttings were such pretty colours in Lobel's book. And I trust they'll write theses about us - lepers stimulate literary men. Maistre and le Lépreux de la cité d'Aoste, Huysmans and Sainte Lygdwine de Schiedam, and that prototype of the bogus masterpiece by a bogus genius, la Jeune fille Violaine.'

He saw that dusk was falling, and thought: 'What do the changes in nature amount to compared to the change that is taking place in my body at this moment?' On the horizon, the mountains grew blurred and disappeared; now there was nothing to be seen but the snow on the summits, like shrouds suspended in the sky. Then everything changed again; the mountains reappeared, grape-purple and pink in colour, and in those high places dedicated to nature-worship there began the daily sacrifice of the Sun. The silence was total. No more beasts, no more birds, no other life but that of the immeasurable winds; or the tiny sounds of the snow or of a stone coming loose and rolling down the embankment of the track, or of a dead branch breaking off like a warning. For a moment, through a break in the clouds, a ladder of gold descended on to purple rocks. For a moment, in a valley, a lake could be seen, of a violet so intense it might have been a vast bed of violets. Then, suddenly, all was shadow, and the spirits emerged from the dark mountains.

Sure, now, of arriving before nightfall at Souk et'Tnine, no more than a kilometre away, Costals dismounted and dined off the fruit, cakes and milk which the kaid had given him of his poor riches. These substances, having reached his belly, helped to modify his attitude to life. His first reaction to the threat had been one of calm, partly because his lunch had bolstered him up. Then, exhausted and weakened by the hard journey, and his stomach having emptied, he had indulged in a bout of confused exaltation: his defence against the terrible reality had then been the one we all turn to - the impulse Andrée Hacquebaut had had when she decided he was an invert, or when she persuaded herself that he loved her, the impulse he himself had already had when he sought to gild the pill of marriage by systematically working himself up in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is our natural bent that saves us from everything. In times of trial, the man of pleasure takes refuge in pleasure; the man of imagination, if he can convince himself that the ordeal he is living through was once faced by men who inspire him, takes a liking to it. 'Men are troubled, not by things, but by opinions about things,' says the Ancient. Yes, but what saves them, too, are opinions about things. Costals, with his romanticism, had attempted to construct a world in which he would not suffer unduly, and he had succeeded, for human nature is extremely well adapted; one has only to manipulate it with a little intelligence. Now, fortified by rest and food, he had recovered his original serenity. The supposed benefits of his disease had reinstated themselves in the foreground of his consciousness: an interesting experience, a better use of the time that remained to him, his life concentrated on essentials. 'That which is noble in my nature is safe,' says Mephisto, while his body bursts with sores.

Meanwhile they were descending the last slope of the mountain, returning to the human world, the gentle world of humanity, and Costals felt the same emotion he had once felt on a scorching August day in Paris (in the place de la Bourse) when an itinerant pedlar had proffered some violets: violets! an evocation of cool winter in the midst of this furnace! Unleashed waters resumed their course, with the delicious roar of distant artillery; the night was full of invisible running water. Invisible? Here was a stream whose sinuous coils, as of a bludgeoned viper, shimmered in the darkness; here were waterfalls, grandiose by virtue of the rocks and heights from which they fell, charming because they looked like long sparkling oriflammes or the unfurled tails of Arab horses. The moon had appeared, flanked by tiny Venus (like an ox flanked by an ox-pecker bird), and the constellations glittered on the further slope, like snow crystals in the sun. A vast sky inlaid with bright forms, a night wreathed in whispers and voices. In sight of the first lights of Souk et'Tnine (there was a dog running behind him, whose course down the slope he could only guess by the noise of the stones it sent rattling down); in sight of the first lights of Souk et'Tnine (there was an insomniac bird that uttered a shriek of connivance); in sight of the first lights of Souk et'Tnine, Costals had a thought that was a little strange, but full of peace: 'After all, it's only me who's dying.'

18

Costals arrived at the front door of the Marrakesh hospital, and went past without entering. He was funking it. 'It's five past nine. At twenty past nine I shall know I'm done for.' Then he rapidly retraced his steps, and with a smile of resentment and fortitude, went in and asked for Lobel.

When Lobel arrived, they went into his office. Costals took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt-sleeve, and showed his forearm without a word. He was still smiling, but it was a different smile, a quizzical smile as if to say: 'You must admit it's genuine all right, and that you didn't expect it.'

Lobel bent down and scrutinized the spot, while Costals watched him intently. 'This is the moment when he'll lie to me. I wouldn't be a writer of psychological novels if I couldn't see through him now.' But the doctor's face remained sealed.

'No other marks on your body?'

'Not so far as I could see.'

At the hotel, he had not dared to examine his body for fear of discovering more marks, like a consumptive who does not dare examine his spittle.

'You haven't been blowing your nose more than usual? No tingling sensation at the tips of your fingers?'

'No.'

A pause. Ah! this was the moment of truth. 'How is he going to break it to me? Probably he'll say: "No definite symptoms, but you'd better have some treatment, in case...." What! he's putting his hand on my arm. That must mean that he's about to come clean. He wants to give me courage.' Costals felt himself turn pale inside. Passionately he murmured the prayer from his childhood missal, giving it a human meaning: 'Say but the word and my soul shall be saved.'

Lobel said:

'The thing is, you see, you're a very nice chap ... but you haven't an appointment, have you?'

Silence.

'I wouldn't want to keep you waiting. And I can't see you for another hour. Have you anything you need to do in Marrakesh?'

'No, I haven't anything to do in Marrakesh,' said Costals. glum and icy. At the same time he was thinking: 'The brute makes soothing noises, like all doctors; only I've got leprosy. If the spot wasn't suspect, he would already have laughed in my face. And if it is suspect, then that's that.'

Lobel calculated aloud, and then: 'I can see you in forty minutes. Wouldn't you like to look around the town. Marrakesh is quite picturesque, after all.... Oh, of course, it's not the same sort of thing as the Eiffel Tower.... '

'He'll drive me mad with his Eiffel Tower.' Costals allowed himself to be led to the door, and went out.

'Would he talk about sight-seeing to a man when in forty minutes' time he was going to tell him he had leprosy? Why not? Before telling D. he had cancer, the doctor made him sign some limited editions of his books.

'So I'm a "nice chap"! And if he had read a eulogistic article about me by the most stupid academician, he'd be calling me cher maître. But he's never heard of me, and so, as he can only judge me by my face, he tells me I'm a nice chap - in other words that I'm a half-wit. And indeed that is what I must be. "Nice" to Solange. "Nice" to Andrée Hacquebaut. "Nice" to Rhadidja.'

Never would Costals forget those forty minutes killing time in Marrakesh: they were enough to cure him of Africa for the rest of his life. 'Sometimes it's the world that is the theatre of an imminent unknown: the eve of a revolution. This time it's inside my body that the catastrophe is brewing. And there's nothing I can do but look on - until the revolver shot. But can I even count on that? X. and Y., who tried to kill themselves while there was still a tiny glimmer of hope for them, and failed, never dared make another attempt - they both admitted it to me - when they knew the game was up.' As the appointed hour drew near, his anxiety increased. He remembered a friend who, telephoning to hear the result of a Wassermann test, took care to put the call through from a café, with a glass of rum at hand which he could gulp down at once if the result was 'positive' and he felt himself about to pass out. After thirty-five minutes, Costals could bear it no longer and returned to the hospital.

He was led through a room full of terrifying appliances. 'What a waste!' he thought. 'One would be enough to make me confess.'

Lobel stuck a bit of tin-ware up his nose, pawed his hands knowingly, and gave him a few of those taps on the knee with a hammer that children find so comic. Then he examined the macula. 'Close your eyes.' He tickled him on the spot and all round it with a sort of pin. 'Can you feel anything?' The man who knows. Who may be coarse, vulgar, ignorant, dishonest. But who knows. And the man in front of him, who may be a man of the highest intelligence and refinement, but who nonetheless says to him: 'I am in your hands.' Religion demands that this should also be man's attitude towards the priest. But the priest is a charlatan, whereas the doctor really knows. Costals, standing there, grave in his surrender and passivity, had already gone beyond. Beyond what? Beyond his will. He was no longer master of himself.

More tickling. 'Can you feel anything?' Costals in his agitation answered a little haphazardly. It seemed to him at times that it was his body that was insensitive whereas the macula was sensitive: surely that was not how it ought to be. In the same way, when Lobel tested the patch for heat and cold with some scruffy little tubes, Costals at once confused hot and cold - just as, long ago, as a boy, when the riding-master commanded: 'Right!' our young genius forthwith pulled the reins to the left.

'Undress.'

A little laugh.

'If you were a Spanish lady I'd tell you to keep your underclothes on. I never make Spanish women undress. I don't want my native attendants to see how dirty a European woman can be.'

When the examination was over:

'Are you obliged to stay in Morocco?'

'Not at all.'

'Well, go back to Paris without delay. The more detailed examination I should have to give you would take several days. But there's no point in starting anything here (starting, noted Costals), because if you require treatment - which, I hasten to say, is highly unlikely - you would have to have it in Paris. Here, we're not all that well equipped for research.'

'He didn't tell me that when we talked about Rhadidja,' Costals thought. 'Although I asked him to treat her as he would treat me. No, Arab, in other words anima vilis: nothing to be done about that.' He did not realize that, in advising him to leave, Lobel was mainly concerned with getting rid of somebody who might be a nuisance. Then, shamefacedly, like a man asking his mistress, 'Do you love me?' he asked: 'Well?'

'It's quite impossible to make a diagnosis. As far as I can judge after such a cursory examination, you have none, I repeat, none of the primary symptoms of Hansen's disease. Only that spot is suspect. But that could be dermatitis, it could be vitiligo, it could be all sorts of things. Marrakesh is the paradise of skin diseases. It seems most improbable to me that leprosy should declare itself three months after a contact. I've never known a case, I've never heard tell of a case, where incubation was as rapid as that. It's true that we're rarely confronted with first symptoms. In fact we only have fairly advanced cases to deal with...And then, if you have contracted the disease, it could have been from an earlier contact. Rhadidja might have been in incubation all these last years.'

Costals told himself that there must surely be important questions to ask, but although he had been alerted for twenty-four hours (if not for three months) he was caught off guard and did not know what they were.

An assistant came in and murmured something to Lobel. The door remained open, revealing European patients waiting outside, huddled together on narrow benches like prisoners in a police station - Spaniards holding black caps between their hairy fingers, Italian women who seemed to have three or four breasts, with infants sucking at each of them like rivers sucking at the sea.

Lobel picked up an X-ray photograph from the table and held it up to the light.

'Look at that!' he said. 'What a beautiful picture!'

'What is it?' asked Costals, outraged that Lobel should take an interest in someone other than him, and leave him so quickly.

'A cancer of the stomach.'

'The chap's done for?'

'And how! But you must admit it's a fine picture.'

'Medicine's all very well,' said Costals, pulling on his trousers. 'Saving lives! But what for? A plaintiff or a defendant in a criminal case has scarcely finished wringing our hearts by the justice of his cause before we discover that he too isn't worth bothering about. It's the same with patients; how many of them are worth curing? When they're sick they're likeable enough; the virulence of their stupidity is abated. But when they're cured! And what will they do with that precious life you restore to them?'

'Oh! if we thought like that! Besides, the job keeps us on our mettle.'

'It seems to me that medical murder must be a terrible temptation. ... It has sometimes occurred to me during a rough sea voyage that if the ship sunk I should die more easily if I knew that a hundred and fifty human beings were perishing at the same time.'

'Seriously?' said Lobel. For him, such sentiments existed only if unexpressed. 'No, no, really, that won't do at all,' he added with a smile. Costals was trying to do up his tie without much success, there being no mirror in the room. 'Come to the window,' said Lobel. One of the shutters, closed to keep out the strong sun, made a foil behind the window-pane.

'Once when I was staying in a strange town I had to have some injections from a doctor I didn't know. After these injections, I discovered that he was a devout Catholic, a member of the St Vincent de Paul society, and a regular communicant. I may tell you I hesitated whether to let him give me the rest of my injections.'

'I don't understand....'

'Yes, if he had discovered that I was a sworn enemy of the Catholic Church...He could have put anything he liked into the injections.'

'You certainly have a flattering idea of doctors and Catholics!'

'St Paul, having cited one of Jesus' sayings, adds "... for he knew what was in man". I too know what is in man.'

'Believe me, doctors often know it far better than literary men,' said Lobel, rising to his feet. 'That's it, he's showing me the door,' thought Costals. 'And yet we were just moving into a territory where we might have touched on important things. But there it is, he doesn't take to me; and between doctor and patient there must be some degree of mutual sympathy.' Ah! where were the beloved doctors of the urinary tract, who were always so cordial, who slapped you on the back and called you 'Old boy' the very first time they had dealings with you, who told you dirty stories and saw you off with the time-honoured jokes of eternal France: 'Only the third time? ... Now if it had been the sixth or the seventh! ...' or else: 'Now all you have to do is go and catch it again' (and even the humble eight-hundred-francs-a-month assistant, opening the door when you rang, would insist on telling you then and there: 'I must put your mind at rest at once. It's negative ...'). With all those people, disease became almost a feat; there's something about a dose of clap that reminds one of a citation for gallantry. But as for Lobel, Costals took his leave of him with that sensation of being of no importance, of being abandoned, that he felt whenever he came away from his publisher's office.

As the thought that 'they can put what they like into injections' had stuck in his mind, and Rhadidja would be remaining in Lobel's care, he took out his cheque book. 'I should be glad if you'd accept, for the hospital ... ' There are times, when one gives away money, when something inside one weeps. Not at 'forking out', but because it is so useless.

Costals came out of the hospital visibly affected. He felt physically incapable of smiling even had he wanted to; there was sweat on his forehead although the heat was moderate and very dry. No longer were there Europeans, Arabs, Negroes in the street, no longer any differences of nationality or race or class; only one great difference - between those who were diseased and those who were not. However, as he was being driven to the post office in a barouche to pick up his mail, he fell into one of those pointless rages with the native driver that are proper to a man in good health. 'Even if my body was falling to pieces, by God! that wouldn't prevent me from being the boss.' Which, translated into imperial language, came out as: 'I've got one foot in the grave, but that still leaves me one to kick you up the a— with!'

But back at his hotel, suddenly, it was the moment when the sick man panics - a moment as easy for the doctor to discern as is for the spectator the moment when a boxer is groggy or the moment when a runner cracks up. A horrible temptation to bury himself in the book on leprosy, and at the same time a fear of doing so. 'I'll open it again when I'm feeling better, when I'm strong enough to face the awful things I shall read in it.' He stood at the table, his eyes staring blankly, suddenly dumbfounded, shattered by the thought that he was not immortal. Was it he who, yesterday at the same hour, had greeted the discovery of the spot with equanimity? Was it not a dream? How could he have? How had he functioned at that moment? As astounded at having for a moment been serene in the face of death as he was astounded, these past few days, at having been able to live with his son far away. The fact that man is incomprehensible we know, not from other men, but from ourselves. How can one welcome the end of earthly enjoyment with equanimity? Yet those who do so - 'heroes', 'sages', 'saints' - are legion: dying 'well', the supreme vulgarity. Why, they're simply unhinged. After all, they may perhaps be men for whom life is insipid. The tragedy is not the loss of life but the loss of happiness. If there were no happiness there would be no fear of death. That is the ultimate punishment of the happy, the ultimate revenge of the 'vale of tears' school: the infallible prescription for dying without horror is to have been sick of life. Costals was paying for having enjoyed life madly, and for wanting to still. It was the existence of beautiful creatures that made him a coward, divine faces that gave him such horror of non-being. 'To think that I shall never see all that again!' Then he remembered a sentence he had written in one of his books: 'I shall not die, for my passions hold me to the earth.' It was his passions that were casting him out of this earth, yet it was to them still that he turned to keep him there. It was from them, and them alone, that he wished to receive all that was good and all that was evil.

His thoughts drifted towards his work. 'I bequeath to the world something that is dear to it,' said the dying Byron. As for him, he would bequeath to the world something against which the world had never ceased to protest. Yesterday he had thought that four more years of life would give him time to finish at least the slice of work on which he was at present engaged. Illusion! Under the shadow of death and physical pain and gradual debilitation, a man may write a few scattered pages, but he cannot produce a finished work. Thus, for want of a few years, he would leave behind an incomplete and unworthy picture of himself. (And what joy his disappearance would give to his fellow-writers! Ah! that alone should be enough to keep him alive!) However, this regret tormented him less than regret for lost pleasures - and one other regret...For at this moment his mind turned towards his pleasures, towards his work, and also towards his son: the only three things that had mattered to him in life.

His son! 'What will become of him? What happens to someone who has no one to love him?' The blow was so sharp that he put his hand over his eyes. It was always the same: a life in which reason was supreme, that is to say a life of non- suffering; but it was enough for him to care for a single being, and his soul was plunged into anxiety and servitude. 'It's horrible to love someone,' he blurted out aloud. 'Ah! why did I bring him into the world! Without him, and without him alone, I would have gone through life like an invulnerable dragon....' In accordance with his habit of jotting down there and then every emotional experience, he wrote on a blank page of one of the letters he had just collected: 'I remember that day last April when I went to see my son in Cannes and stayed at (the name of a grand hotel) because there were builders working in the house. I remember that beautiful morning when we sat on a bench in the garden of the hotel. Everything was in flower; a hose fluttered its quavering comet's tail over the red tennis court; the blue distances flaunted their villas hanging there like apples of power and happiness. My son was sitting on my left, reading a booklet describing the eleven scientific ways of drowning oneself according to the rules with a skiff one has built oneself - his feet on a garden chair, his head resting on my shoulder, and from time to time butting me like a young goat. When a breeze blew a cloud of spray over his face from another near-by hose, he shut his eyes and smiled. I said to him: "Do behave yourself! The gardeners can see you." And he, pouting like a badly brought-up child of the rich, replied: "Well, you pay enough here." ' Costals stopped writing. In evoking this memory he had been trying to clutch at something that would show his son in a bad light, looking for an escape hatch through which to escape from the prison of loving him. And he could see that there was indeed a slightly vulgar side to him; but it was no use, he still loved him. It was him he would take to the grave with him, like one of those stone knights on their tombs with their little pages at their feet. 'No, no, I don't want to lose all that!'

Who would believe it? Those horrible tentacles and suckers he had grown in order to cling on to life eventually lost their strength and slackened their grip. One cannot sustain even the fear of death for long at a time; that subject, too, exhausts itself, like all the others. Then Costals opened his letters (all except one, from Andrée Hacquebaut, which he put away in his suitcase unopened) and sat down to answer them all conscientiously. He noticed how firm his handwriting was. 'For how much longer?' He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror, and was astonished to see how hard and energetic its expression was. He thought of what was behind it, and sniggered. Next day he sailed from Casablanca.

19

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Letter forwarded to Marrakesh.

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

17 March 1928

What childlike joy some women would retain until their hair was grey if they felt they were loved! You were so sweet four days ago, when we walked to the La Mutte crossroads together, that I feel quite revived. You forgave me the pain my last letter had caused you: the mistletoe reproaching the oak for preventing it from living its own life! In the three months since I started writing to you again, you could so easily have shown me, had you wanted to, that you were bored by me. You have not done so; therefore.... Anyway, heaven alone knows the pleasure I get from writing to you, the joy I've experienced through you during these three months. I watch over you as you watch over me. But watch over me well, I haven't yet had my full share of happiness. Perhaps, this time, you have accepted me for ever.... By the way, what is the significance of the heart I have only just noticed stamped inside the cover of those of your books which you sent me and which isn't on those I have bought? [This mark, made by the publisher, indicated that these were complimentary copies and could not therefore be sold (Author's note).]

I saw that you used one of my recent letters [This letter had not been opened by Costals (Author's note).] in your short story in Candide. I'm glad to come across myself in your writings, to think that, in creating them, you must have lived with me. And when you live with me like that, it makes me better, more of a woman.

A publicity van from the X store in Orleans came to Saint-Léonard the other day. What a mad desire I had to buy everything. I bought some boots. I'm crazy about my little boots. Booted and hacquebooted! And so rejuvenated! And you, when I took them off, you sat there holding one of them between your feet so caressingly, as though my foot were still inside it.

I've just been singing at the top of my voice a slow pre-war waltz, Amoureuse. Nothing releases me more than to sing madly some old refrain like that, in the most refrainish way possible.

Life is wonderful. Have I not got what I wanted? I wanted a unique place in your heart. Ah! how delicious it would be if I were a young widow with a flat in Paris and...Oh, fiddlesticks!

This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

20

On arriving in Morocco, Costals had written to Solange: 'I must pay tribute to the excellent behaviour of the sea during the crossing.' No tribute on the return journey: it's a real calamity, this element.

The sea blotted out three quarters of the port-hole - sometimes the whole of it - and it was simply unbelievable that it did not shatter it: perhaps it recoiled from the human stench that accumulated in every cabin of a French liner. Costals drew the curtain over the port-hole: no submarine life for me. But the curtain had been designed in such a way (a thoughtful touch) that its swaying to and fro ensured that you were fully aware of the degree of the ship's roll. Costals roused himself from a bout of nausea and lurched to the notice-board where the number of his lifeboat would be indicated. But it was a French ship, so the number had not been filled in. As for the lifebelts, no question about it, they could be relied on to keep a man afloat - but upside-down, because the tapes were too long. However, all was well. A pity about that tenacious fly, though: a fly that hasn't paid for its passage, and isn't seasick either - ah! no, it's too much.

There was no question of thinking, but of hanging on, with a glance at his watch every quarter of an hour: 'Only eighteen hours more. In twenty minutes, only seventeen hours. No, we're bound to be late. To hell with these calculations.' Costals, his nose blocked, sneezed and snuffled and blew. Was it rhinitis, one of the symptoms of leprosy? Then, a little later, an armpit and the inside of one of his thighs began to itch. And pruritus often occurs in the early stages of leprosy. ...

The woodwork groaned. From time to time the whole ship quivered like a horse twitching its skin. At one moment.... that icy hand, it seemed to have lost all feeling. Costals pinched one of the fingers, and felt nothing. Sweat drenched his forehead. The anaesthesia of leprosy. Then the feeling in his hand returned. He realized that he had gripped the edge of the upper berth with that hand, and the blood had ebbed from it. But the cold in his head and the pruritus were still there.

At ten o'clock in the evening the sea calmed down a little. The agony ceased, and consciousness returned.

Consciousness.

It is difficult to appreciate the poets when your shoe is pinching. And the vast edifices of the soul come toppling down over a pitching ship, like a palace over an earthquake. Costals, having risen from that pocket of physiological misery, now collapsed into another pocket - of spiritual misery. There he found Christianity.

For anyone who has spent his childhood among Christians there is a good chance that later, whenever he feels frightened, Christianity will rise up in him again; until the day when, fortified by the power of ripe old age, he has finally eliminated the poison from his system. Costals did not hate Christianity. In order for him to hate this religion, it would have had to contaminate someone he loved. And everyone he loved was untouched by it. As for hating it as the religion of the 'enemies of the human race' (Tacitus), he was not sufficiently infatuated with the human race for that. He despised Christianity, nothing more. But, having been brought up in it, his memories enabled him to evoke it easily. And as a novelist he needed to make very little effort to put himself under the skin of a Christian: we have seen this with 'Marie Paradis'.

In the past few days he had contemplated his disease in a more detached way. Much good it had done him: now he was dreaming of how he might Christianize it! Oh! of course, there was no question of 'believing' - although he envied priests, whose faith must make them happy to die (assuming they have faith), but envied them as he envied animals, who he presumed (quite falsely) to have no fear of death. No, there was no question of believing. 'I wept and I believed' (Chateaubriand) remained in his eyes perhaps the most stupid remark in the whole of French literature. It was a question of toning up his ordeal by infusing it with a new kind of poetical substance. He would enter a lay order, retire to a monastery. A leper in the world is pitiful and horrible. But a leper who, thanks to his disease, rediscovers 'the path to the old altars', was both photogenic and elevating: a proved recipe, one of those clichés of the bogus-sublime, sure in its effect. The absurd respect manifested towards the histrionics of monasticism even by the majority of non-believers would reach new heights if the monk's cowl were to cover rotting sores. (It is worth noting that a consumptive who rediscovered 'the path to the old altars' would be of no interest at all.) Costals worked himself up over all this bric-à-brac. No, it could not be said that he was thinking of making a career in Catholico-Hansenian romance, as others in Judaeo-Iiturgical gush or in Pederas-thomism. But he toyed somewhat complacently with a possible 'persona'. It was the same process as at the Bibliothèque Nationale, when he had sought out stirring images about marriage which would make his own bearable. When he had gone skirmishing against Abd el-Krim as a volunteer, it was because he had worked out a formula for himself whereby the taste for adventure prevailed over the fear of death. Now he was working up a formula which would allow him to feel that it was a good thing to die of leprosy. In creating a persona for himself he was taking a hair of the dog that bit him; he was sinning through literature, but he was saving himself through his sin. And if a man as remarkable as Goethe, after having written 'There are four things that are as hateful to me as poison and snakes: tobacco smoke, bugs, garlic and the crucifix', could nevertheless dare to say later 'I would rather that Catholicism did me harm, than that I should be prevented from using it to make my plays more interesting', who could throw stones at one who dreamed of using Catholicism, not to make his works 'more interesting', but to make a leper's life more liveable? He was taking a dose of religion as one takes a dose of quinine.

There were also moments when he seriously believed his passion for coition would prevent him from having leprosy! 'When I get back to Paris and hold Guiguite in my arms, the disease that was taking shape inside me will be nipped in the bud. No, it's inconceivable that such a love of life should fail to get the better of death, it's inconceivable that a certain intensity of joy should fail to repel death.' At other times he thought (still quite seriously) that when he had made love to Guiguite or another once, once only, he would be ready to accept death. He remembered what a nurse had once told him about a badly wounded soldier who tore off his medals and yelled at her with a terrible look in his eyes: 'To hell with France. To hell with medals. All I want is one more f— before I croak.' (Might there not be women who would perform that function as a duty, for men doomed to die? Could not a charity be created for such a purpose? Or better still, why not an order of nuns who would specialize in this sublime form of charity?)

And here he was back in shabby old antiquated, ill-equipped France. No bootblacks, no taxis at the stations, no one to carry your luggage, cigarettes that go out all by themselves. Picard, his manservant, was not at the avenue Henri-Martin. Having gone back to his home in the country during Costals' absence, no doubt he had failed to receive in time the letter asking him to return to Paris. There was a hideous fusty smell in the flat, and a hint of stale tobacco (Picard must have been smoking there and forgotten to open the windows). And another atmosphere: that of a house in which someone has died and which has not been occupied since. And the same old neighbour behind her window. 'Another one who hasn't yet croaked!'

In these empty, dusty, funereal rooms, with their dirty window-panes and rolled-up carpets, another wave of cowardly weakness overcame him, as though the spectres of all the weakness and hysteria that for five months had plagued him here were now assailing him: here, the spirit of Solange took possession of him again. He did not have the heart to unpack, to add to the clutter in his study ('Mind you don't move anything, Picard'). He was cold: it was the 27th of April, the heating was turned off, and the season was hanging back. As was his habit, he stretched himself out on his bed.

It must be borne in mind that at this moment (1) he was a man faced, as far as he knew, with ten years of horrible and incurable disease; (2) his resistance had been lowered by the shock he had received in the Atlas and a day's journey over the mountains, partly on mule-back, followed almost immediately by an eight-hour bus-ride, by seventy-five hours of raging seas, and seven hours in a train; (3) that this cold and dilapidated flat oozed depression from every cranny; and (4) that the shade of Solange, which was omnipresent here, was for him a baleful presence. Small wonder, then, that, lying on his bed, he should give way to self-pity once more. And his cowardice, which on the boat had flowed quite naturally towards religion (whose phantasms had since been dispelled), here quite naturally flowed in the direction of woman. Woman the 'consolatrix'! Woman the 'guardian angel'! Absurd and pernicious preconception of the male, when all it amounts to is this: a defeated man - even if only momentarily defeated - taking refuge with the eternally defeated: the female. (In antiquity, defeat was equated with womanliness; certain peoples, to humiliate their vanquished enemy, branded him with a triangle representing the female organ.) And in what woman did Costals seek refuge? Aberration! He sought refuge in Solange. He turned towards the woman who had done him so much harm, as a dog that has been struck by its master seeks refuge by crawling at its master's feet.

He remembered a notice he had read mechanically in the corridor of the train: 'Admission to the compartments may be refused to persons whose infirmities are of such a nature as to inconvenience other passengers.'

Like a stone dropped into a well, he seemed to hear himself fall into the bottomless pit of eternity.

An absurd idea was germinating inside him, like weeds that spring up from impoverished soil. To support, help, nurse this man whose body would soon be in the throes of decomposition, who better than Solange? With Solange, no more necropolis-flats, no more of this solitude which terrified him at such moments as this: she had freed him from the spell of solitude. Oh, there was not much nobility in this impulse of his: Costals was giving Solange the look of gratitude he had given to a sympathetic steward when he was sea-sick; but a sick man puts nobility second. Would Solange be prepared to marry him now, knowing his condition? In any case he would put the question in a vague, hypothetical form: 'Would you marry a leper if it was a man you loved?' And he was convinced that her answer would be yes.

On this pillow-case where his head was now resting, surely their heads had touched. Solange was there, and he spoke to her: 'I fled from you twice after giving you hope, and you forgave me. I broke my word, and you forgave me. I mistrusted you and your mother. Now I am making an act of faith in human nature. I am putting myself in your hands. Do what you like with me.' And he ended with a typical invalid's phrase: 'I want to live with my head in your lap.'

For a moment he had a passionate desire for this marriage to take place, and as soon as possible. He got up and rushed to the telephone. She must come tonight! If she delivered her 'yes' that evening, how much stronger he would feel when he heard the other 'yes', his doctor's: 'Yes, you have the disease'! But the telephone was dead. It must have been cut off during his absence, because, away in the Atlas, he pretended not to know where to pay his bill. So he would have to go out and send a telegram. Solitude, at other times so dear, now wore the face of desertion.... Well then, having dressed and gone out, he would take the opportunity of fleeing from the necropolis. His bags were still unpacked. He would go to a hotel, at least until the following day.

At the hotel he wondered what to do. And then his strength reasserted itself (perhaps it was also because the room was clean and tidy). He went back to his work, as a cat goes back to the mouse to tease it a bit more. He settled down at a table and took up his manuscript again at the point where he had left it in the Atlas the day he had discovered the spot. As in the avenue Henri-Martin, when he was working serenely between two pre-nuptial affairs, everything else was obliterated. A man will believe that, were he to see hand-cuffs on his wrists, he would faint. When he has them on, not only does he not faint, but he realizes that it is perfectly possible to enjoy a drink with hand-cuffs on your wrists. In the same way Costals - convinced that sooner or later this writing hand would be a shrivelled stump, that pus would flow from his nostrils, that his genitals would rot away and drop off - scribbled and scratched out and devoted three minutes of his short life to finding the 'exact word'. When the telephone rang (Solange saying whether or not she was going to come), he made an impatient gesture.

After all, there are women, too, who take up their knitting, just like that, after a great upset...

21

Solange had resigned herself without any reservations to the fact that Costals was not going to marry her. Unfulfilled desires become reabsorbed - as we shall see presently with the other heroine of this tale. Resigned: but she nevertheless retained for him, incoercibly, an affection tinged with love. 'Like iron to a magnet...I'm attached to him like iron to a magnet.'

The letters she received from Africa, so tender, so regular, convinced her that this affection was reciprocated. 'No, no! I don't want to lose you!' The cry that had burst from her went on echoing still. 'No matter what, as long as I can remain on the same terms with him as when he left.' The loss of their physical relations did not bother her. The loss of his kisses and attentions, or merely his presence, for good, was unthinkable (losing them for a time she could bear without too much pain). If, from Morocco, Costals had renewed the proposition whereby she would spend part of each week at the avenue Henri-Martin (but he was careful not to do so, only too pleased that she had failed to grasp that life-line), she would not have reacted with the indignation she had shown when he had suggested it three months before; she had not taken long to knuckle under. She melted at the thought of Genoa, and quite shamelessly had asked in one of her letters whether they might not return to Italy. He had excused himself on some pretext or other. Not long afterwards she had returned to the charge, but her ambitions had lowered: could they not, in the spring, have a little escapade of three or four days on the outskirts of Paris. He had replied evasively.... Of course, Solange was not unaware that she would lose him altogether when she married - but there was plenty of time to think of that. Girls are always convinced that 'it' will happen of its own accord.

Mme Dandillot had received Costals' 'latest' without too much distress. And with even less surprise, for she had never shared Solange's confidence in the solidity of their engagement. Perhaps, too, her widowhood enabled her to withstand the blow more easily: she was put out, but she did not let it get on her nerves, as it would have done if M. Dandillot had been a third party in the affair, and it is nerves, above all, that are women's undoing. Thus, ten years before, she had felt much stronger, much more mistress of herself, from the day she had started sleeping in her own room (her bed, in which she could shift about as she liked, her sheets, which were only used for her!): marriage is hell with a communal bedroom; with separate rooms it is no more than purgatory; without cohabitation at all (simply meeting twice a week), it might be paradise. Incapable of vindictiveness, except towards her husband, Mme Dandillot bore Costals no grudge. She was content to take refuge in platitudes, which are the haven of all women. A woman has too much need to feel protected to stray very far from platitudes. 'Disillusionment is all one can expect from men. Such is life. The best thing to do is to love ... a Dream. Illusion is best because it forms the basis of our poor human loves. . . . ' With such vacuous nonsense she lulled Solange, and lulled herself, as one lulls infants to sleep with stories about elves.

She was, as we know only too well, defenceless where her daughter was concerned. She sought in Solange the justification of her own existence: as often happens, mediocrity in her case expressed itself in unselfishness. She had advised Costals to 'travel', but she had not forbidden him all relations with Solange. Their mutual correspondence was not much to her liking, because it kept alive in the girl a feeling which it would have been wiser to suppress; at the same time, seeing the happiness it gave Solange, she refrained from asking Costals to disappear for good and all. These muddled women wallowed in ambiguity, a state to which they were suited by nature. When Solange alluded, as though to something that went without saying, to the relations she would resume with Costals on his return 'on a footing of simple friendship', Mme Dandillot did not turn a hair. She realized that one day she would have to insist that the situation be brought to an end, if she was to get her daughter married (for she did not, any more than Solange, imagine them continuing once Solange was married). But she put off this decision, vaguely hoping that one or other of them would tire of it all and break it off without her having to intervene.

Solange, therefore, on her way to Costals' hotel, had the impression that she was taking up her life again more or less at the point where she had left it three months earlier: one simply stepped over the corpse of the Hippogriff and carried on. She had even, though she still wore a little make-up, reverted to her pre-engagement hair style. The permanence, the immutability of all these women: Andrée Hacquebaut, Rhadidja, Solange.

Costals awaited her in the hotel lounge, in order to have an excuse for not kissing her, for fear of contagion. When she held up her face and he said: 'Not in public. Later on,' she was a little taken aback. But his words were at once so sweet and tender. How simply everything picked up again! And this time, if there was the melancholy of transitory things (a transitoriness that might perhaps last a long time), there was also the restfulness of no longer having to try, of no longer being tense and strained. And of no longer having to torment him, of seeing him happy, now that things were at last as he liked them and as he always wanted their relationship to be: a liaison, nothing more.

Costals had decided not to talk to her seriously until after dinner. Dinner, in a restaurant, was full of ease and gaiety. He told her about his travels and his work. He rummaged in her hand-bag as of old, making amiably disobliging remarks about the absurd objects he found in it. He teased her, for he teased even the women he did not love. She told him that her boils and her decalcification were over. 'It was a foregone conclusion: I had only to tell you I'd never marry you for you to be restored to health. And I'm sure our urine is no longer pale!' (It was true that in the past three months all her 'little troubles' had vanished, although logically they should have increased after the final blow; but the body is no more logical than the soul. Unless patent medicines.... But that would be too simple, wouldn't it?) He refrained from swearing at her when, every time he turned his head, she took the opportunity of extracting her various appliances from her bag and touching up her face. He talked very loud, as very young people do, and since whatever he said was always 'impossible', she (sitting on her gloves - one of her idiosyncrasies) had to reprimand him: 'Not so loud!'

'Everything's so like it was a month ago,' [Pardonable inaccuracy (Author's note).] she exclaimed. 'The same table in the same restaurant.... I'd never have thought, when you went away, that one day we'd meet again here.'

A little rashly, for it is always a mistake to rub people's noses in their defeats, Costals said:

'But something in you has changed. I have a feeling that if I suggested that you should come and live with me from time to time, you'd accept. And yet you jibbed at the idea in January.'

'I've already told you that people would get to know, and the scandal would rebound on Mummy. But there might be a compromise solution. Without living in your flat, I could come and spend part of the day there a few days a week, breathe the same atmosphere as you, take part in your daily life. I'd be taken for your secretary, and besides, I could be in fact: I'd so much like to do something for you, for your work. And why shouldn't you say I was your cousin? Surely we could find a vague family link somewhere.'

'You know quite well you ought to be thinking about getting yourself married. And yet you'd be prepared to spend part of your life with me, more or less as a recognized mistress (who do you think would be taken in by the "secretary" or "cousin" business?), and at the same time play the part of the pure young thing with your future husband!'

Her face took on the disconsolate look of a little girl faced with an insoluble problem in arithmetic.

'How could you think for a moment that it wouldn't be painful for me? But since it has to be....'

'What do you mean "It has to be"?' asked Costals (who understood perfectly well).

'It has to be, because I love you. But you've never wanted to believe that I loved you.'

'It's true. Perhaps because, usually, that solution - that a woman loves me - is one I don't care for. Nevertheless at this moment I'm touched that you should love me, after all I've done to you. We'll come back to your plan later on. It depends on something I must tell you after dinner.'

A little later she said a terrible thing. She had written to him while he was in Morocco to tell him that a Norman pig-breeder had proposed to her.

'Perhaps I shall settle for him one day,' she said now.

'Rather than Tomasi?'

'Yes, you see, I don't know the Norman one.'

In the cloak-room, she helped him on with his coat. He found this fitting. Ancilla domini.

On the way back to the hotel, he said to her: 'Now I must tell you.... I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm almost sure that I caught a serious disease in Morocco. It's not a very contagious disease, contrary to what people think, but there's a risk that it may be if one doesn't take certain precautions. We can go on seeing each other, but our intimate relations must cease. I'll tell you about it in my room.'

She walked on in silence, her eyes focused on the toes of her shoes. Finally she said:

'I think I can guess.'

'You can't have guessed. You think, don't you, that it's one of those diseases that are called venereal?'

'Yes.'

'It isn't that.'

In the lift she looked at him in silence, visibly nervous and perplexed. When they were inside the room he said:

'Sit down there.'

He had not switched on the light. She switched it on. He switched it off again. Through the shutters and the curtains, the red glow from a neon sign on a near-by cinema penetrated the dark room. The glow of hell. Just the thing for Mephisto and his sores.

She was sitting on a chair. He sat down on another chair beside her, facing her. He put his hand on her fore-arm. She took his hand, he drew it away. 'If you wish, you can put your hand on my fore-arm, on the sleeve. Not on the bare skin.' They held each other thus, with the 'hand-clasp' of ancient Rome, which was in fact a 'fore-arm clasp'.

'Don't be afraid. No emotionalism, please. If I really have this disease, and I'm convinced that I have, I might still live another ten years, with a great deal of nursing and a great deal of pain. I should end up as a hideous object, but there's no question of that: I shall kill myself when I have to. In the meantime, I shall remain more or less normal, and we can go on seeing each other for some time, provided we don't touch each other... except through our clothes, as we're doing now....'

She showed no impatience, did not press him: 'But tell me what it is, for God's sake! ... ' Always Miss Silence. Petrified, waiting. Always waiting. Beneath their window, the bell of the cinema began to buzz. A voice yapped: 'Continuous performance. Big atmospheric hall. A film of love and adventure. All the latest news.' What was an 'atmospheric' cinema? Costals wondered. This gibberish threatened to break down his composure.

'Do you know what Hansen's disease is?'

'No.'

'Do you know what it means to be a lazar?'

'Lazar? I don't know.... It means to be poor. What do you ... '

'Do you know what leprosy is?'

She took her hand away from Costals' arm as though she had had an electric shock. Whatever might happen subsequently, nothing could alter the fact that she had taken her hand away.

'But you haven't.

'Yes. At least, very probably.'

'No, no! It isn't possible!'

Beneath the red glow, he saw her terrified face. A perfect setting for 'hell'. With a burst of volubility he sought to bring himself back to human reality.

'You don't know anything about it. People imagine all sorts of things. There are three hundred lepers in Paris, only twenty of whom are hospitalized - and in public wards, too. Perhaps the waiter who served us.... There are women who've lived for thirty years with a leper husband without being infected. All this isn't a lot of guff I was given to reassure me. It was told to me, of course, but I've also read it in a medical textbook. You can buy one yourself.'

'But how did you catch it? If you have caught it, because I can't believe you have.'

'From a woman.'

(Truth is tantalizing as death.)

'Was she a bird of passage, or had she been your mistress for a long time?'

'She was my mistress for four years. A native girl.'

She stared at him, her eyes dilated, with that red glow upon her, like a night-bird nailed to a wall and covered with its own blood. And he stared back at her, like a small furry creature of the fields stiff with terror in the face of a bird of prey. Not even the imbecilities of the cinema, that prostitution of pathos, could diminish the pathos of those two faces: life held its own.

'If I frighten you, you can go away at once and never see me again. I should find that perfectly natural.'

'I'm not afraid. I believe everything you've told me. I know very well that if there were any danger you wouldn't have brought me here.'

What trust! And as though to give him a proof of it, she placed her hand on his fore-arm once more. Then she smiled at him.

'You told me not to get emotional. That warning was unnecessary. I shall be upset when the doctors have made a positive diagnosis. Until then, I don't believe in your leprosy - or I only half believe in it.'

Costals was not very pleased that she did not believe in his leprosy. If he had had to choose at that moment between having leprosy or not, perhaps he would have chosen to have it, simply in order to show her that he was not bluffing.

For a long time he talked to her about his disease. The bell from the cinema buzzed intermittently. Each time it began to buzz it reminded him of the door-bell ringing in some clandestine lodging when he was there with a woman and their liaison was threatened. In these casual lodgings he often forgot that he was not in his own flat. And he would go into the hall in his bare feet with a revolver in his hand to see if there was a shadow under the door: the shadow of the man who had rung the bell, who was waiting there, who would bang on the door with his fist, interminably, if you did not open. You and he, six inches from one another, separated by a mere plank. And you, with your bare feet on his shadow.

As he talked, Solange's face was calm, calmer than when she had entered the room. Calm and thoughtful. Putting the accent always on the if, she produced a string of consoling observations, all of them sensible. 'If you've got this disease, it might have been worse. You might have died suddenly, and you've told me often enough that your affairs were not in order. Ten years! How many people in good health are certain to live ten years, the way things are these days? Then there's war.... In ten years you'll be forty-five, and haven't you always maintained that by the age of forty-five most writers have said their say and simply go on repeating themselves?'

'How she hits the nail on the head!' thought Costals. 'I've often had proof that she didn't understand who I was. Now she seems to have understood perfectly. And so wise! She's a real brick, after all.' It was then that he put to her the question which the whole evening had been leading up to:

'Would you rather marry a leper you loved than a healthy man you didn't love?'

'Yes.'

After a brief silence she added:

'Of course.'

He asked her to lie down, if she would, fully dressed on the bed. 'I won't kiss you on your bare skin. Only on your clothes. Or rather I won't even kiss them, I'll simply put my face against them. And I'm going to wear my gloves.' 'Why gloves? You've got nothing on your hands.' He put them on, and stretched out beside her in the darkness that enveloped the bed, which was out of range of the red glow. The bell still buzzed from time to time in the cinema, but the barker no longer barked. She lay huddled in his arms, curled up as in her mother's womb. He remained thus for a long time, his cheek resting on her breast, groping for her face and her hands whenever he moved so as to avoid touching them with his mouth. He felt an inner peace, and a sort of sweetness which he did not know was the false sweetness of the sea as it laps against the shore and gleams there before dying away for ever. The noise of people coming out of the cinema told them it was time to part.

She sat on the edge of the bed, plaiting her hair which had come undone, like the little school-girl of old.

Next day, more in control of himself - because his fatigue had evaporated - Costals took the decision not only not to go ahead with the crazy project of marriage which he had conceived the day before, but also to space out his meetings with Solange until finally he put an end to them altogether, whatever might be the doctors' verdict on his condition.

There were two reasons for this. No, he would not marry, in order to turn her into a leper's nurse, the girl he had not wanted to marry when it was a question of making her his companion. Furthermore (and this was perhaps the more powerful reason), he refused to allow himself to be dragged into that perilous sphere in which one noble gesture is capped by another. The sublime must not be allowed to be omnipotent. The world would fare even worse than it does already if, in order to tip the scales to the baneful side, one had only to add an ounce of the sublime. Dying for a cause does not make that cause just. Solange had been sublime; that did not make marriage with her a solution any less absurd and fraught with dangers - quite unjustifiable. The watchword must be: 'Hold out against the temptation of nobility.' 'She was sublime, and I too must have been sublime, though I can't quite see in what way. So if we went on, it would be sure to end badly, for when one plays at being sublime.... '

Five days later, when they met again, they went neither to the hotel nor to his flat (he explained that this was because of his fear of contagion). They went to a concert like old friends, or rather like strangers to each other. It was all dissolving into indifference once more, as wadis dissolve into the sand, where they end up by ceasing to be altogether.

22

Ah! make the most of what we yet may spend. - Omar Khayyam.

Every intelligent being cast on to this earth sets out each morning in pursuit of happiness. - Stendhal.

Six days later, in the place Saint-Augustin. Half past five. Costals crossed the square in the direction of the Madeleine. Heavy spring weather, almost sticky: a fumigation of asphalt. The sun hidden behind a white haze so as to be able to work its mischief undisturbed, as in the Sahara. And fellows with silk scarves in a temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade, because silk scarves look 'rich'.

Costals had just come from seeing Dr Rosenbaum, after four days of consultations and examinations with various big-shots. There was nothing wrong with him. The spot was lichen, which is not serious. The nasal catarrh was the result of having caught cold on the deck of the liner in the sea-wind. The pruritus (which anyhow had gone) was caused by the change of air between Morocco and France - something that often happens. Costals having once told Rosenbaum that the mere fact of having bought some medicament, even before opening the bottle, made him feel better, Rosenbaum tended to assume that with Costals any illness was imaginary. (We really must firmly resist our inclination to make fun of ourselves.) So the doctor had teased him a little: 'You have a lively imagination.' Costals had flung him one of those looks of superb contempt which cured patients reserve for their doctors, the look he had given the lifebelt the other day when they were in sight of Bordeaux. 'He also told me I was as healthy as an ox. But perhaps that was because he's going to send me his bill within a week. He wants me to like him for a week, so that I'll pay him pronto.' It was true that Dr Lipschutz had also told him he had an iron constitution, while Professor Lévy-Dhurmer opined that he had the constitution of a Bolivian general. Costals, who liked to have things in writing, had replied uniformly to them all: 'Send me a certificate to that effect.'

Happy? Of course, happy. One hundred per cent happy? Let's say ninety per cent. But just as it is well known that a writer, reading a dithyrambic article about himself in which there is one word of reservation, sees only this one word, so it was the ten per cent of non-happiness that set the tone for Costals. Lazarus emerging from the tomb must also have had his ten per cent of non-happiness, and railed a bit against Jesus Christ.

For a fortnight, Costals' entire future had been based - and solidly based - on this disease. And now everything had to be turned upside down again. Moreover, this disease represented grandeur, and grandeur acquired on the cheap. Now grandeur would have to be (1) invented, (2) conquered, (3) organized. In the meantime, back to the humdrum and the prosaic: it was as though a door had been slammed in his face. Rosenbaum had been right when he had made the classic remark of the doctor to the cured patient: 'You're no longer interesting.' And Costals caught himself murmuring a phrase that he regarded as blasphemy, a phrase he repudiated, spat upon - and yet a phrase that in spite of himself had risen from the depths of his being to his lips: 'Nothing but life ... ' Did he not love life? Of course, but leprosy had seemed to him an opportunity for a fuller life.

Not to mention the various inconveniences of perfect health. Since he had believed himself to have leprosy, he had cancelled all the lectures he was to have given that spring, had made up his mind to default on his contractual engagements - in short, had relieved himself of all obligations towards society. And now.... Well, no! He would pretend to be convalescing from a serious illness, pneumonia or suchlike, and give himself a rest. The moribund state has too many advantages to be relinquished just like that.

But enough of this nonsense. Spotting a pimply passer-by, he had shuddered: it reminded him of something. Besides, if he was so keen on leprosy, all hope was not lost: the incubation is so slow.... At the centre of his ninety per cent of happiness, there was normal life with his son, back with him again. One of the drawbacks of illness is that it forces us to pay attention to ourselves rather than to those we love. During the last week he had made up his mind that if he was given a clean bill of health, he would bring his son back from England; Philippe thenceforth would live in Paris. Vita nuova. The cry that had burst from his lips in the hotel room in Marrakesh: 'What will become of him? What happens to somebody who has no one to love him?' - that cry that he could not repeat to himself without being overcome with emotion (it often happened to him to be shattered by something he himself said, or by a sentence in one of his own books) - it was that that had clinched his decision. 'When one wants to make someone happy, one must do it at once.'

And at the centre of his ten per cent of non-happiness was the fate of Rhadidja. He would look after her. Already he had spoken about her to Rosenbaum, who wanted her to be treated in France, in Paris, or rather at Valbonne. He would write to Rhadidja to this effect. He would do everything that could be done.

The Madeleine...The step on which he had sat with Solange on the first night of their engagement.... That nightmare, like the other, was over, and he was rediscovering the fresh joy of his sixteenth year. 'Freed from these two leprosies, O primal purity! May I now prove worthy of this purity!'

The temple known as the Madeleine, although exaggeratedly filthy, is one of the rare monuments in Paris which may be said to have some majesty. Costals felt an urge to go in. For he was a religious-minded man. If he had never raised his head towards the sky in supplication, he instinctively raised it in thanksgiving. In thanksgiving to whom? The Spirit who ruled over his destiny. Which was tantamount to thanking himself.

The Madeleine was the only Christian sanctuary in Paris which Costals could tolerate. Was it in memory of this doughty deed: as a little boy, in this holy place, he had once stuck his tongue out at an unknown young woman praying? (The young woman complained to the child's English governess, who recounted the doughty deed at home: 'He's a tiger.' Mme Costals had recalled this story years later when she said to her son: 'You're so naughty.... Some day you'll become the Anti-Christ.' To which the fifteen-year-old had replied: 'I couldn't be bothered.') Was it the memory of Mgr Rivière, once curé of the Madeleine, a Diocletian who was wont to flourish his over-scented hands under the noses of the little girls in catechism class, all of whom were in love with him? Chiefly it was because the Madeleine was the only church in Paris in which there was practically no trace of Christianity. For nine years the Temple of Glory under Napoleon, to Costals that was what it remained: the Temple of Glory, that of the individual and that of the nation. But it was also many other things.

A temple of syncretism, in particular. A temple of the disparate - the disparities of the world, the disparities of each of its creatures. On the pediment, to the left of Zeus-Sabazius-Christ, a naked young Dionysus with disquieting hips; to the right, another naked ephebe, the Spirit of the Dance, or some other brother of Carpeaux's bacchic dancer. Inside, a temple devoid of mystery and devoid of humbug: nothing in its pockets, nothing up its sleeve - in other words the opposite of Christianity. Behind the altar, beautiful winged urchins bringing forth from a shell, like Aphrodite of old, the modern Aphrodite, Magdalen, the holy puta. The sinner, with downcast eyes and a charmingly bulging nine-month belly, half opening her arms in a gesture of resignation which seems to say: 'It was bound to happen to me one of these days.... ' What a pleasure not to be in a temple dedicated to the Virgin - that Virgin of whom the gospel hardly speaks, of whom we know nothing except that her son abandoned her; that Virgin who was not a virgin, and who as a mother is non-existent; that Virgin who was simply an instrument for making the Word incarnate, as terrestrial virgins in the last resort are no more than instruments for reproducing mankind. A temple of the Nation, of Glory, but also a temple of the Courtesan, erected on the threshold of that 'right bank' which is the courtesans' playground (whence the fact that its façade at night is symbolically illuminated with potassium permanganate [In 1928, the façade of the Madeleine was illuminated at night with violet flood-lighting, a masterpiece of bad taste (Author's note).]), Costals was in the habit of visiting it whenever he had made a conquest on the boulevards. Pick-up and up-lift. He went there to give thanks.

Today, once more, Costals gave thanks. But he also besought the unknown Presence to give him the strength and the audacity to think of his happiness unceasingly. He made a resolution to remind himself continually that his happiness must come first, that he must not allow himself to be put off by anything or anyone. Solemnly he made this resolution. Then, on the way out, he halted for a moment on one of the steps.

Paris ... white, grey, black, dirty, polluted, like sheets after a night's coupling. Nothing beautiful in what lay before him, except perhaps, under the milky sky, those buds of such a tender green one would have wished to protect it. They heralded the spring, season of purity and impurity, that great vessel which could be seen looming on the horizon, after the long wait, bringing the perfumes of unknown lands. And nothing strong, save this unscrupulous crowd and its infinite possibilities. Once, as an adolescent, walking with his parents on the Grands Boulevards, he had heard his father say: 'On the Boulevards, everybody's for sale.' As a result, he had conceived for the boulevards a respect arrowed with hope: already the river of his concupiscence was overflowing its banks. Later a doubt came to him: 'But I too was on the boulevards that day. And my parents. And we're not for sale. So there are exceptions, alas ... ' Nevertheless, he had never forgotten his father's words.

Beneath him, on the viscous pavement, flowed the race of men, of sub-men and of women, a vast stream of liquid manure which split in two at the foot of the temple and into which it was his destiny to discharge his male liquid, the purest of the substances secreted by the human organs - the only pure substance - innocent and pure as a grain of wheat. The baseness of this Parisian crowd, how he had hated it in the past! There was a time when he used to lower his eyes when he passed these women of Paris, for fear that some passer-by might think he desired them: he would have been ashamed. ['They [Parisian women] are at most passable-looking, and generally plain rather than handsome.' - J.-J. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloise (Author's note).] Now he loved this baseness: 'It's my raw material.' The Latin gorilla, the Parisian marmoset, the fish-complexioned pétroleuse, [A reference to the female incendiaries who, during the Paris Commune of 1871, emptied paraffin into the basements of houses and set it alight (Translator's note).] the sansculotte with his foul mouth and girlish voice, all those grey people intent on evil-doing - stealing, cheating, f—ing, wangling, skulking - all this (external) Judeo-Latin licentiousness which horrifies and fascinates the decent Nordic, because it testifies to the licentiousness within and promises that here all things are possible - it was this sun-beaten dung (dung of body and soul) that he spread over his soil and that made it sprout so thickly. He knew, too, that there were plenty of pearls in this dunghill - and 'does one disregard a diamond because one has found it in the mud?' (Fénelon) - and purity in this filth, like the white teeth in the jaws of a dead dog.

As it happened, today he felt disposed towards the hunt, for he had not shaved that morning. And when he went hunting women he liked to be unshaven and rather scruffily dressed so as to make the sport more difficult and in particular to make it clear that he despised his quarry and, so to speak, dominated his subject: put myself out for them! let them take me as I am! there are plenty more like her! His beard increased his self-confidence - 'To hunt with a beard I must be really good at it!' - and at the same time provided him with an excuse in case of failure: 'Not surprising, when I'm as hairy as an ape!' For the first time since his return, he was also without either overcoat or hat: relieved of these symbols of respectability, a man is reborn, like a woman who has had her hair cut short: a light-infantryman without impedimenta, he can pursue the adversary more easily, as brisk and lively as the people one said good-bye to on the boat at noon, crumpled, haggard and dishevelled, and meets again at three o'clock parading along the harbour front all spick and span. Then he lit a cigarette. Then, with the same instinctive gesture as the caveman 'girding his loins' before venturing forth, or the soldier tightening his belt before zero hour, or the matador pulling his cape tight to his waist as he enters the ring, he buttoned the middle button of his jacket and plunged into the jungle. Just as wild beasts emerge from their lairs each day in search of food, so he resumed his regular way of life, which was to set forth each day in search of fresh prey. Less from a need of prey than from a need of the hunt: as Lessing said, if God offered him the truth he would refuse it, loving the search for it so much; and a shell that has burst is no longer interesting, it's the one on the way that excites you. Today, Costals had no great hunger, but he was taking the plunge because he thought: 'So those swine would like to stop me doing what I want to do, would they!' When other motives were weak in him, this one would decide him without fail.

Worshippers of love should draw the following conclusion from all this: that every man who falls ill becomes good and forgives all, while the first impulse of the man who has recovered is to run amuck. The nurse, almost before she looks at the thermometer, knows that the patient's temperature has dropped: he looks a regular shark again. Evil becomes identified with life (whence the fact that a man in good health always wants war, his life force demands it, even though his reason shows him how much good might be done in peacetime with the virtues expended in war). Thus all the forces of society are pitted against life, which is apt to cause far too much trouble; unable to attack life directly through men's bodies, which they need for the strength of the nation, they attack it through men's souls, inoculating them with morality and religion. Costals, strolling along the boulevards, amused himself by jostling people (especially old trouts of both sexes), or charging straight at them to see if they would step aside. And they always did, with never a protest: they were Frenchmen of the 1928 vintage (just try and play rugby in the streets of Algeria or Spain or Italy! ). True, he had no illusions about these billowing women with their generous backsides and their faces smeared with cream like tumours smeared with ointment, and he recognized that they hardly deserved to be coveted. His desire was simply to set his seal, his P.C., on each of them, and never to hear of them again - this for the pleasure a farmer feels as he surveys a flock of sheep all marked with his brand.

On he went, sizing up each passer-by at a glance, the women to see what there was to be had from them, the men to see what to guard against. He interrogated each face, turning away from one, following another, half tracker, half tracked, half savage, half coward - exactly like a beast of prey. He took a terrifying pleasure in this jungle, as much from being himself on the alert as from putting others on the alert. Fear swept over him in waves, like a thin film of spray over a rock; this rock was his belief that he bore a charmed life: Gott mit uns. With his youth, his health, his effrontery, his writings, his charming son, his string of young mistresses, and all the advantages of power without any of its disadvantages, he felt himself invulnerable: stronger, more supple, more resistant, more malevolent than they. With his head jutting forward like a snake's, sniffing danger and prey from afar, and a slight thickness in the neck like the ox which Rosenbaum had seen in him, he was both ox and snake; and the life force, the urge to take, to hurt, to corrupt, to deceive, stood out on his face not in a sweat, but in a sort of glowing veneer - glittering like Moses descending from Mount Tabor. And all this time he was creating, in the course of this feral prowl. And he would create better still, once he had offered up a sacrifice. The more he sacrificed, the more he wanted to sacrifice: his finest captures were always made when he had just finished sacrificing, was almost on his last legs, but nevertheless all set; and he was the better fitted for it then, for the rails over which many trains pass are clean and shining, whereas little-used tracks rust. Doctors tell us that the sexual capacity of living organisms is far more considerable than people suspect. Costals had never perceived the slightest difference in intellectual or physical vigour, in lucidity and self-control - everything, in short, that makes a man's worth - between those periods when he indulged in apparently excessive delights and those during which (in the war, at sea, or in the mountains) he was forced into total abstinence. On the contrary, the more he sacrificed, the better his form, both in mind and body. When he was on his last legs - quick, a sacrifice! And he came out of it renewed, as delighted with himself as a doggie that has just done its business and immediately rushes round like a madman. Literally, a copious amorous excretion was necessary to his health.

Resuscitated from that other world - the world of disease and death, the world of despair and absurd projects to avoid being engulfed by it all - he was coming back to life, to his life, like a convalescent on his first outing, or a colonial officer who finds himself in a town for the first time after the dangers and hardships of two years in the desert. Whence the element of frenzy he injected into such a trivial act as walking along these drab boulevards. Whence, after ten minutes' walk, his almost unbearable nervous excitement, his abnormal anxiety - anxiety about the impending catch, anxiety about possible failure, anxiety about a possible cogida. [Cogida: goring of the torero by the bull (Author's note).] There was the dragon of Disease, which he had eluded, the Hippogriff which he had slain, the monster of Work, which he laid low each day; now there was also this Gorgon to be flung on her back without too much compunction. Already his eyelids ached, already his cheeks were hollow with fatigue, for his constant chagrin had come back to him - the chagrin of being unable to 'tumble' the whole youth of this city without a single exception. Just before he arrived at the corner of the rue de Richelieu (where there is a house with a double exit: pirates please note), he withdrew into a courtyard for a moment and closed his eyes to calm the palpitations that rose inside him - and also to allow his face to relax; a face so tense, so avid, so cunning, so give-away, that it seemed to him it must mark him out to all as someone to be distrusted, when there was nothing he wished more than to pass unnoticed and to lull suspicion.

Faint voices, ridiculously feeble, voices from another world, from a world of shadows and ghosts, broke out above the crowd with the sour tinkle of a broken clavicord, or perhaps, rather, the cantilena of a foetus: 'Bibles for sale!' The monstrous ugliness of these Nazarenes explained everything. Costals turned his head away. He suffered from his outbursts of anger and loathing, as far as possible avoided anything that might occasion them.

At the corner of the faubourg Montmartre, he debated whether or not he desired a passing woman; there was an indefinable shabbiness about her footwear that was full of promise; in fact it was a very near thing. He took out a coin and tossed for his desire, heads or tails, in the palm of his hand. He let the woman go.

Opposite the rue Rougemont, having given an old man a light, he felt he had performed an act of altruism. One does what one can.

A little further on, he shuddered. The sun, traversing the five figures stencilled in the turned-down roof of a bus, above the platform, traced a number on the back of one of the passengers. With this number in large, garish figures on his dark jacket, the man suggested a convict. 'Hm!' grunted Costals. After a pause he added: 'But is there anything that is not worth experiencing?'

At the faubourg Poissonnière he slipped into a urinal. He had seen an ex-mistress of his approaching, and trembled at the thought that the end of such a promising day might be ruined by charity. He had no desire for her, but out of kindness would feel himself obliged, if they ran into one another, to spend the evening with her in some place of entertainment instead of getting on with the chase. 'No, God will not abandon me,' he repeated to himself in the urinal. Which was not blasphemy, since he did not believe in God. God did not abandon him: the ex-mistress vanished.

Then once more he plunged into the jungle.

And already he thought of the coming night reposing on his peaceful face, a night without demons and without dreams.

And already he thought of the first streak of approaching day, when the lights of the city tremble pitifully, as though they knew they had only a few minutes more to live, while the highest star, which knows that it too must soon be extinguished, stiffens and does not tremble. Early morning, an unappreciated hour compared to those literary sunsets, like a fastidious person who does not seek the limelight. And the solemnity of dawn: what will this day bring? Uncertainty in face of the day, as in face of a young life. And already he would be at his desk, lucid and pure and tenacious, his eyes soothed with sweet sleep.

And the first noise would be the jingling of the milk-cans brought by the milkman's boy. And he would go to his window, his chest all honey-coloured with the first rays of the morning, and he would feel the sunlight vibrating against his person. He would go to his window, so that the first face he saw should be a youthful one, a greeting and a sign of hope for the day to come.

And there would be the joy of water, the ancient joy of Triton and of Rome, ludus matutinalis (he had made one huge bathroom of his life). And the perpetual astonishment that a glass of cold water did not cost six francs in a restaurant, so much better is it than all their alcohols; the perpetual astonishment that our minglings with our aquatic partner are not a 'sin', so good they are, that one is not liable to four years' imprisonment without remission for getting into a bath; the perpetual astonishment, too, that one does not risk getting GPI by letting water flow over one's skull. Oh, the certitudes of sensation! And unpunished, too! And whose only limit is satiety!

And he would go out and walk into the Bois, where the birds would still be singing for themselves alone, his manuscript and fountain-pen in his hand, working as he walked. There would be the insulae of the ignoble rich, and soon the humble race of early morning people, drudging in their midst without hating them: the paper-pickers, all of whom he knew, and to whom he would say 'Good morning'; the rustic, dawdling roadmenders; the keepers, who are incapable of showing you the way to Bagatelle; the butchers' boys on their carrier-tricycles who, on seeing him, would show off by speeding along on two wheels, as a dog, the moment it sees you, lifts its leg in order to impress you; the night-watchman going home after having protected the rich, who will never be killed because they pay men of the people to be killed in their place, just as they will go to heaven because their relations will have paid for plenty of Masses for them.

Then, one by one, the sporting cranks, in sweaters, running, stopping, making rhythmic movements. And then the rich, who dig in their heels to avoid paying their divorced wives alimony, and shove their only sons into boarding schools, but walk the spaniel in the Bois every morning, not because it wants to walk but because it cost two thousand francs. And the little bourgeois boys, floating along in the air, lightly, like soap-bubbles. And the wan-faced satyrs, with their swift and restless eyes (underlined with pouches), affecting a supreme off-handedness.

And, in the background, the blueish Seine, blueish hills, a blueish mist, a pointed steeple evoking all the spirituality of France, etc.... (if I can't think up a flowery phrase for the steeple, I'm not a man), little boats which lower their funnels when they are covered by a bridge, with a gesture that somehow smacks of a woman succumbing. And the show-offs, male and female, in the riding alleys, and the little, shining, well-polished horses, waggling their bottoms in the most improper way, but above all proud of the veins standing out on their foreheads. And the little crosspatch urchins (you can tell from their faces that they're fuming inside) on bikes the colour of dragon-flies and poison, colours never seen except in oases - astonishingly serious urchins, pedalling in a dream (that they're doing the Tour de France), bunched together and jostling the uncomprehending butterflies out of the way. And the religious silence of the bunch as it goes by.

And everywhere he would recognize places where he had bored or debased himself with women, and at each of them he would shy internally, like a horse that passes a crossroads where it once saw a viper. And he would reject these places, but the pleasure of rejecting them would be such that it was as if he were going through the experience again. And passing in front of the thicket where he had kissed Solange for the first time, he would think to himself: 'Dead men tell no tales.'

And he remembered that in a week's time his son would be with him here, in this very place, on his bike with its emerald wings, insisting on doing a balancing act in a forbidden alley, and putting his hand on his shoulder every time the bike gave up the ghost....

And off they would go, amid the laughing birds, in the grace of the morning.

23

I drive thee on pitilessly, knowing thy suffering. Song of the Bedouin of Southern Tunisia (the rider is talking to his mare.)

A life that stirs further than you wish, like those enormous chains which you set very gently in motion and which soon drag at your hands, and would drag you with them too if you did not let go....

A has an old school friend, B. Since B has been living in Chartres, and comes to Paris for forty-eight hours every fortnight, he has taken it into his head that one of his two evenings in Paris must be spent with A. A finds this a bit much, and considers that an evening together every two months should be enough to satisfy the demands of his old friendship with B. He would like to be able to say to him, as Mohammed said to Abu Hosairah: 'O Abu Hosairah, visit me more rarely, and my friendship for you will increase.' (Saadi). He does not say this, but twice running he makes an excuse, and that is enough. B understands. He makes his invitations fewer and farther between.

The old school friend may be a little dull, immersed in his business and his money-grubbing, but he is a man, or something approaching a man - that is to say that there is not only a sort of dignity in him but a sort of intelligence which enables him to put himself in another's place. He accepts the fact that he gets more pleasure from these evenings than his friend.

recognizes that this after all is the latter's right, and does not allow it to affect his friendship.

On the other hand, it is always a very laborious process to get a woman to realize either that one does not love her, or that one no longer loves her, that her presence, for you, means nothing but gloom and wasted time, and that all you expect of her is to clear out. Trying to drown a woman gently is like trying to drown a cat: one comes up against a terrible vitality. Which is why the only really agreeable love-affairs are those where one is jilted oneself.

Costals felt the sort of embarrassment one experiences on a liner drawing away from the dock, when one has waved one's arm and smiled at one's loved ones who are remaining behind, when one can no longer speak to them because of the distance, and when one is not quite sure what expression to put on. To all intents and purposes he had said good-bye to Solange, and now they stood there exchanging vague smiles, while the space between them went on widening until the moment when they could see each other no more. Every other day, at ten o'clock in the evening - because she knew that at that hour the servant was never there and that Costals would answer the telephone - Solange rang up. 'When are we seeing each other?' Good God! How he had to restrain himself in order not to send her packing! But his constrained, chilly, crepuscular voice ought to have warned the importunate girl. These telephone calls invariably ended with: 'I'm overloaded with work at the moment. I'll get in touch with you in a day or two.' Once a month he would say to her: 'I have an appointment on Tuesday at half past eleven. Would you like to meet me at half past ten outside the gare de la Ceinture?' (That mania of his for arranging to meet women on the pavement!) 'But that will give us so little time!'

At first she had made excuses (such clumsy ones!) for her telephone calls: 'Just a word. The bookseller in the rue d'Antin asked me to ask you if you'd be prepared to sign some of your books in his shop.' The bookseller had certainly never asked her anything of the sort, for he had received Costals' reply on the subject at least a week ago. Now she did not even bother with excuses: 'When are we seeing each other?' 'But we saw each other a week ago!' 'A week! ... We saw each other on the 24th, so it's exactly seventeen days. And you know how I love seeing you and talking to you.' 'Allow me to say that this pleasure of yours seems to me incomprehensible. And for two pins I might say... the tiniest bit pathological.' He really thought this, for he was so gloomy when he was with her, and so 'ungracious', that it really seemed to him abnormal that she should get any pleasure from his company. They talked almost like strangers, holding hands out of habit. Now she only wanted to marry a friend of Costals, so she said, in order to be able to maintain relations (of pure friendship) with him which otherwise would be impossible.

Costals resigned himself to unplugging the telephone every evening, at the risk of missing important calls. She telephoned at eight in the morning. He unplugged the telephone in the morning too. Whereupon the notes began to pour in: he did not answer them.

He was inexpressibly weary of her: the last hours of a journey always seem the longest. He put his head in his hands: 'No, no, there's nothing in the world more boring than a woman. And especially an unhappy woman.... We don't need their love, which they try to foist on us. As for their need to be loved.... really, I'd a million times rather a person had a craze for money than a craze to be loved: that's what they bring us to. Women refuse to understand that they're a nuisance, refuse to understand the impatience they arouse in a man. Definition: "Woman: a person who solicits, a person who badgers." A woman who does not badger is an object so rare that I should like to see every woman of that species decorated - after due research and testimony - with the Legion of Honour.'

It was his custom, on spring mornings, to go and sit in a corner of the Bois near his house, and work. Unfortunately, he had confided this to Solange. One morning he was sitting on his favourite bench when she arrived looking bright and jaunty: 'Please don't think I've come to see you. I'm going to the so-and-so's in the rue Michel-Ange, and I made a detour to get a whiff of greenery.' He put away his papers (anyone can imagine the mood of a writer interrupted in his work). He talked to her for ten minutes, then dismissed her without ceremony: a tactless woman makes a man a boor, genuit indiscreta muflum. She left with a 'When do we meet again?'

Costals chose another bench, a long way from the first. And he worked there apprehensively, convinced that she would discover him there too.

Then she began to stick to him like a back who marks you at football and keeps bobbing up wherever you move. If Costals was leaving a meeting of some literary panel, at the corner of the street he was sure to run into Mlle Dandillot, full of surprise: 'You here!' She had read in the papers that he would be sitting on the panel, and had been waiting for him on the pavement for an hour. If he called at his favourite bookshop, Solange would be there ostentatiously browsing. The bookseller had told her the previous day: 'M. Costals is coming in at ten o'clock tomorrow.' Whenever he saw her, his face fell. But she, noticing nothing, or appearing to notice nothing, went on imperturbably doing everything that was most calculated to make him loathe her.

The author has often remarked, in the course of these books, that such and such a trait he had come across in one of his characters exceeded his powers of psychological analysis, and that he preferred to admit it rather than throw dust in the reader's eyes with some bogus explanation. So he will shirk a decision as to whether Mlle Dandillot failed to see that she was boring Costals to death, and was blinded by the rendezvous he vouchsafed her every three weeks to the point of regarding them as a proof of affection; or whether she did see it but persisted nonetheless, not because she wanted him either to marry her or possess her, but because she wanted to see him and talk to him, even though she was aware of the drudgery she was inflicting on him.

However that may be, for Costals it was as though he were watching a monstrous transformation taking place before his eyes, like the processes of nature as revealed in cinematographic slow-motion (the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, etc.): Solange was being metamorphosed into Andrée Hacquebaut. Solange, once so reserved that she never telephoned first! The same frenzied scrabbling at one's trouser-legs to get the piece of sugar, the same determination never to see what stares you in the face, the same desperate clinging, the same obtuse optimism and the same futile stratagems: the same masterpiece of vain perseverance. The truth was glaringly obvious: all women were Andrée Hacquebaut. Andrée Hacquebaut loomed up like a sort of gigantic idol - larger than life, like the Athene of Phidias, and, like her, terrifying, ridiculous and grandiose - made up of the entire female sex, millions and millions all swallowed up in it and now peering out from it with all their different faces. Andrée Hacquebaut was Woman.

One morning, Costals was dressing in haste and some agitation. He was lunching in town at one o'clock, it was half past twelve, and he calculated that he could not be less than half an hour late. The telephone rang. And there was that bright, cheerful voice, that voice which alone was enough to show how little she understood the real situation: 'Well, still alive?' This time Costals could stand it no longer. Six months of enforced courtesy and charity were destroyed in an instant: a branch one has been holding bent and which one suddenly releases: 'Listen, Mademoiselle Dandillot, I should be extremely obliged to you if you would refrain from telephoning me every other day.' 'Forgive me, I'm disturbing you ...' said the voice, stammering, and falling, like a bird that has just received some shot, and drops like a dead leaf. 'Yes, you're disturbing me. Let's arrange, if you like, to meet once a month, and telephone me therefore once a month. We saw each other last week. Telephone me in three weeks. Good-bye.' He hung up.

Mlle Dandillot telephoned no more, and wrote no more. When we introduce a person into our lives, we have qualms about how we shall ever evict them. But such qualms are more often than not superfluous. More often than not, life contrives to detach people without any open clash, simply by mutual consent (except in a few cases where people get themselves murdered).

KO of Mlle Dandillot. Technical commentary. - In the first and second rounds, Costals had the upper hand. In the third round, groggy, he had gone down (the hippogriffical 'yes'). If she had then followed up, if her mother had said, 'It's the registry office next week or good-bye for ever,' Costals would have been out for the count. But she had allowed him to recover, and he had come back at her, for he was tough; come back to administer the knock-out, failing which she would have won on points. Costals soon began to believe it was he who had dictated the fight. 'I was keeping myself for the third round. In the end, class told.'

More profoundly he thought, seeking to exculpate himself: 'It wasn't as a woman that she made me suffer; I don't allow myself to suffer through women. It wasn't through her that I suffered, but through myself. She was only a pretext for me to work out my anxiety about marriage. I could not suffer through her, since she never did anything against me. What I suffered from was the "fiancée as such". More precisely still, I suffered from the idea I had formed for myself of the "fiancée as such".'

After that, life came surging back. 'Every time I break with a woman, life begins again.'

EPILOGUE

1928

1

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

Pierre Costals

Paris

17 September 1928

Dear Mademoiselle,

Between 1925 and 1927 you sent me some two hundred letters. I made no objection, and even replied to you several times.

Since your letter of 30 December 1927, which was your epistolary come-back after six months of quiet sulks, you have written me twenty-one more letters. Not one of these was opened on receipt. They remained in their envelopes just as I received them, carefully filed in a special file. To be frank, this file was a shoe-box; but since it came from a London shoe-maker, your honour is safe. I wanted to see how many letters a young lady could write to a gentleman without getting a reply. Twenty-one is by no means excessive.

I find it difficult to explain the strange impulse that prompts me to reply to you today, after having taken it into my head to open all your letters; or rather, alas, I understand it only too well. Let us, if you will, call it on this occasion a respect for the human person - for that human person I respect in you. Please do not misunderstand me: I am always half-involved - as a novelist, if not as a man - even in what I do not like; thus, willy-nilly, there is something of me in you. The other day, I came upon your earlier letters (those of 1927). Blackmail you? But there's nothing I want from you; and besides, you never gave yourself to me, or at any rate I never took you, if I remember rightly. I flicked through these letters, and dipped into them here and there. Do you remember the one you wrote from Paris, at the beginning of a distressing week, the 'solemn' letter which begins: 'The fire is roaring, and down below Paris stirs beneath the rain'? I cannot prevent this simple sentence from setting up a certain vibration in me. I saw you again, in your little room in the little hotel (where someone had stolen your bottle of scent), frozen, your overcoat over your shoulders, and writing to me frenziedly under the too-high electric bulb. Three years have gone by since then, and three years of my life are the equivalent in richness to another man's entire existence (if not several of them; but let's be modest). And yet there are certain images there which have become embedded in me - forever, it seems to me.

Again, don't misunderstand me. I have never had the smallest droplet of desire, or love, or affection, or tenderness for you. Nor have I today. But I have had, and have, some sympathy for you. Why this sympathy? The fact that you loved me could only irritate me, since I did not love you. The fact that you suffered through me was a matter of indifference to me, since I did not love you. I think this sympathy comes, as the word suggests, from the affinities that exist between us. If people were to read your 1927 letters, they would say you were a trollop; if those of 1928, a crackpot, and if all of them, from the beginning until now, a bore and a clinger worthy of immortality. These are judgements that I do not share. I have often been criticized for being too familiar with you. I have been told that it was unbelievable that a man like me should waste his time with a person as unimportant and uninteresting as you, and that it must be either irresponsibility or vice. But I know what I'm doing. There is an element of grandeur in you about which I feel I am not mistaken. And I like very much your last batch of letters, that lonely cantilena as of a child crooning a little story to itself. You cannot see straight? Well, who could have taught you to see straight? The whole education of girls is distorted. You have been a little indecorous? Believe me, others offer themselves as you did, only they're more circumspect about it. 'You'll end up by getting yourself killed, sir: you're too frank!' my batman used to say to me during the war. And besides, we all know that solitude has its unchastities. There remain the insults you wrote me. But for me it's fun to be insulted.

Finally, I was about to forget my great pity for women, well known to you by its effects. When I think of all those skirts that nobody ever lifted, I feel like apologizing to the women who remain unloved.

I should rather like to see you again. There would, of course, be no change in the relations we have always had. Let's say it's a sort of divine curiosity on my part...

C.

P.S.1 - I also lit upon a passage in which you describe your feelings about the sculpted snake in the Musée Dennery, which flattens out when it touches the edges of the tortoise's shell. Somewhere in China, centuries ago, a man was enchanted to see a snake flattened against the edge of a tortoise's shell, and in 1928 a young lady of Saint-Léonard (Loiret) looks at it too and is moved. It would please me to think that the words in which you described to me your emotion should be among those that bring me back to you. What a long chain, right back to the moment when the artist thought of flattening the body of his snake a little, and how splendidly he is justified now!

P.S.2 - As for your remark to your girl-friend's young brother, advising him to do something - to read, pencil in hand - do not be put off by mocking. Even if the whole universe guffawed at you, you would still be right.

P.S.3 - As for your letter of the 29 January, expressing your desire for coition with me, it's perfect. Who does it come from? Mlle de Lespinasse? Adrienne Lecouvreur? Marie Dorval?

P.S.4 - And no boils, no decalcification, in spite of all your troubles. A sound constitution. Bravo!

2

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

20 September 1928

Dear Costals,

You certainly have the knack of breaking the spell: I realize for the first time the full meaning of that expression. For fifteen months you have given me no sign of life, for nine months you have not even answered one of my letters, and today you are gracious enough to inform me that you had kept them without opening the envelopes. Neatly filed, one little rectangle beside another little rectangle, I can see them from here: the cataract transformed into a salt-marsh. It makes me laugh.

So, you've come back. You want to bring me back to you, to chain me to your chariot once more. 'Go further away Come closer...Love me a little less...Like this, like that No, that's still not quite it ... ' Like a little dog being taught to jump through a hoop. 'In love, I like to keep the initiative.' And yet this time it's you who are giving ground. Your letter is full of veiled whining - for after all, be honest: if you emerge from your retirement after more than a year's silence, it's because you feel you need me. But you've recalled me like this once before, and having got over your fear of losing me, you made me submit to those insults in your studio in the boulevard de Port-Royal. I'm beginning to know you. You're an illusionist. You give the illusion of being many-sided, constantly changing. And you're always the same, desperately the same. You always fall back on the same chord, like Mozart's music. You return with the same old tricks of two years ago. Stupid you are, and stupid you'll remain. I've given up trying to convert you.

Well, you delude yourself. The habit of writing to you was so powerful that I went on - that's all there is to it. I wrote to you as I used to write in my diary before I knew you, as I might have written a novel: I have never been able to live without a confidant. I've told you more about myself than my father and my mother ever knew: you have had before you a woman in the state of nature. But for the past year you have been no more to me than a witness to my inner life. Something had died. I was like those mystics who continue to love God in a latent way, but no longer feel anything. Before, whenever an article of yours, however unimportant, was brought to my notice, I would order the number in which it had appeared (often in the name and address of a friend, for fear that the 'young lady from Saint-Léonard' might become famous in the book-shops); I would throw my head back as I read your sentences and gargle with them; I would cut out the article; occasionally, even, I would slip it inside my bodice, sometimes to gladden my heart, sometimes also so that my heart might transfuse it with a little of that tenderness you lack. But in the past year, I haven't even read those two limited editions you've published. Before, when I asked for one of your works in a book-shop in Paris or Orleans, I pretended to have forgotten the author, so as not to have to pronounce your name; I never pronounced your name except to myself. Today I pronounce it without the slightest emotion. I haven't removed your portrait from my wall; but it was enough that it was there; I never looked at it. In June '27 you wrote to me that if you did not wish to be my lover, it was in order not to 'sink' in my esteem. You wanted to remain on a pedestal. Well, you haven't remained there.

I was happy in that state. Formerly, absence was the rodent that gnawed our relations to shreds. This time, your absence and your silence have been a boon to me. They have been my occupational therapy. I embroidered on them, and I needed you only in order to recreate you in my own way. If you only knew how much I've put into your silence! how much I've achieved so simply in that way! I've made a life for myself beside my own life. For we were lovers, were we not? How romantic everything will have been in the existence of this little girl!

And no longer to receive those letters from you which I never opened without my heart beating, no longer to expect anything from you, no longer to have to beg, to insist, to strive to understand. To give up. To know that one has done everything one could, that it no longer depends on you. No longer to seek anything, and to tell oneself that perhaps it's because, in a certain sense, one has found what one wanted. Peace in despair (despair, naturally, in the literal sense: absence of hope). Peace with an obverse of anguish. But when one realizes that everything in this world has two sides to it....

In these circumstances, to meet you again, unchanged except for this extra year (which shows very clearly on your face, if your latest photograph in Vu is anything to go by)? The very thought of it makes me weary. I have used up all too much courage and self-confidence in this affair. Seeing you again would mean the deflation of the prodigious balloon I have blown up during your absence. Already your letter has awoken in me a sort of wounded beast which was dozing there and which it would have been better to let lie. Go back to that unbreathable atmosphere of aridity in which you made me live for six months, as in a wood during the frost, when the ground is hard and crackly? And all that familiar routine of teasing and boorishness combined, of affectionate rudeness and irritable compassion, of which your letter is a reminder? And that famous lucidity, which only seeks to desecrate what decent people regard as sacrosanct, which in fact disqualifies you as a novelist, for how can the vision of a man who rejects normal values be worth anything? Well, the answer is no. Stendhal says that the great test of a friendship between a man and a woman is love, and that one can only survive it with the utmost honesty of feeling. I don't know which of us two was lacking in this honesty, but we did not pass the test.

If you care about me, as your return proves, but at the same time are flailing about without having the slightest physical desire for me, as you make no attempt to conceal (what a godsend for a man is a woman he does not desire! He can revenge himself on her for all the others. The un- desired woman has her role to play in God's creation, just as the rebel has a role to play in the social scheme), well then, marry me or something, give me a son, find something other than friendship, another bond. Anything rather than friendship. I am no longer capable of that. My dead love would poison it, like those dead flies in the ointment, of which the Scripture tells us, which ruin its sweet scent. Has it never happened to you, on a train journey for instance, to have a ferocious desire to sleep, and to close your eyes for a few minutes only, and, when you open them again, to find that these few minutes have sufficed to cure your desire for sleep? My unanswered letters this year have been those 'few minutes': they have sufficed to cure me of my desire for you. Now everything has been re-absorbed. What difference is there, in the last analysis, between a body that has known enjoyment and a body that has not? Things that one thought one loved fade away, and suddenly, one day, one decides that one has seen enough of them and they might as well disappear. I used to say to myself: 'How shall I ever be able to live when I've nothing left?' Then, once I was there, I realized that I could perfectly well live with nothing. Remember that, my child. It will come in useful for your novels.

The silence of a little country town at nightfall, the lights from the kitchens and stables, the clanking of chains, the heavy footsteps of the farmers, and then the electric lamp which lights up your table alone and leaves all else in darkness, all else ... so utterly the same, so utterly familiar after thirty-one years...In such an atmosphere everything is reduced to essentials, and one can see deep inside oneself if one allows oneself to do so.

And what I see in myself is this: that I have loved you very badly, since I have never made the sacrifice you asked of me if I wished to keep you - in short, I have only loved myself and my own pleasure. Even today, I only lay down one condition for my return: that you raise your veto.... But I know perfectly well that you will not raise it. So that, in the last resort, it is I who will not have wanted it.

Farewell, dear sir, and be happy. Always remain exceptional in your quest for human happiness. For, if you were not happy, with the methods you use to achieve it....

A.H.

Perhaps, too (my letters in the void) ... a desire to maintain in you, at all costs, the life of the soul....

3

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

24 September 1928

Dear Costals,

You must think I'm mad. But I've just re-read your letter while the radio was playing softly in the background, and everything I wrote to you no longer holds good. You want to see me again, and I haughtily refuse! That would be a bit much! I'm taking the train tomorrow morning. Write or telephone in the evening, about eight o'clock, to the Hotel R., rue de Verneuil. I shall have done all I could for the beauty of my fate and for its plenitude.

Yours,

Andrée

4

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Hotel R„ rue de Verneuil, Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

25 September 1928

Express letter.

Dear Mademoiselle,

Do you know the Armenian Restaurant, 4, rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, near the corner of the boulevard des Capucines? I have eaten there fifty times with a woman I 'loved', and it would do no harm to disinfect the place by eating there with a woman I don't. I shall expect you there tomorrow, Tuesday the 26th, at one o'clock. I see from the calendar that it's the feast of the beheading of St John the Baptist. This anniversary bodes no good. But, as God wills! If it's agreed, don't bother to answer.

Yours,

C.

5

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Paris

26 September 1928

Express letter.

So, as I suspected, you only brought me to Paris to play a vindictive hoax on me. I was in the restaurant at 4, boulevard des Capucines from one o'clock till two, without seeing you. I didn't dare sit there for an hour without ordering a meal, and I had to pay thirty francs or so for one dish! All I can say to you is this: your behaviour makes me vomit.

A.H.

p.s. - I've just looked at your express letter again, and I see that the rendezvous was 4, rue de la Chaussée d'Antin. But as you went on to mention the boulevard des Capucines, I muddled the two (I hadn't brought your letter with me), and as ill luck would have it, there was also a restaurant at 4, boulevard des Capucines. Forgive me. Could we have lunch tomorrow or the day after instead?

6

to Andrée Hacquebaut

Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

26 September 1928

Dear Mademoiselle,

I waited for you from one o'clock till a quarter to two in the restaurant where I had arranged to meet you. I am a person who doesn't forgive but who forgets - who really forgets - the gravest discourtesies. But I am not the sort of person who can be stood up, even out of stupidity. Good-by, then, this time for good.

Costals

This letter remained unanswered.

Costals never heard from Mlle Hacquebaut again. All's well that ends well.

1929

7

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Solange Dandillot

Paris

2 October 1929

My dear friend. You will give me credit, I hope, for not having exactly forced myself upon you in the fifteen months since we last met or corresponded.

And indeed, I am not writing to you now to tell you about myself, assuming that if the subject interested you, you could easily have asked for news of me. I am writing to you about our housemaid. As you know, even at the time when you used to come to the house, she was not in good health. Now she has TB, and must go into a sanatorium. And I remember you once told me that your mother had left you a bed in a sanatorium, the name of which escapes me. Could you possibly do something for this girl who has served us loyally for six years? Thank you in anticipation. Telephone me, if you'd be so kind.

All the best,

Solange

8

to Solange Dandillot

Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

1 October 1929

Dear friend.

How pleased I am that you should have thought of me to ask me a favour! Send me your housemaid any morning between eleven o'clock and midday: I'm very fond of consumptives. If I cannot find her a bed in the R. sanatorium, no doubt I shall find her one elsewhere (honi soit qui mal y pense). The only question is to know if she is to be kept alive or not, for TB is a question of money when it's caught in time.

I wonder what can have made you think that I'm no longer interested in you. If it's because I've given you no sign of life for fifteen months, you can't be serious. I don't feel the need to see even my dearest friends more than once every three years.

All the best, as you so nicely put it.

C.

1930

9

Monsieur Alphonse Groger, Engineer-in-Chief at the Iron and Steel Works of S., Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and Madame Alphonse Groger, and Madame Charles Dandillot, have the honour to announce the marriage of Mademoiselle Solange Dandillot, their grand-daughter and daughter, to Monsieur Gaston Pégorier, Member of the Institute of Engineers.

And invite you to attend the nuptial Mass which will be celebrated on 20 December 1930 in the church of Saint-François-de-Sales, rue Brémontier.

Avenue de Villiers

1931

10

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Madame Gaston Pégorier

Paris

8 October 1931

My dearest,

In a moment of distraction I mechanically dialled your number on the telephone, certain in any case that I should be told you were out or that the famous cut-off switch would be on. If I had known that you yourself would answer, I don't think I would have rung. In fact your 'Who's speaking?' at the other end of the line, harsh, peremptory, disagreeable, threw me into a panic. Had you or had you not recognized my voice? I shall never know. I began to pant into the telephone, and the shame I felt at panting there like an animal at bay - especially as it must have reached you amplified - together with my panic ... in short, I hung up.

And so, as in the old days when I was too nervous to speak to you, I am writing to you instead. As I used to with my husband, too, at the beginning. He would find the letter on his napkin when he arrived at table. I didn't appear until he had read it. I would look at him, he would not look at me, and the meal would go by in total silence. I would be screaming inside, but outwardly nothing showed: petrified and passive. You can just see me, I imagine. Still the little artichoke.

I'm afraid that this may appear to you (quite wrongly) as the thin end of a wedge. But how can I go on concealing the fact that your interminable silence causes me pain? It is true that I myself have been equally silent. Do not attribute this to coldness; it's simply that I hate badgering you; you know me well enough to remember how terrified I am of disturbing those I love. Clearly, you have no great desire to see me again. I trust that nothing I have done has injured me in your esteem, which I would like to feel is still intact. As for your affection, I wonder how much remains of it. Yet I should be sorry to lose you completely. Could we not meet from time to time at your flat? Don't you at least owe me that? My husband is at present in the Haute-Saône for six weeks. It is your friendship alone that I would like to preserve or renew. But I would be to you whatever you would like me to be. You know that I will only do what you would want.

My husband is an excellent sort and a man of great ability, but he does not understand me any more than Papa understood Mummy. Mummy tells me, to console me, that 'all men are like that'. 'Then why did you force me to marry?' 'Everyone has to get married. That's life.' Ever since I've been married, I feel odd, ill at ease, as one feels in a badly cut dress, which irks you without your knowing precisely where the trouble lies. But recently it has got much worse. There are days when I feel as though I were caught in a net; for two pins, I'd scream. I could break up everything, to find myself free and alone again.

Four years ago, my dearest, we were in Genoa. Yes, four years ago this week. Does this memory move you? I doubt it. I can assure you that for me it is worth the grief it cost me. And perhaps it is so dear to me because I paid so dearly for it.

I look forward to a friendly reply from you. But you have accustomed me to renunciations...And then. 'Women, full of memories, always dragging the past around like a nine-month belly, whereas man is eternal forgetfulness, the virile and child-like power of forgetfulness.' [Quotation from one of Costals' books (Author's note).] No matter, never in my life have I waited as I wait for you now. May this letter bring you at least the assurance of all my tenderness.

Yours,

Solange

11

to Madame Gaston Pégorier

Paris

Pierre Costals

Paris

10 October 1931

My dear Mme Gaston Pégorier,

You once said to me: 'The words you say to me are never the ones I expect.' Here are some more which are doubtless not the ones you expected.

Some years ago I had an impulse towards you; I took you. Afterwards I felt affection for you, I desired your well-being; there was a moment when I had it in my heart to love you very much. Then you wanted to transform this impulse, which was a natural thing, into a duty, that is into something unnatural and deadly; you sought to drag me - an irregular - on to ground which was not mine: you wanted to 'regularize' the position. And from that day onwards I also felt hatred for you: I say also because my affection remained. Until the day when I told you: 'Never.' From that day onward, I no longer felt hatred for you; I felt indifference, which I camouflaged as much as I could for some months more, out of a sentiment that you should have found quite unacceptable, but which you accepted nonetheless, because women accept anything, it's simply a matter of taking: this sentiment was charity. Until the day when I took myself by the scruff of the neck just as I was about to sink into a bottomless pit of altruism.

If I saw you again now, what would be my feeling for you? It would still be, and would always be, simply charity: your present suffering is a matter of indifference to me. On the pretext that you have married an imbecile, you would like me to become once more a prey to that charity which is the cancer of man. Before you, and after you, I was and have been happy. I was not happy 'during' you, because of that charity and that duty. All around you there is health and happiness, and you in the midst of it are misery and disease: to me you were like a severed head on a golden charger. You remember how I always thought that if I did not marry you my future would be poisoned by regret for not having done so. Well, in the past three years scarcely a fortnight has gone by without my inventing God for a moment, just long enough to throw myself on my knees beside my bed and cry: 'O God, who gave me the strength not to marry her! O God, who gave me the strength to resist the temptation of charity!' And if, on receiving your letter, I said to myself (what could be more human?): 'After three years she would find me aged,' in a flash I answered myself: 'What matter, since it isn't with her that I've aged.'

In the manuscript of a novel which has just been submitted to me by an unknown girl, I read this sentence: 'The stupidity of women is like darkness over the earth.' (She might equally have written: 'The love of women....') Ah! that darkness is not the only darkness over the earth; there are plenty of others. One of them is charity. Which makes an artifice of what is worthless if not spontaneous. Which continually encroaches on love, which steals its prerogatives and even its very features. Which turns smiles into grimaces. A Persian poet has written: 'He who has been charitable to the serpent cannot have seen that this was an injustice towards the children of Adam.' In a more general sense I myself would say: 'He who has shown charity cannot have known that this was an injustice towards love.' My acts of charity fill me with shame, which is why you have been one of my shames. I want no more grimaces. There is nothing I desire more than to rid myself of all those that I have been taught, for what is called education is merely the teaching of grimaces. I am doing my utmost to make daylight reign in me during the second part of my life, in place of that darkness which was there as it is over the earth, and to make my sunset a sort of dawn. Do not come and cast your shadow over it all again.

If this letter is harsh, unduly harsh, it is because one cannot go on indefinitely holding up a weight which is beyond one's strength. One goes on and on holding it, then the muscles give way, the weight falls, and if someone has put his foot in the wrong place, the weight crushes it. That, no doubt, is what women call 'betrayal'. You saw the weight fall on the foot of one of your congeners, the woman I showed you in my studio in Port-Royal. On the other hand, when one loves, the weight does not fall, because it is easy for one to bear it.

One day I definitely preferred myself to you, and from that day everything fell back into place. All the trouble sprang from the fact that there were times when I preferred you to myself. You tell me: 'I shall be for you whatever you want me to be.' I want you to be nothing to me. You wonder what remains of the affection I had for you. Nothing remains. If you knew the extent to which I do not love you, you would be appalled. You have left no trace in my substance; even your face has vanished. Although I owe you a few hours that were worthy of myself, your memory as a whole is painful to me. I remember all that was touching about you, and sometimes sublime, but none of it grips me any more - it's like a pair of pliers on which the screw has come loose. 'Esteem wears out, like love.' (Vauvenargues). The greater part of what concerns you has faded completely from my memory. If I happen to read on such and such a day in my engagement-book for 1927 that we went to the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt together, not only does nothing - not an instant - of that whole evening float to the surface, but I could have sworn that we had never been to that theatre. And indeed it is well that it should be so. It has been said that memory is a muse. Oblivion must be a fairy.

And it's indifference, too, that you have felt for me in the past three years, in spite of this apparent recrudescence of passion provoked by M. Gaston Pégorier's absence in the Haute-Saône. And believe me, indifference, total, solid indifference, is a thoroughly healthy feeling between two people. Even when they have loved each other. Things become reabsorbed, and no more harm comes of it than from unanswered letters. This metamorphosis is not a function of man's woes, but of his virtues. I assure you, there's something intoxicating in feeling oneself in that state. It would be worth while loving if only to experience it some day. One feels as though one were flying through the air.

One of the reasons why I was able to put up with you so long was that you did not write me long letters. 'Misunderstood' or not, don't start down the slippery slope of letter-writing. I can do nothing for you: there is nothing one can do for those whom one does not love. Look elsewhere, the world is large, as I've told you many times. And if you need any consolation, tell yourself that at least you made me live for a whole year. You gave me feeling. So, until your dying day, you can console yourself with the thought that you will not have been superfluous on this earth: that much is established. Armed with this knowledge, go your way.

All the best,

C.

This letter remained unanswered. Costals never heard from Mme Végorier again. All's well that ends well.

APPENDIX

Costals had just been re-reading some notes of his, a year old but unpublished, which he had found. And he mused:

'I go on thinking ill of women, and say so, and get carried away. Then a moment comes when I stop, blink, and ask myself "Where am I?" with the feeling that for some time now what I've been thinking and saying no longer squares with reality. Then I reproach myself, and take a vigorous mud-bath in humility and remorse. But when I come out of this bath, I'm surprised to find that I hadn't been mistaken at all, and that my alleged exaggerations corresponded exactly to the facts.

'For instance, a woman of sixty who has lived for forty years with her husband (of seventy), and who, while they go on cohabiting, eating face to face, starts separation proceedings, gets the bailiff to make an inventory of the house, has her husband's deed-box sealed up, and when he says: "This business will kill me", replies: "I know" - and all this out of jealousy, that is to say "love"...

'Or airmen's wives who tell you: "You think Georges has guts, but he's terrified in lifts, he wouldn't dare to reprimand the maid, and he does precisely what I tell him to. He's a child, etc."

'Or the young woman in Morocco whom I once heard say of her husband, slaving away up-country for ten hours a day: "René has to keep his nose to the grindstone. Now he knows what it costs to keep a wife."

'And similar instances ad infinitum. . . . One for every page of the calendar. No, it's when I think I've strayed too far from reality that I'm mistaken ... '

Here is the text which the writer had just read:

The Lepers

SOME GRAVE MALADIES OF THE MODERN WEST

(Synopsis)

Woman, what have I to do with thee? Jesus to his mother.

Unrealism. - Blinkers. Fear of reality, either from cowardice, or from idealistic inanity. When in fact it's reality that cleanses the soul. 'I throw into the waste-paper basket the documents about German rearmament which the military go on sending me.' (Briand to Stresemann, at Thoiry).

Dolorism. - The Apostle says: 'If ye be without chastisement, then are ye bastards and not sons.' The chastised rub their hands: down with the happy! The chastised affirm that one must suffer, as bad writers affirm that a novel must be badly written: it is a way of justifying themselves. Moral suffering is supposed to deepen one, when in fact it is not suffering that deepens, ['For sorrow hath killed many, and there is no profit therein. - Ecclesiasticus.] but crisis: not at all the same thing. It provides people with a claim to consideration, to being fussed over, to forgiveness, one of the so-called essential ingredients of inner worth and of genius. A man cannot say he is happy without being considered a simpleton, or a vulgarian, or a humbug who wants others to envy him, or an insulter of the miseries of the human race. Whence the universal pose of suffering and 'anxiety', etc.: people realize that it's suffering that pays. Whereas the truth is that moral suffering is nearly always a sign either of physiological inferiority (it's only the weak who worry) or of intellectual inferiority (an intelligent person knows how to alleviate most of his own moral sufferings).

The desire to please. - Never saying what is, or what one thinks, but what one believes will please. The desire for approval is the common denominator of every individual in every bourgeoisie.

Gregariousness. - Fear and hatred of individual thought; and collective auto-suggestion. The world is riddled with clichés as the vine is riddled with phylloxera. Everyone thinks in the same way at the same time, like puppets making the same gesture at the same time in response to the puppet-master.

Sentimentalism. - A substitute for reason and justice. The cheap morality and bogus uplift ('the threepenny opera') of religion, school and press.

Now, in each of these five sores of the body social, the same abundance of bacilli are to be found in the shape of yoni. In other words, all these sores are essentially feminine. Let us go over them again:

Unrealism. - 'I don't want to think about it' and 'It's to be hoped that' are two typically feminine expressions. Women are too infirm to bear reality: reality, for them, is an affliction. Whence the 'refuges': love, religion, superstition, mythomania, convention, ['Elegant women think a thing does not exist when it cannot be mentioned in society' - Nietzsche.] idealism. Falsified both in face and body (because of their infirmity), they only feel at ease in a falsified universe. Men are more afraid of words than realities; women are afraid of both. Ostriches and women bury their heads in the sand and imagine they can no longer be seen. Men also bury their heads in the sand, but know they can be seen. In Hans Andersen's story, it was surely the women who were most enthusiastic in praise of the emperor's non-existent clothes; the men must have followed with some reluctance; and only the child was prepared to admit that the emperor was naked.

(Whence the success, in a society that gives women an exaggerated degree of influence, of an art - whether fiction, theatre or cinema - in which life is represented as it is not, and the loathing which that society feels for any art that represents life as it is.) [Women authors. Their manuscripts always full of spelling and punctuation mistakes. They know how to spell and to punctuate, but they can no more see these errors in their manuscripts than they can see what stares them in the face in life. Like those mothers who, after a dozen years, have still not noticed that their son has a scar on his head or a birth-mark on his calf.

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

Dolorism. - For long in a socially impoverished position, woman seized rapturously on the idea that suffering was an advancement and a benefit: the yoni-shaped bacillus and the cross-shaped bacillus have long been known to have certain affinities. No one reiterates more emphatically and more stubbornly that suffering is necessary; no one abuses more violently those who know how to avoid suffering, or is more tenacious in seeking out the chinks in their armour. 'I hate him because he does not suffer' (Mme Tolstoy on Tolstoy). The story of humanity, ever since Eve, is the story of the efforts made by woman to diminish man and make him suffer, so that he may become her equal. [You know nothing of feminine psychology, because you know nothing of suffering, because the satisfaction of the flesh (when flesh that does not suffer is flesh still-born) prevents you from despairing of everything ... A man may be this or that, but a woman will always remain a woman, will always be able to inflict suffering which is more beautiful than love, ruin which is mightier than life, on the strong, who are always the proudest and the stupidest.' (Letter from an unknown woman to Pierre Costals.)]

In the West, dominated by women, the cult of suffering. In the East, where man is master, the cult of wisdom.

The desire to please. - Woman wants to please, no matter what the price, no matter what the circumstances, no matter whom. (No need to elaborate.)

Gregariousness. - 'How different you are from all the others!' Every woman has heard that said to her by a man with his tongue hanging out. (Title for a novel: Panting Tongues.) When it's 'How like all the others you are!' that she should have heard. The animal that secretes clichés most copiously is woman. Because, weak and lacking in self-confidence, she needs to feel the backing of majority opinion; because, lacking any ideas of her own, she needs to appropriate man's; because she is accustomed to saying what she thinks will please man. And yet, 'I'm not one of the herd' is a typical woman's remark. Could it then be that only the worst members of the herd cry out against it?

Sentimentalism. - When a man really loves a woman, the love he gives her is a different sort of love from that which she demands: she continually seeks to corrupt the love which the man gives her. It is women who have turned affection into a neurosis, and affectionate love - a divine emotion when it means tenderness, whether or not mixed with desire - into that laughable monstrosity which one might call 'Lurve'. Lurve is love-as-women-understand-it: absurdity, jealousy, histrionics, 'How do we stand?', the feminine anxiety with which women infect men, the need to be loved in return, the tendency to change to indifference, the tendency to change to hate - a whole inept scholasticism the object of which becomes so tenuous that one ends up by saying to oneself: 'But anyhow, what's it all about?' In short, one of the most ignoble products of the human race, a thousand times more vulgar and impure and maleficent than the sexual act in its simplicity, and the principal refuge of both man and woman against reason and conscience. Lurve, the European disease, the great Western hysteria.

The ancient Arabs used to crucify their slain enemy side by side with the carcass of a dog. If Lurve had a human form, it is thus that I would wish to crucify it.

A parenthesis.

Someone I know often feels, when in France, as lost as a man who has inadvertently strayed into a big drapery store thronged with chattering women: 'What am I doing here?' Some years ago I wrote in one of my essays: 'A feminine people, like the French ... ' Then I said to myself: 'Careful!

perhaps that's an idle generalization; or perhaps one of my pet prejudices.' And I crossed it out.

But since then I've read this: 'There's something of woman in every Frenchman.' Who said that? Voltaire. And this: 'The role which Frenchmen play among men is that which women play in the human race as a whole.' Who said that? Goethe. And this: 'In every Frenchman, woman predominates. They are a decadent race.' Who said that? Tolstoy.

And I regretted not having had the courage of my convictions.

Let us resume.

This moral inferiority of woman, certain features of which we have noted and which is matched by a considerable number of physiological inferiorities (in a medical book I have in front of me, the bare enumeration of these inferiorities takes up ten lines), woman is herself aware of ['One of the facts that enabled me to establish my conception of individual psychology was the discovery of the more or less unconscious inferiority feeling that exists in all women and girls simply due to the fact that they are female. And this affects their psychic life to such a degree that they are always betraying traits of masculine protest, though often in a circuitous form, especially in the form of apparently feminine traits.' - Adler.

(Cows ride each other, though they get no pleasure from it, through a stupid imitation of the male.)] - even without having to take into account the special container on liners into which she is invited to dispose of her 'towels and other bulky objects'. How can she fail to recognize that she belongs to a sorry race when she sees that she is always the asker, always the one who 'needs', always the one who flaps her wings and squawks for a beakful? (Her need to be loved, kissed, taken in someone's arms, is a veritable disease. How humiliating it is, this perpetual supplication, avowed or not, this perpetual mendicancy - camouflaged at times under the plumage of coquetry or disdain!) The sentiment of her inferiority secretly governs all her behaviour. Whence her tendency to engulf, to cling, to hoard, to seek assurance: it is as though she were in constant fear of being deprived; all she gives is the child, which she gives only after having received (and it is in that act of receiving, physiologists tell us, that all her biological interest lies). Whence also the peculiar frenzy with which women push themselves forward and grab and cling, the tenacity with which they try to work their way into your life or get you to do them a favour. (When, in a crowd, you feel yourself being violently clutched or jostled, ten to one it will be a woman or a child. Knowing their weakness, the weak put all their strength into a gesture that called for comparatively little.)

How explain, otherwise than by an inferiority complex, the need, innate in almost every woman, to counterfeit herself - to counterfeit her character (posing), her face (make-up), her body (no need to go into details ...), her natural smell (scent), her handwriting? The strong do not lie, or rarely; they spare themselves the trouble; they are honest, not to say cynical, through disdain: 'We veracious ones,' the nobles of ancient Greece used to say. And all races that are servile by nature, or enslaved by circumstance, lie. How explain, otherwise than by a sense of personal inadequacy, the need that obsesses women to make themselves interesting, to affect sham moods - always 'distinguished' ones? How explain, otherwise than by a sentiment of physiological inferiority, the necessity they so often feel to simulate sexual enjoyment.

And finally, it is not unusual for ambiguous women to get the surgeon to change their sex. But even the bait of not having to go to war never drives an ambiguous man to change himself outright into a woman.

A civilization - ours - in which literature, whether popular or academic, press, cinema, radio, popular song, are forever harping on the slogan 'Woman must have her way', and have ended up by making men believe it; in which, for centuries, they have established, secured, envenomed this power of woman, who would be harmless without them, and compelled men and children to gape at her in wonder, through an immense conspiracy of public opinion, morality, and clichés by the million (thus the farmer and his daughter and the lad bang away at the stallion with their sticks, to make him go to the mare); all the social forces in coalition, a gigantic campaign of ballyhoo which makes the publicity of big firms and the propaganda of totalitarian states seem laughable by comparison; - and since the idolatry of woman means for a man the abandonment of his independence and his dignity, and the breakdown of all order, one feels the same sort of horror in the face of this ballyhoo as one feels on seeing an advertisement for some deadly alcohol. If, at least, women were proud and sensitive enough to tell their frightful knight-errants to go to blazes! If they would only greet with a hail of rotten tomatoes those cattle-drovers disguised as lecturers, or those film-directors dropping clichés like a tree shedding its leaves, whose milk-and-water patter dishonours them: 'Get away with you, you and your "victorious Eve". Defenders of your sort do us more harm than good. We need the respect that we deserve as human beings, but your gallantry makes us vomit.' Alas! not a sign of vomit. Even the most sensitive of them ask for more.

If woman reigns, in spite of her manifest unworthiness, in spite of her incompetence even in her own line - as witness her lack of insight, her weak judgement, her childish wiles - it is therefore only due to the stupidity of men.

This stupidity arises partly from desire. In desiring, a man flatters the object desired, in order to win its favours, and over-rates its charms in order to justify his lust, as well as the weakness it entails, in his own eyes and those of others. [Whence the hue and cry raised by men themselves in the modern West against those who dispute the supremacy of women. For to demonstrate that that supremacy is unfounded is to brand them, indirectly, as nincompoops, since they created it. And then, just think of it, deflating the dreams of these gentlemen!] But this stupidity is not necessarily implicit in desire. The peoples of antiquity, the peoples of the East, whose interest in woman no one would question, nevertheless put her in her proper place.

This stupidity derives especially from the after-effects of the ideology formerly applied to women: Christian love (fanatical belief in marriage), courtly love, romantic love, etc. (Develop).

Women play their game, and there is no cause to reproach them for it. The reproach should be aimed at men, for playing theirs badly. For letting themselves be imposed upon by these centuries of gynolatrous literature, not daring to be either clear-headed, truthful, or ruthless enough with women (everything that women and their toadies call 'caddish'), and all this either from a false sense of honour, because they are mesmerized, or from cowardice, because they are afraid public opinion will be against them if they act otherwise. Women are well aware of this, and so long as they are not brought forcibly face to face with what they are, as a dying man is brought face to face with death, they will shuffle and squirm and try to keep up the pretence.

One of the duties, therefore, of the modern European who wants to live rationally is the duty of coarseness in love. He must have the 'effrontery' to cut through those Gordian knots which women tie, those difficulties which are not difficulties at all. He must struggle against whatever there may be inside himself which reaches towards that swampy or mined terrain on to which she would entice him. He must oppose with the utmost firmness a systematic frivolity to her unhealthy complications and sublimations. He must cease to create for himself, where she is concerned, under the pretext of desire, idiotic obligations, I mean unjustifiable obligations. He must fight against the artificial reflexes of 'chivalry', by repeating to himself each time: 'If every human being has a right to respect, woman has a right to that respect, and no more. She has no right to special respect. There is no valid reason why a woman should be treated differently from a man.' He must oppose a harsh indifference, real or feigned, to all the vulgar tinsel of bogus uplift, bogus high-mindedness, bedroom idealism, Lurve-as-social-convention, all that that 'threepenny opera' which virtue turns into when it is conceived by the mind of woman, and laugh himself silly when women call him a lout because he pretends not to understand what they are talking about. In short, he must on the one hand dishonour Lurve, and on the other, to the extent that woman is not indispensable, free himself from her. And, after all that, he will see that women do not cease to come to him, that some of them, perhaps, come to him all the more readily. And he will take the leper in his arms, and enjoy her, and give her pleasure too - why not? poor kitten, - but without catching her leprosy.

At which, just as there is always some arch-unbeliever ready to throw black looks at those who eat meat on Good Friday, there will certainly be some male hog who will grunt: 'Alas for French chivalry!' And then you will remember that there was a Greek chivalry at one period of antiquity, a pre-Islamic Arab chivalry, a Persian chivalry at the time of Shah Nahmeh and the Beharistan, a German chivalry based on the cult of the hero, a Japanese chivalry with the samurai - all of them in the last degree authentic, by which we mean branded with the authentic chivalric absurdity, - and that in not one of them did women play the smallest part (any more than 'God' did, be it noted in passing).

And to all those who, 'rending their garments', yelp 'He has blasphemed; he has committed a crime against love!' we say further that it is not love that we are defaming, but its caricature, Lurve. Parental love and filial love, true friendship, even the love of 'God' and the love of humanity, such as they are to be found in certain lofty spirits; and even those sentiments which are deemed to be no more than pale reflections of love, to bear no relation to it whatsoever - the intellectual esteem of a disciple for his master, the graciousness of a superior to his subordinate, the comradeship of arms or adventure, the interest an educator takes in his pupil; and even sentiments which public opinion puts lower still, such as the friendship of a man for his dog or his horse, are sentiments altogether nobler and worthier of respect than Lurve.

Progress comes about, not through women, but in spite of them...Learning, reason, justice, all that is best in the patrimony of our species, is threatened by the advent of women. AMIEL, Journal.

That what we are saying here has been said many times before may be an argument against us, but what does it matter as long as it argues in favour of what we say? The civilization of which we have just laid bare one of the principal characteristics is not a Utopian one. It was, for thousands of years, that of the ancient world, which for centuries afterwards was praised to the skies, without anyone ever being aware that 'all the great things done by mankind in antiquity derived their strength from the fact that men found themselves side by side with other men, and no woman could lay claim to being, for man, the object of the closest and highest love, or even the sole object' (Nietzsche). [And again: 'To be mistaken about the fundamental problem of man and woman, to deny the profound antagonism between the two and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream perhaps of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations: those are the typical signs of shallow-mindedness. A man who has depth of mind as well as of desires, and also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness ... can only look on women as Orientals do ... He must take his stand on the prodigious rationality of Asia, on the superiority of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did of old, those best heirs and pupils of Asia - those Greeks who ... from Homer to the time of Pericles, joined the progress of culture and the growth of physical force to an even more oriental strictness towards women.' (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.)

These, almost word for word, are the views expressed by Napoleon on St Helena: 'We, the peoples of the West, have ruined everything by treating women too well. We have raised them, very wrongly, almost to be our equals. The peoples of the East have a sounder sense; they have declared them the virtual property of men, and indeed, nature has made them our slaves. It is only through our wrongheadedness that they have laid claim to being our rulers.'] It is that of Asia, whose wisdom we praise, forgetting that the land 'whence cometh the light' is a land where woman has no place other than sexual. It rules the Moslem world, one of whose traditions tells us that the Prophet said: 'When he is in doubt, a Moslem consults his wife, so that he may do the opposite of what she advises' (quoted by Djami). Two thousand years of a different civilization, over only one part of the globe (Europe and the new World), against the millennia of that civilization [That the attempts made in the USSR to inject a bit of common sense into the 'couple' seem to be failing is not because they are 'unnatural', as our bien-pensants claim. For if Christianity has succeeded, anything unnatural can succeed.]

Perhaps, to a future race, the era of woman's rule will appear as remote as the era of priestly rule seems to the men of today. Lurve will have disappeared as completely as the great saurians of the mesozoic period. The modern conception of the couple (sublimation, wrangling and frenzy) will arouse the same horrified amazement as marriage between brother and sister or the sacred prostitution of certain ancient civilizations arouse in us. It is possible that this period of health will last only for a time: civilizations are by nature ephemeral, like political régimes. The quantity of human stupidity probably remains constant; when it has been eradicated here, it springs up again there, like boils (what a staggering list one could draw up of the successive lunacies of humanity!), but it does happen that, between boils, there is a moment of respite. If a civilization in which woman no longer holds sway is no more than a respite in the furunculosis of our planet, one will nevertheless deserve credit for having been among those who brought it about.

'Well, you must admit it isn't too badly put,' he said cheerfully to the young woman over whose shoulder he had just re-read his thesis, which she was still holding in her pointed hands, her fore-arms resting on her hip-bones (half-Egyptian through her mother, she was built like those Egyptian figures one sees on monuments). 'Infamous race!' He kissed her head, the very scalp, underneath her hair, which had three different smells - on the crown of her head, on the temples, and where it met her forehead. 'Yes, you really belong to an infamous sex.' There was a silence. Then he added: 'Nevertheless I'm pleased with you for not yet having protested: "Pretty odd to write things you don't believe." '

'I haven't said it because I don't think it. But I admit I'm disconcerted....'

'Everything I've written there I profoundly believe, and I've believed it since adolescence, since the age when one starts getting to know about people. But sometimes it seems to me that I could maintain with equal sincerity - that is to say with total sincerity - a completely opposite view of the question: a view that would demonstrate the grandeur of woman. Why? Because that maleficence and that absurdity and that grandeur all exist in women. Turn and turn about. Always turn and turn about. Sometimes, too, it seems to me that...

'Here, I'll tell you a story. There was once a boy in a boarding-school who was persecuted by one of the masters, who treated him with monstrous unfairness. One day, towards the end of the school year, the master sent for this boy, who appeared before him tense and bristling and said: "I suppose you're going to give me another wigging." The master replied: "No, I sent for you because I'm leaving the school for good, and we won't see each other again. And so I wanted to tell you that if I gave you a rough time it was because I liked you so much. Now give me your hand and go." They shook hands and parted. And, as he had said, they never saw each other again.'

'What's the point of that story?' asked the young woman, knitting her brows a little.

'Isn't it obvious?'

She had turned her face towards him, and she searched his eyes (like a real woman) not so much in order to understand as to see if she could find reassurance there.

But he, as always, was smiling at something else.

Table of Contents

Title page

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

PART TWO

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

EPILOGUE

1928

1929

1930

1931

APPENDIX