Herbaud didn’t resemble any of my other friends, whose faces were all so commonsensical that they almost ceased to exist as faces. Actually, there was nothing seraphic about Jacques’ face, but a certain bourgeois icing masked some of its abundant sensuality. It would have been impossible to reduce Herbaud’s face to a symbol; the jutting jaw, the broad, liquid smile, the blue irises set in their lustrous corneas; his flesh, his bone-structure, and his very skin made an ineffaceable impression and were self-sufficient. Herbaud had more than a face: he had an unmistakable body, too. Walking under the leafy trees, he told me how much he detested death, and that he would never submit to being ill or old. How proud he was of the young red blood pulsing in his veins! I would watch him come striding through the gardens with his rather awkward grace; I would look at his ears, transparent in the sun as pink sugar-candy, and I knew that I had beside me not an angel, but a real man. I was tired of saintliness and I was overjoyed that he should treat me – as only Stépha had done – as a creature of the earth. Because he was not interested in my soul; his liking for me was not based just on an evaluation of my good points, but being spontaneous and undemanding, accepted the whole of me, just as I was. The others talked to me in a deferential, or at any rate in a grave and reserved way. Herbaud laughed as he spoke to me, put his hand on my arm and used to shake his finger at me in mock warning when he called me, ‘My poor young friend!’ He would make all kinds of remarks about my appearance – friendly, joking remarks, always unexpected.
I did not think much of him as a philosopher. I noted, rather incoherently, in my diary: ‘I admire his ability to have his own theories about everything. Perhaps because he does not know much about philosophy. I like him enormously.’ He was, in fact, ignorant of any philosophic discipline, but what mattered much more to me was that he opened up paths that I longed to explore without as yet having the courage to do so. The majority of my friends were believers, and I kept evading the issue by trying to find a compromise between their point of view and my own; I didn’t dare disassociate myself from them too much. But Herbaud made me want to wipe out the past that separated me from him: he frowned upon my association with the ‘Holy Willies’. Christian asceticism was repugnant to him. He professed deliberate ignorance of metaphysical soul-searching. He was anti-religious, anti-clerical, anti-natiönalist, and anti-militarist; he had a horror of all mysticisms. I gave him my dissertation on ‘The Personality’ to read, for I was overweeningly proud of it; he pulled a face as he handed it back to me; he felt it smacked of Catholicism and romanticism: he exhorted me to get them out of my system as soon as possible. I accepted his advice with open arms. I had had enough of ‘Catholic complications’, spiritual dead-ends, miraculous make-believes; I felt it was time for me to get my feet back on the ground. That is why, when I got to know Herbaud, I had the feeling of finding myself: he was the shadow thrown by my future. He was neither a pillar of the Church, nor a book-worm, nor did he spend his time propping up bars; he proved by personal example that one can build for oneself, outside the accepted categories, a self-respecting, happy, and responsible existence: exactly the sort of life I wanted for myself.
*
This brand-new friendship added greatly to the gaiety of spring. There’s only one spring-time in the year, I kept telling myself, and you’re only young once: I mustn’t fritter away any of my youthful spring-times. I was finishing the final draught of my diploma thesis; I was reading books on Kant; but I’d broken the back of my work, and I felt sure of success; this too helped the spring to go to my head. I used to spend mirthful evenings with my sister at the Bobino, the Lapin Agile, and the Caveau de la Bolée, where she would sketch the patrons. At the Salle Pleyel, I heard the Layton and Johnstone festival with Zaza; with Riesmann I visited an exhibition of paintings by Utrillo; I applauded Valentine Tessier in Jean de la Lune. I read with admiration Stendhal’s Lucien Leuwen, and with curiosity Manhattan Transfer, which was far too contrived for my taste. I would sit in the sun in the Luxembourg Gardens; in the evenings I would wander beside the jet-black waters of the Seine, while my heart felt it was brimming over with the lights, the scents of Paris, and my own overwhelming happiness.
One evening at the end of April I met my sister and Gégé at the place Saint-Michel: after drinking a few cocktails and listening to some jazz records in a bar that had just opened in that district, we went on to Montparnasse. The fluorescent blue of the neon signs reminded me of the convolvulus of my childhood. At the Jockey, familiar faces smiled at me and once again the voice of the saxophone quietly broke my heart. I caught sight of Riquet. We talked: about Jean de la Lune, and, as always, about friendship and love; he bored me; what a difference there was between him and Herbaud! He took a letter out of his pocket and I saw it was in Jacques’ handwriting. ‘Jacques is changing,’ he said. ‘He’s ageing. He won’t be back in Paris until the middle of August.’ He added, impetuously: ‘In ten years from now, he’ll be doing fantastic things.’ I didn’t turn a hair. I felt as if my heart were dead.
But when I awoke next morning I was on the brink of tears. ‘Why does Jacques write to other people and never to me?’ I went to Sainte-Geneviève, but I couldn’t get started on my work. I read the Odyssey, ‘in order to put the whole of humanity between myself and my too-private pain’. The remedy wasn’t very successful. Where did I stand with Jacques? Two years earlier, disappointed by the chilly welcome he had given me, I had walked the boulevards planning ‘a life of my own’ in which he would have no place; now I had a life of my own. But was I to forget the hero of my youth, the fabulous brother of Meaulnes, he who was going to do ‘fantastic things’ and was perhaps branded by the cross of genius? No. The past still had me in its toils: I had longed so much, and so long, to carry it with me, all of it, into the future!
So I started to grope around again among my memories, my disappointments, and regrets, and one evening I pushed open the door of the Stryx. Riquet invited me to his table. At the bar, Olga, Riaucourt’s friend, was talking to a dark girl swathed in silvery furs who I thought was very beautiful; her black hair was parted down the middle, and in her thin, pale face her lips were scarlet; she had long, slim, silk-stockinged legs. I knew at once that this was Magda. ‘Any news from Jacques?’ she asked Riquet. ‘Didn’t he ask after me? The bastard ups and leaves me – over a year ago now – and he doesn’t even ask after me. Hah! I never have any luck! The bastard!’ I took in her words, but at the time they hardly made any impression upon me. I talked quietly with Riquet and his friends until one o’clock in the morning.
But as soon as I got to bed, I broke down. It was a frightful night. I spent the whole of the next day on the terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens, trying to sort out my feelings. It was hardly jealousy I felt. The affair with Magda was over; it hadn’t lasted long: Jacques had soon got tired of her and he had broken it off in good time. Our love had nothing in common with that sordid little liaison. I remembered something; in a book by Pierre Jean-Jouve that he had lent me, Jacques had underlined a phrase: ‘This is the friend I open my heart to; but the friend I embrace is someone else.’ And I had thought. ‘All right, Jacques. It’s the other one I’m sorry for.’ He encouraged this fatuous self-importance by telling me that women meant nothing to him, and that to him I was something more than just a woman. Then why should I feel this desolation in my heart? Why was I saying over and over to myself, with tears in my eyes, the words of Othello: ‘But yet the pity of it, Iago: oh Iago, the pity of it Iago.’ I had just made a very painful discovery: the fine story of my life was gradually going wrong as I went on making it up.
How blind I had been, and how mortified I felt now! Jacques’ fits of depression, his self-accusations – I had been attributing them to some unspecified yearning for the impossible. How stupid the abstraction of my replies must have seemed to him! How far away I had really been from him, at those very moments when I had thought we were closest! Yet there had been hints I might have taken: those conversations with his
friends, when they had talked about mysterious – but they had been real! – troubles. I remembered something else: I had caught a glimpse of a woman sitting beside Jacques in his car – a dark, thin-faced woman who was too elegant, and too pretty. But I had persisted in my acts of faith; with what ingenuity, and with what blind obstinacy I had deceived myself! It was I alone who had built up the image of our friendship over the last three years; I still clung to it today because of the past, and now the past was nothing but a lie. Everything was falling to pieces. I felt I wanted to burn all my boats behind me; to love someone else, or set off for the ends of the earth.
And then I chided myself. It was my own dream that was at fault, not Jacques. What had I to reproach him with? He had never set himself up as a hero or a saint and he had even told me himself that he was no good. The quotation in the Jouve had been a warning; he had tried to talk to me about Magda, but I had not made it easy for him to be frank. Besides, I had long suspected, and even known the truth. What was it within me that could be so shocked by it? My old Roman Catholic prejudices? I felt my equanimity had been restored. It was I who had been wrong in wanting life to conform to a preconceived ideal; it was for me to show myself equal to everything life might bring. I had always preferred reality to the mirage; I brought my meditation to a pious close by priding myself on having stumbled on a solid problem, and on having successfully solved it.
The next morning, there was a letter from Meyrignac; grandpapa was seriously ill and was not expected to live; I was very fond of him, but he was very old, his death seemed natural now, and I could feel no sadness about it. My cousin Madeleine was in Paris; I took her to eat ices outside a café in the Champs-Élysées; she nattered on about her affairs and I hardly heard what she was saying; I was thinking of Jacques with disgust. His liaison with Magda had been all too faithful a copy of the classic set-up which had always sickened me: the rich elder son who loses his virginity to a low-born mistress; then when he decides it’s time to lead a respectable life, he drops her flat. It was banal; it was beastly. I went to bed, and woke up still full of bitterness and scorn. ‘One’s integrity is no greater than the number of compromises one makes with oneself’: I repeated to myself this phrase of Jean Sarment’s during my lectures at the École Normale and during a lunch I had with Pradelle in a sort of dairy called the Yvelines on the boulevard Saint-Michel. He was talking away about himself. He was protesting that he was not as calculating and ponderous as his friends declared; only he detested showing-off; he would not allow himself to express sentiments or ideas which he felt were not well-grounded. I approved of his conscientious attitude. Though sometimes I thought he was too indulgent to the faults of others, he always judged himself with the utmost severity: which is better than the opposite, I thought bitterly. We discussed the merits of all the people we admired and at one fell stroke he dismissed as ‘nobothes’ all the ‘bar-corner aesthetes’. I agreed with him. I went back to Passy with him in the bus and then took a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne.
I smelt the fragrance of freshly cut grass as I wandered there in the Bagatelle, dazzled by the profusion of daisies and jonquils and flowering fruit trees; there were whole beds of red tulips, heavy-headed, high lilac hedges, and enormous trees. I read Homer beside a stream; little ripples of water and great blasts of sun were playing on the rustling leaves. What sorrow so great, I wondered, that it could remain impervious to the beauty of the earth? Jacques, after all, was no more important than one of the trees in this park.
I was talkative; I liked to make public everything that happened to me; and besides, I was hoping that someone would be able to take a more impartial view of my dilemma. I knew that Herbaud would find it faintly comical; I thought too highly of Zaza and Pradelle to expose Jacques to the judgement they would pass on him. On the other hand, I was no longer intimidated by Clairaut, and he would weigh the facts in the light of that Christian morality to which, despite myself, I still bent the knee: I opened my sorry case to him. He listened greedily, and heaved a sigh: girls – how intransigent they can be! He, for example, had admitted to his fiancée that he had had several lapses – they were, he hinted to me, solitary pleasures – and instead of admiring his frankness she had seemed to be disgusted. I supposed that she would have preferred to listen to some more glamorous kind of confession; failing that, he should have held his tongue; but that was not the point in question. As far as my own case was concerned, Clairaut thought I had been too severe on Jacques, who therefore was justified in his conduct. I decided to fall in with Clairaut’s opinion of the case. Forgetting that I had been immediately shocked by the middle-class banality of Jacques’ liaison, I blamed myself for having condemned him in the light of purely abstract principles. In fact, I was lost in a dark tunnel, battling against shadows, brandishing the useless sword of an ideal I no longer believed in against the dead past, against Jacques’ own phantasmal shade. But if I abjured this ideal, what other yardstick could I use? In order to protect my love, I swallowed my pride: why should I insist on Jacques being different from other men? The only thing was, if he was the same as all the others – and I knew that in many respects he was inferior to a great number of his sex – what point was there in putting him above the rest? My indulgence was finally turning to indifference.
A dinner at his parents’ house only served to increase my confusion. In that gallery where I had spent so many sad, so many precious moments, my aunt informed me that he had written: ‘Do remember me very kindly to Simone when you see her. I’ve not been very nice to her, but then I’m never very nice to anyone; not that she’ll be at all surprised.’ So he looked upon me simply as one among many! The thing that disturbed me even more was the fact that he had asked his mother to let him look after his young half-brother when he, Jacques, returned to Paris: so he was going to continue his bachelor existence? Really, I was incorrigible. I could have kicked myself for dreaming-up a past in which he had no part; and here I had been making plans for our future life together. I gave up all my make-believe. I don’t care what happens, I told myself. I went as far as to think that it would be better for me to write the whole thing off and get started on a new tack. I still didn’t really want to make this clean break, but it was a tempting prospect. In any case, I decided that if I wanted to live my own life, write, and be happy, I could perfectly well do without Jacques.
*
On the Sunday, a wire brought the news of grandfather’s death; my past was certainly on the way out. I wandered alone through Paris, heart-free, or in the Bois de Boulogne with Zaza. On the Monday afternoon, sitting on the sunny terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens, I read My Life by Isadora Duncan and day-dreamed about my own existence. It wouldn’t be a stormy life, nor even a startling one. All I wanted was to be in love, to write good books, to have children and ‘friends to whom I can dedicate my books and who will show my children by personal example what poetry and philosophy can be’. My husband was to play a very small part; that was because while still investing him with the characteristics of Jacques I was eager to treat with friendly indulgence those failings which I no longer closed my eyes to. In this future life, which I began to feel was imminent, the essential thing would still be writing. I felt I had been right not to bring out anything too despairing while I was still so young: at present I wanted to express both the tragic sense of life, and its beauty. Meditating thus upon my destiny, I caught sight of Herbaud walking round the lake with Sartre: he saw me, and did not acknowledge me. How mysteriously misleading private diaries can be! I made no mention of this incident which nevertheless had made me sick at heart. I was hurt that Herbaud should have made this denial of our friendship, and felt that sense of exile which I hated above everything else.
The whole family had gathered at Meyrignac; it was perhaps because of this great upheaval that I remained unmoved by the sight of grandpapa’s dead body, the house, and the garden. When I was thirteen, I had wept at the thought that one day I would no longer feel at home at Meyrignac; t
hat day had come; the property belonged to my aunt and cousins; this summer I would visit them as a guest, and very soon, no doubt, I would never return there: but I didn’t heave a single sigh of regret. My childhood and adolescence and the sound of the cows’ hooves kicking the stable door as I leaned out into the starlit night – all that was far, very far behind me. Now I was ready for something else; I was all expectancy, and in the violence of this feeling all regrets were swept away.
I returned to Paris, dressed in heavy mourning, wearing a hat swathed in black crêpe georgette; but all the chestnuts were in flower, the tarmac was soft underfoot, and I could feel through my dress the gentle force of the sun. The fair was on in the Esplanade des Invalides: I strolled about there with my sister and Gégé, eating nougat that made our fingers sticky. They met a fellow art-student who took us off to her studio to listen to her records and drink port. What a lot of pleasure for one afternoon! Every day brought me something new: the smell of oil-paint in the Salon des Tuileries; at the Européen, there was Damia, whom I went to hear with Mallet; there were walks with Zaza and Lisa; the blue air of summer, and the sun. I was still filling the pages of my diary: they spoke unendingly of my new-found happiness.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Page 41