It was in a town in eastern France, some months after having been, as they say, restored to civilian life, that I became acquainted with Germaine. She was a postmistress and the daughter of a local farmer. She was four years older than I and to this day when I think about her, I am reminded of this disparity in age. Her father would send her baskets of cherries. She herself resembled those hard little cherries that are left until the last. She had a family, women friends, personal pursuits. Modest though her existence was, how I longed to be part of it! The tragic thing is that I have always wanted to become like those whom I have got near to, and it is the opposite that has occurred every time, it is they who have become like me. A little before I was discharged, Germaine handed in her resignation, sold the few things she owned, and went to Paris to wait for me. I wanted to enter her life. She preferred to enter mine.
It was seven in the morning when I came out of the Gare de l'Est. They had allowed us to let our hair grow. Mine was too long, just as the leaves strewing the boulevards were too abundant, fallen from trees untended since 1914. I wasn't wearing a detachable collar, and this bothered me no end. Nobody looked at me. It is always this way when we set foot in a new city. Germaine was waiting for me in a room she had taken on rue du Château-d'Eau. I did not want to join her unless I had no alternative. It was too early to go to my mother's. I went into a public bathhouse. I waited an hour for the water to heat. Before starting out on my trip, I had waited three hours in Châlons for my train, seven hours the day before. So now I was about to see my mother again.
She was living by herself in a small courtside apartment in a handsome building on rue Théodore de Banville, owned by the National Insurance Company. Receipts were sent to her by mail. This flattered her. These are practices possible only between well-bred people. From time to time, she would invite a few devoted friends to dine, with a ceremonial borrowed from the foremost restaurants. Often she thought of her childhood, of the forest in Laigle, of her father's hut, but rarely of Madame Mobecourt. What poverty! A poverty so inveterate it was impossible to dislodge. It went back too far. Not even the remembrance of a relative who would have been well-to-do. Neither kindness nor money could do anything to assuage it. And one would have my mother remember someone who had ignored this fact!
I rang the bell. My mother appeared, physically still attractive. The recollection of her sins, instead of inspiring repentance in her, gave her a feeling of security. She knew how to take care of herself now. She knew how to distinguish, in her misfortunes, the share of responsibility that fell to all concerned, herself included. I thought about everything I had been left to surmise about my mother, about that backbiting no one remembered but that I had not forgotten. Above all, I was not to undertake to see my mother anymore. To pay her a visit would have been an act of disobedience. I could not help but notice that today it no longer was.
My fondness for the Fruchauts originated in their not judging me upon appearances. In my past they had discovered the existence of a world into which, later on, I would probably return. Sometimes they poked fun at me. It's extraordinary how from a certain kind of mocking goodness will emanate. Mockery always ruffled me before I met them. Such was their manner of laughing at some of my words and ideas, at my naïvetés, that their good opinion of me remained unaltered.
I had never dared talk to them about Germaine. But they suspected her existence. At my age, it was impossible to hide something. From time to time they alluded ironically to my reserve. When I realized that they knew me so well, how I wished not that I had not hidden anything, but that I had hidden something of which I could be proud!
They asked to be introduced to Germaine. What humiliation! And then what joy when they told me she was charming, but not suitable for a young man like me, that I had duties toward myself, that I did not have the right to sacrifice my life. Nothing is more comforting than those lessons given by people we admire, than the absence of scruple they would demonstrate if they were in our shoes. They called me a child when I declared I could never abandon Germaine. It is true that I had not told them everything. They still did not know that she had resigned from the post office for my sake. Merely to think that their support might fail if they were to learn the truth cast me into the deepest dejection. "Ah! You never mentioned that! That's a different story!" How I dreaded those words!
With growing frequency Germaine reproached me for not accepting, for the time being, a job of whatever sort. I would darken at this. The fact of being tied down to a regular job, simply to meet my material needs, would that not be my undoing? Did I not have better things to do? I was haunted by the desire to resume my education. To take a degree in law, in medicine, that alone struck me as worth my making the effort to break out of the rut I was in. I hung about the Latin Quarter. I bought curricula outlines. But that was all. I did not have the spirit, above all I did not have the strength of will, to do more.
It is curious that the Fruchauts, instead of blaming me for this helplessness of mine, were understanding of it. I had the impression that it made me even more likeable in their eyes. I should say that they formed a vaguely Bohemian family, for whom lofty aspirations coming into collision with reality was the subject of amused commentary. The mother, as the good bourgeoise she sought to go on being, remained conscious of her rank in the thick of everyday worries. She did private tutoring, used the term French family as a lure to recruit boarders from abroad. The father, so redoubtable owing to his office of deputy public prosecutor in the Department of the Seine, had literary ambitions which otherwise rendered him the most inoffensive of men. As for the children, they were engaged in a variety of occupations. The son did research in libraries on behalf of a foreign scholar. The daughter had set her sights on painting and was taking speech lessons. Whenever they spoke about those demeaning problems having to do with money, about the ire these have from time immemorial provoked in the greatest minds, they seemed to me to have the right. But I, nobody that I was! Oh, the desire I felt to be like them at such times! Being poor did not matter to me so long as I was poor in a certain way, the way a student is poor, or a young artist. And if to this day I never think of that family without a feeling of gratitude, it is because they had understood this desire too, and because their good spirits were a source of encouragement for me, and because they had the rare goodness to believe I was in the same situation as they. I thought of other reasons for liking them them. Their insight, so new to me, into the hidden springs of human behavior. Their pleasure at coming upon a striking illustration of a state of things said to be widespread and which I was conscious of exemplifying. Finally, that mockery I was the object of, a mockery that I sometimes did not understand but beyond which I divined a more general mockery aimed at those who had brought me up. For the Fruchauts certainly had had cause to be critical of the way in which solidarity is exercised within rich and respectable families.
I had heard a lot of talk in Menton about the liberal professions. Monsieur Fruchaut would smile every time I unintentionally revealed how much importance I attached to them. There he would discern the mark left by a certain middle class irresponsibility. To bring up a boy to think highly of those careers, and then, one fine day, to cease to care a fig for him.
Time passed. At twenty-three we want to be everywhere at once. We forsake faithful friends for strangers. What we possess does not count. Monsieur Fruchaut had no idea, when he said that I ought not sacrifice my life for anyone, what kind of a quandary he would throw me into, for the first person I thought of was him. Suddenly I had the feeling that without some impulsive act our relations would never end. "Let's break it off here, otherwise a few years from now I shall find myself at exactly the same point." But how? There are some friends we part with who later on seem to have parted with us. Would the Fruchauts be of this sort? I began to ponder the consequences of my actions.
One day they spoke to me about a gentleman from Compiègne.
"You should go see him, he can be of help to you," the
y advised. Ah, those Compiègne milieux, how well we know them!
"And what shall I say to him?"
"Nothing. Talk to him about Compiègne, about Joan of Arc."
How, I wondered, could so vague a subject create a bridge between us?
"It does defy comprehension."
Monsieur Fruchaut gave me a letter of introduction. It looked to me to be of little weight. A word or two from Abel, for instance, would have suited me better. Is it because we need to have known people a long time in order to feel that their intervention will have any chance of succeeding? I did not believe in a lunch or a visit producing any success.
Nevertheless, I went to Compiègne.
"Madame Mobecourt is very ill," the Fruchauts' friend informed me. "Go see her. You will certainly make her very happy."
Three years have gone by. I have broken with Germaine. I have stopped seeing Monsieur Fruchaut. I still run into their friend Mauguière, the fellow they sent me to visit, for I more and more often spend a few days in Compiègne.
I have a need for change. Every year, every six months, I am somewhere else. It's no longer the same people, nor the same houses. And yet there is no difference. It is the same wretched poverty. Within this poverty which is constant and within this setting which changes I am little by little discovering something new. For some time now I have stopped growing physically, but I feel that I do not cease to learn. In the midst of my idleness and my changes of address I am gradually becoming another man. I do not age, I am becoming aware of what surrounds me.
Ah! That visit to Etienne's parents, not at their estate in Cuts, but in their house in Compiègne. Gazes settle upon me, all identical, as if they were those of the same person. They talk to me about Madame Mobecourt. I incarnate the good that she has done.
It is a Sunday afternoon, with a leaden sky, and music in the cafés bordering the forest. What sadness! The air is heavy. There is thunder in the distance. The flies are biting. And we are all sitting in the park. I am the abandoned child, now become a man. So everything has turned out pretty well. . . A little too much importance is accorded to things I say.
I rent a little room in the Gobelins, near the so-called Ville de Lutèce, the neighborhood's large bazaar. "Just fine," I say upon being shown the room, acting easy to please. A room whose one window faces due east, a room where the summer sunlight comes in for half an hour, then does not reappear until the following morning, leaving an empty patch of blue sky for you to contemplate all day long.
I attach no importance to the distinction between furnished and unfurnished. This room is furnished. Were I to rent one that isn't, I would pay less. This acceptance of expenses that could be avoided is madness when one is poor. I do not wish to organize myself in order to spend as little as possible. I do not care what things cost.
And I have taken it into my head to protect lower middle class folk! I hand out advice around me. What advice, my God! In the most modest households they discover they have connections with wealth. They apply to me because, it seems, I know all about it. Back on rue Descartes, they used to apply to Raymond Fruchaut, on rue Descartes of all places, where for one week I slept up in a maid's room on a box-mattress with broken springs. In those days he used to contradict me imperiously. With him not there I take my revenge. He had one shortcoming that I do not have. He always kept the powerful up on their pedestals, whereas I depict them as regular human beings. "They'll understand," I say. "There's always some way to work things out. Above all, avoid making it appear as if it were your due." That is the crowning argument, instantly understood by everyone.
The church in Compiègne was packed. The coffin rested on a mobile platform concealed beneath black hangings. They were burying Madame Mobecourt. I had gone to visit her a few months earlier. She was a very old lady. She had expressed great emotion at seeing me again. She had gazed at me admiringly. I was tall, strong, handsome. Had she not been right after all? Her old woman's eyes, had they not been more clear-sighted than mine? Was it not dishonesty on my part to complain constantly about my fate all the while I possessed this world's most precious treasures: youth and health? But why this uneasiness I felt to see her satisfaction before assets that I did not owe to her? In reality, I was nothing at all for Madame Mobecourt. The years I had spent in her proximity, though they had been the earliest of my life, had for her been no different from other years. She told me that she was glad to have contributed to my turning into a man. A man—why only this one vague word? Did youth and health suffice to illustrate that theory she so cherished: where there's a will, there's a way? Did she not seem to be thanking me for having understood that you mustn't let everything depend on those who are helping you?
Now she was dead, and she left to other charitable ladies the trouble of aiding other abandoned children. I did not dare go up to the members of her family. However, I sat down three or four rows behind them. I gave my face that look of deliberate solemnity one notices at funerals. And when I nodded discreetly to anyone, I was mindful to shed none of that solemnity. From time to time I glanced at Denise, Monsieur Jules Dechatellux's niece, seated on the other side of the central aisle, at the end of the row adjoining mine. Like darkness as one's eyes become accustomed to it, my dark blue suit seemed to become lighter and lighter. I had the impression that everybody was noticing that I was not in black, that the hat I kept hidden was gray. And more and more often I turned my head in the girl's direction. She coughed constantly. I was admiring her. She was so lady-like, with her black suit, her fur, her black gloves, her self-conscious air from which a sort of ignorance of feminine artifice became apparent.
Suddenly I felt a palpitation, the palpitation I feel every time a stranger advances in my direction. A woman in deep mourning, whose face I couldn't make out, had just left the row where the family was sitting. But I was relieved the next instant. She bent toward my ear.
"Come sit near us," she said to me in a voice loud enough for others to hear.
I followed her without understanding what was happening to me. I looked up at the woman sitting across the aisle and our glances met. Her eyes said: "Well now, this is odd. Why are they asking him to change seats?"
I had just recognized Madame Mobecourt's sister at whose home, as a very small child, I had spent several years. Her son had died, that had been three years ago. Her husband, very recently. Since then she had been living in Compiègne. And now her sister had died in her turn. She was going through that strange period in life when death shows its face to us several times in a row, without, for all that, our wishing to distance ourselves from the loved ones remaining to us.
She had not always been on very good terms with Madame Mobecourt. One would have thought it natural that in the presence of death the petty rivalries from the past be forgotten. Nothing of the sort. Almost as old as her sister, she did not consider herself obliged to grieve beyond measure. She had but to fulfill her duty. It was for this reason she had come to get me, in order that I represent all those who owed thanks to the departed for her blessings.
So taken was I by surprise that I did not think that she had troubled herself simply in order to seat me in the row behind her, and I kept close to her side. Gesturing, she got me to understand that I was to retrace my steps and sit down on an empty chair in the second row. I stood for a moment not knowing what to do. Must I disturb all those gentlemen who were watching us without moving their heads? I turned toward Denise with a woeful air, not to make her smile but to show her my perplexity, as if in such circumstances only she could rescue me. And it was then that an imperceptible smile appeared on Denise's face, a smile that was imperceptible to all except me.
I had lost my main supporter at Compiègne. What reason was I going to invoke now for returning to that town? It is under such circumstances that there appears to us what with our feeble means we are able to distinguish of the designs of Providence. I have observed that Providence is not so impenetrable to an attentive intelligence. I had a presentiment of my des
tiny. It would be neither brilliant nor happy. It would however be marked by a certain pleasant mildness. At the very moment I was losing Madame Mobecourt I foresaw that a feeling more intense by far would replace the one I had had for her. It was probably because of Madame Mobecourt that I had not yet been able to bring myself to make a frank commitment to a course in life. Often a certain situation lingers on even though the circumstances that brought it about may have vanished. A man of my sort will endure the consequences of this to the very end.
After the ceremony I felt more alone than ever. All there was for me to do was to take the train. Yet a light was shining in the distance: Denise. I was not thinking about what I had borne in life, but rather about what I had avoided. A simple slip of the pen had spared me from the war. There had been a lot of them, those discrete interventions on the part of Providence. Denise's presence a few steps away, was that not providential? Whenever I have a fever I get into bed and call upon the mysterious power which, in us, combats illness. Whenever I am undergoing a moral crisis I turn toward a similar power which also defends me. "Will it be possible that Denise and I fall in love?"
I came back to Compiègne. The Easter holidays were my pretext. I had often thought about Denise's glance. Albert Dechatellux, her father, whom I had not seen for three years, questioned me about my plans. I reddened. He was very nice. I had come at a moment when he didn't know what to do with himself. "Well," he said to himself, "I shall see what this young fellow's made of."
"Sit down, sir."
We fell into conversation as if we were old acquaintances. When circumstances permitted, he would cast a rapid glance at me. I waited until he had finished before raising my eyes. What interested him were not my plans but the characteristic signs of my origins, of my upbringing. I was quick to understand that he had apprehended, not my thoughts, but all the false ideas that a social situation like mine had been able to give rise to. Even though he may have heard about me ever since my birth, even though he may have met me several times, he was now getting to know me.
A Singular Man Page 7