The Lepers

by Henri de Montherlant

  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 ag
ainst 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 he
r 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!