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, yo
u 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.
The Lepers Page 17