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 gi
ve 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.
The Lepers Page 18