If this letter is harsh, unduly harsh, it is because one cannot go on indefinitely holding up a weight which is beyond one's strength. One goes on and on holding it, then the muscles give way, the weight falls, and if someone has put his foot in the wrong place, the weight crushes it. That, no doubt, is what women call 'betrayal'. You saw the weight fall on the foot of one of your congeners, the woman I showed you in my studio in Port-Royal. On the other hand, when one loves, the weight does not fall, because it is easy for one to bear it.
One day I definitely preferred myself to you, and from that day everything fell back into place. All the trouble sprang from the fact that there were times when I preferred you to myself. You tell me: 'I shall be for you whatever you want me to be.' I want you to be nothing to me. You wonder what remains of the affection I had for you. Nothing remains. If you knew the extent to which I do not love you, you would be appalled. You have left no trace in my substance; even your face has vanished. Although I owe you a few hours that were worthy of myself, your memory as a whole is painful to me. I remember all that was touching about you, and sometimes sublime, but none of it grips me any more - it's like a pair of pliers on which the screw has come loose. 'Esteem wears out, like love.' (Vauvenargues). The greater part of what concerns you has faded completely from my memory. If I happen to read on such and such a day in my engagement-book for 1927 that we went to the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt together, not only does nothing - not an instant - of that whole evening float to the surface, but I could have sworn that we had never been to that theatre. And indeed it is well that it should be so. It has been said that memory is a muse. Oblivion must be a fairy.
And it's indifference, too, that you have felt for me in the past three years, in spite of this apparent recrudescence of passion provoked by M. Gaston Pégorier's absence in the Haute-Saône. And believe me, indifference, total, solid indifference, is a thoroughly healthy feeling between two people. Even when they have loved each other. Things become reabsorbed, and no more harm comes of it than from unanswered letters. This metamorphosis is not a function of man's woes, but of his virtues. I assure you, there's something intoxicating in feeling oneself in that state. It would be worth while loving if only to experience it some day. One feels as though one were flying through the air.
One of the reasons why I was able to put up with you so long was that you did not write me long letters. 'Misunderstood' or not, don't start down the slippery slope of letter-writing. I can do nothing for you: there is nothing one can do for those whom one does not love. Look elsewhere, the world is large, as I've told you many times. And if you need any consolation, tell yourself that at least you made me live for a whole year. You gave me feeling. So, until your dying day, you can console yourself with the thought that you will not have been superfluous on this earth: that much is established. Armed with this knowledge, go your way.
All the best,
C.
This letter remained unanswered. Costals never heard from Mme Végorier again. All's well that ends well.
APPENDIX
Costals had just been re-reading some notes of his, a year old but unpublished, which he had found. And he mused:
'I go on thinking ill of women, and say so, and get carried away. Then a moment comes when I stop, blink, and ask myself "Where am I?" with the feeling that for some time now what I've been thinking and saying no longer squares with reality. Then I reproach myself, and take a vigorous mud-bath in humility and remorse. But when I come out of this bath, I'm surprised to find that I hadn't been mistaken at all, and that my alleged exaggerations corresponded exactly to the facts.
'For instance, a woman of sixty who has lived for forty years with her husband (of seventy), and who, while they go on cohabiting, eating face to face, starts separation proceedings, gets the bailiff to make an inventory of the house, has her husband's deed-box sealed up, and when he says: "This business will kill me", replies: "I know" - and all this out of jealousy, that is to say "love"...
'Or airmen's wives who tell you: "You think Georges has guts, but he's terrified in lifts, he wouldn't dare to reprimand the maid, and he does precisely what I tell him to. He's a child, etc."
'Or the young woman in Morocco whom I once heard say of her husband, slaving away up-country for ten hours a day: "René has to keep his nose to the grindstone. Now he knows what it costs to keep a wife."
'And similar instances ad infinitum. . . . One for every page of the calendar. No, it's when I think I've strayed too far from reality that I'm mistaken ... '
Here is the text which the writer had just read:
The Lepers
SOME GRAVE MALADIES OF THE MODERN WEST
(Synopsis)
Woman, what have I to do with thee? Jesus to his mother.
Unrealism. - Blinkers. Fear of reality, either from cowardice, or from idealistic inanity. When in fact it's reality that cleanses the soul. 'I throw into the waste-paper basket the documents about German rearmament which the military go on sending me.' (Briand to Stresemann, at Thoiry).
Dolorism. - The Apostle says: 'If ye be without chastisement, then are ye bastards and not sons.' The chastised rub their hands: down with the happy! The chastised affirm that one must suffer, as bad writers affirm that a novel must be badly written: it is a way of justifying themselves. Moral suffering is supposed to deepen one, when in fact it is not suffering that deepens, ['For sorrow hath killed many, and there is no profit therein. - Ecclesiasticus.] but crisis: not at all the same thing. It provides people with a claim to consideration, to being fussed over, to forgiveness, one of the so-called essential ingredients of inner worth and of genius. A man cannot say he is happy without being considered a simpleton, or a vulgarian, or a humbug who wants others to envy him, or an insulter of the miseries of the human race. Whence the universal pose of suffering and 'anxiety', etc.: people realize that it's suffering that pays. Whereas the truth is that moral suffering is nearly always a sign either of physiological inferiority (it's only the weak who worry) or of intellectual inferiority (an intelligent person knows how to alleviate most of his own moral sufferings).
The desire to please. - Never saying what is, or what one thinks, but what one believes will please. The desire for approval is the common denominator of every individual in every bourgeoisie.
Gregariousness. - Fear and hatred of individual thought; and collective auto-suggestion. The world is riddled with clichés as the vine is riddled with phylloxera. Everyone thinks in the same way at the same time, like puppets making the same gesture at the same time in response to the puppet-master.
Sentimentalism. - A substitute for reason and justice. The cheap morality and bogus uplift ('the threepenny opera') of religion, school and press.
Now, in each of these five sores of the body social, the same abundance of bacilli are to be found in the shape of yoni. In other words, all these sores are essentially feminine. Let us go over them again:
Unrealism. - 'I don't want to think about it' and 'It's to be hoped that' are two typically feminine expressions. Women are too infirm to bear reality: reality, for them, is an affliction. Whence the 'refuges': love, religion, superstition, mythomania, convention, ['Elegant women think a thing does not exist when it cannot be mentioned in society' - Nietzsche.] idealism. Falsified both in face and body (because of their infirmity), they only feel at ease in a falsified universe. Men are more afraid of words than realities; women are afraid of both. Ostriches and women bury their heads in the sand and imagine they can no longer be seen. Men also bury their heads in the sand, but know they can be seen. In Hans Andersen's story, it was surely the women who were most enthusiastic in praise of the emperor's non-existent clothes; the men must have followed with some reluctance; and only the child was prepared to admit that the emperor was naked.
(Whence the success, in a society that gives women an exaggerated degree of influence, of an art - whether fiction, theatre or cinema - in which life is represented as it is not, and the loathing which tha
t society feels for any art that represents life as it is.) [Women authors. Their manuscripts always full of spelling and punctuation mistakes. They know how to spell and to punctuate, but they can no more see these errors in their manuscripts than they can see what stares them in the face in life. Like those mothers who, after a dozen years, have still not noticed that their son has a scar on his head or a birth-mark on his calf.
For thirty years the chains that bar the platforms of Paris buses have let one through if one lifts them at one end. Yet a great many women, when they wish to board these buses, persist in pulling downwards instead of upwards, and eventually throw imploring looks at the passengers standing on the platform to get them to come to their aid, as a cat with a fish-bone stuck in its gums comes to you to have it pulled out after having torn its mouth to shreds trying to get it out itself. Yet never have we witnessed such a scene with a man in the part. I don't wish to infer too much from this. But it struck me as being worth remarking upon, however petty it may seem.]
Dolorism. - For long in a socially impoverished position, woman seized rapturously on the idea that suffering was an advancement and a benefit: the yoni-shaped bacillus and the cross-shaped bacillus have long been known to have certain affinities. No one reiterates more emphatically and more stubbornly that suffering is necessary; no one abuses more violently those who know how to avoid suffering, or is more tenacious in seeking out the chinks in their armour. 'I hate him because he does not suffer' (Mme Tolstoy on Tolstoy). The story of humanity, ever since Eve, is the story of the efforts made by woman to diminish man and make him suffer, so that he may become her equal. [You know nothing of feminine psychology, because you know nothing of suffering, because the satisfaction of the flesh (when flesh that does not suffer is flesh still-born) prevents you from despairing of everything ... A man may be this or that, but a woman will always remain a woman, will always be able to inflict suffering which is more beautiful than love, ruin which is mightier than life, on the strong, who are always the proudest and the stupidest.' (Letter from an unknown woman to Pierre Costals.)]
In the West, dominated by women, the cult of suffering. In the East, where man is master, the cult of wisdom.
The desire to please. - Woman wants to please, no matter what the price, no matter what the circumstances, no matter whom. (No need to elaborate.)
Gregariousness. - 'How different you are from all the others!' Every woman has heard that said to her by a man with his tongue hanging out. (Title for a novel: Panting Tongues.) When it's 'How like all the others you are!' that she should have heard. The animal that secretes clichés most copiously is woman. Because, weak and lacking in self-confidence, she needs to feel the backing of majority opinion; because, lacking any ideas of her own, she needs to appropriate man's; because she is accustomed to saying what she thinks will please man. And yet, 'I'm not one of the herd' is a typical woman's remark. Could it then be that only the worst members of the herd cry out against it?
Sentimentalism. - When a man really loves a woman, the love he gives her is a different sort of love from that which she demands: she continually seeks to corrupt the love which the man gives her. It is women who have turned affection into a neurosis, and affectionate love - a divine emotion when it means tenderness, whether or not mixed with desire - into that laughable monstrosity which one might call 'Lurve'. Lurve is love-as-women-understand-it: absurdity, jealousy, histrionics, 'How do we stand?', the feminine anxiety with which women infect men, the need to be loved in return, the tendency to change to indifference, the tendency to change to hate - a whole inept scholasticism the object of which becomes so tenuous that one ends up by saying to oneself: 'But anyhow, what's it all about?' In short, one of the most ignoble products of the human race, a thousand times more vulgar and impure and maleficent than the sexual act in its simplicity, and the principal refuge of both man and woman against reason and conscience. Lurve, the European disease, the great Western hysteria.
The ancient Arabs used to crucify their slain enemy side by side with the carcass of a dog. If Lurve had a human form, it is thus that I would wish to crucify it.
A parenthesis.
Someone I know often feels, when in France, as lost as a man who has inadvertently strayed into a big drapery store thronged with chattering women: 'What am I doing here?' Some years ago I wrote in one of my essays: 'A feminine people, like the French ... ' Then I said to myself: 'Careful!
perhaps that's an idle generalization; or perhaps one of my pet prejudices.' And I crossed it out.
But since then I've read this: 'There's something of woman in every Frenchman.' Who said that? Voltaire. And this: 'The role which Frenchmen play among men is that which women play in the human race as a whole.' Who said that? Goethe. And this: 'In every Frenchman, woman predominates. They are a decadent race.' Who said that? Tolstoy.
And I regretted not having had the courage of my convictions.
Let us resume.
This moral inferiority of woman, certain features of which we have noted and which is matched by a considerable number of physiological inferiorities (in a medical book I have in front of me, the bare enumeration of these inferiorities takes up ten lines), woman is herself aware of ['One of the facts that enabled me to establish my conception of individual psychology was the discovery of the more or less unconscious inferiority feeling that exists in all women and girls simply due to the fact that they are female. And this affects their psychic life to such a degree that they are always betraying traits of masculine protest, though often in a circuitous form, especially in the form of apparently feminine traits.' - Adler.
(Cows ride each other, though they get no pleasure from it, through a stupid imitation of the male.)] - even without having to take into account the special container on liners into which she is invited to dispose of her 'towels and other bulky objects'. How can she fail to recognize that she belongs to a sorry race when she sees that she is always the asker, always the one who 'needs', always the one who flaps her wings and squawks for a beakful? (Her need to be loved, kissed, taken in someone's arms, is a veritable disease. How humiliating it is, this perpetual supplication, avowed or not, this perpetual mendicancy - camouflaged at times under the plumage of coquetry or disdain!) The sentiment of her inferiority secretly governs all her behaviour. Whence her tendency to engulf, to cling, to hoard, to seek assurance: it is as though she were in constant fear of being deprived; all she gives is the child, which she gives only after having received (and it is in that act of receiving, physiologists tell us, that all her biological interest lies). Whence also the peculiar frenzy with which women push themselves forward and grab and cling, the tenacity with which they try to work their way into your life or get you to do them a favour. (When, in a crowd, you feel yourself being violently clutched or jostled, ten to one it will be a woman or a child. Knowing their weakness, the weak put all their strength into a gesture that called for comparatively little.)
How explain, otherwise than by an inferiority complex, the need, innate in almost every woman, to counterfeit herself - to counterfeit her character (posing), her face (make-up), her body (no need to go into details ...), her natural smell (scent), her handwriting? The strong do not lie, or rarely; they spare themselves the trouble; they are honest, not to say cynical, through disdain: 'We veracious ones,' the nobles of ancient Greece used to say. And all races that are servile by nature, or enslaved by circumstance, lie. How explain, otherwise than by a sense of personal inadequacy, the need that obsesses women to make themselves interesting, to affect sham moods - always 'distinguished' ones? How explain, otherwise than by a sentiment of physiological inferiority, the necessity they so often feel to simulate sexual enjoyment.
And finally, it is not unusual for ambiguous women to get the surgeon to change their sex. But even the bait of not having to go to war never drives an ambiguous man to change himself outright into a woman.
A civilization - ours - in which literature, whether popular or academic, press,
cinema, radio, popular song, are forever harping on the slogan 'Woman must have her way', and have ended up by making men believe it; in which, for centuries, they have established, secured, envenomed this power of woman, who would be harmless without them, and compelled men and children to gape at her in wonder, through an immense conspiracy of public opinion, morality, and clichés by the million (thus the farmer and his daughter and the lad bang away at the stallion with their sticks, to make him go to the mare); all the social forces in coalition, a gigantic campaign of ballyhoo which makes the publicity of big firms and the propaganda of totalitarian states seem laughable by comparison; - and since the idolatry of woman means for a man the abandonment of his independence and his dignity, and the breakdown of all order, one feels the same sort of horror in the face of this ballyhoo as one feels on seeing an advertisement for some deadly alcohol. If, at least, women were proud and sensitive enough to tell their frightful knight-errants to go to blazes! If they would only greet with a hail of rotten tomatoes those cattle-drovers disguised as lecturers, or those film-directors dropping clichés like a tree shedding its leaves, whose milk-and-water patter dishonours them: 'Get away with you, you and your "victorious Eve". Defenders of your sort do us more harm than good. We need the respect that we deserve as human beings, but your gallantry makes us vomit.' Alas! not a sign of vomit. Even the most sensitive of them ask for more.
If woman reigns, in spite of her manifest unworthiness, in spite of her incompetence even in her own line - as witness her lack of insight, her weak judgement, her childish wiles - it is therefore only due to the stupidity of men.
This stupidity arises partly from desire. In desiring, a man flatters the object desired, in order to win its favours, and over-rates its charms in order to justify his lust, as well as the weakness it entails, in his own eyes and those of others. [Whence the hue and cry raised by men themselves in the modern West against those who dispute the supremacy of women. For to demonstrate that that supremacy is unfounded is to brand them, indirectly, as nincompoops, since they created it. And then, just think of it, deflating the dreams of these gentlemen!] But this stupidity is not necessarily implicit in desire. The peoples of antiquity, the peoples of the East, whose interest in woman no one would question, nevertheless put her in her proper place.
The Lepers Page 19