'Well, if you had refused? I'd like to show you something.'
Solange's father rose, took a sheaf of papers out of a drawer, and handed Costals a cutting from the Indépendant de N—, dated July 1923. The headline read: Our fellow-citizen, Charles Dandillot, refuses the Legion of Honour. A lyrical, or rather cautiously lyrical, editorial introduction was followed by the letter written by M. Dandillot to the unfortunate custodian of the scarlet flood.
Sir,
I understand that you wish to propose me for the Legion of Honour.
I have dedicated my life unostentatiously to the youth of France. I did not do so in the hope of a reward which must be shared with all and sundry.
Furthermore, I am now fifty-seven. Allow me, dear sir, to express one wish: that in future the Government will employ men better qualified to select the people who have done something for their country.
Believe me, etc. …
Costals saw in this letter the resentment of a man who had missed being decorated at thirty, and nothing more. 'As a way of thanking a man who has had a kind thought, it's not too badly put together.' The fact that M. Dandillot had communicated his masterpiece to the Indépendant de N— also seemed rather significant. M. Dandillot then embarked on a lecture about 'purity'. Costals knew this one well, having delivered it himself on occasion. His real opinion on the subject of honours was that they belonged to the category of things designated by Epictetus as 'indifferent'. But it was obvious from this letter that M. Dandillot attached great importance to honours.
While the latter was searching through the folder, Costals had cast an author's eye on the cover of his book (writers throw surreptitious glances at their names in print much as pretty women - or women who think themselves pretty - glance at their faces in mirrors) and noticed that hardly more than a dozen pages of the 'great book' had been cut. It is true, of course, that one can perfectly well 'place' an author after having read only a dozen pages by him.
When he had finished his lecture on 'purity', M. Dandillot said: 'Has Solange told you that I haven't long to live? It's not absolutely definite, but I'm fairly certain of it.'
'Mlle Dandillot has never said anything of the kind.'
'I shall be dead within a month. The end of all illusions!'
'For me, death will be the end of all reality.'
'For me, the end of all illusions. I'm going to die at the age of sixty-one. And for a man who has been living for the past thirty years in accordance with certain natural principles which could reasonably have been expected to promote both youthfulness and longevity, it's a bit of a fiasco. Sixty- one! The age at which everyone dies. And yet, think of it: for over thirty years I've lived with all my windows open, never touched alcohol, never smoked. For over thirty years, do you hear, not a drop of hot or even lukewarm water has ever touched my face or body, even when I was out of sorts. For over thirty years, I've been up at six every morning doing my exercises naked. And only a year ago I was camping in the mountains, walking twenty-five miles a day with a rucksack on my back like a young man, my head bare to the sun and the rain. Even if my face is lined, my body, up to a month ago, was still that of a young man.... Even now,' he added, pointing to his stomach, 'you mustn't think I have a paunch. I have to wear a flannel belt, and that accounts for the thickness. Actually I have a very slim waist. In short, I've lived a natural life: you realize what that means, natural? And in spite of all this to end up dying at sixty-one, at the mere threshold of old age. When heaps of people who have lived the softest, most artificial lives, go on living into their seventies and eighties. So now I say to myself: it wasn't worth it, I've been had.'
Costals, too, felt that it hadn't been worth it. He remembered the words of the Scripture: 'I shall suffer the same fate as the foolish. Why then was I more wise?' He said:
'The main thing is to know whether it was a sacrifice for you to give up wine, tobacco, etc...
'Often, yes. Particularly getting up at six. But I was determined to conquer myself. If I had had to struggle for my livelihood and that of my children, I should have told myself that the effort was not wasted. But no, I've always lived on my private means. If I have struggled, it has only been against myself, a kind of luxury. And now I tell myself: I've taken all that trouble for nothing. You see, Monsieur Costals, there's no point in being brave about life. And yet I feel obliged to go on, to see it through to the end.'
He threw back his hair with a sudden jerk of the head - the gesture of a young boy, or a horse tossing its mane.
'Why see it through to the end?'
Am I to betray the ideals of thirty years? Am I to deny everything I have stood for? I know too many people who would have a good laugh, or should I say a nasty laugh? To everyone who came near me I presented the image of a certain type of man. It is my duty to maintain that image to the end, even if I was mistaken. Look, my eyes are dead, my heart is dead, my spirit is dead. I know what would buck me up: champagne. But how could I possibly ask for it? It would look as though I were ratting on the whole of my past life. No, I refuse to be a deserter.'
'What an aberration of conscience!' thought Costals. 'That's how one turns into a living lie, when one imagines one is "pure".'
'I'm going to die,' M. Dandillot went on, 'but if I make the slightest allusion to the fact, I'm told I'm an alarmist. But hush....'
There was a noise in the next room. M. Dandillot said: 'Walls have ears, you know....' His expression was that of a child caught red-handed. When the noise had stopped, he went on:
'Yes, I'm going to die, and they expect me to be cheerful. I have to pretend that I don't know I'm dying, so that my family can go on enjoying themselves with a clear conscience.
When I'm at my last gasp, I shall have to say something memorable that my family can pass on to future generations. What about you? Will you make a historic remark on your death-bed?'
'I trust I shall preserve some decorum on my death-bed, and that means no historic remarks. If I were positively compelled to say something, I think I should ask the public's forgiveness for not having expressed more satisfactorily what was in my heart....'
'You're a public figure, that makes it different. I thought I had the right to stop acting now, after thirty years of it - the right to three weeks' sincerity before I vanish from this world. But on the contrary, the farce has only just begun, and it will soon be in full swing! Yesterday the doctor came, and he had to give me a very painful injection. I was longing to complain, just to hear them say "Be brave", so that I could shout back at them: "Be brave? Why should I? When I've hardly an ounce of energy left, because I've spent it too lavishly in the service of others, I'm expected to use it up putting on an act for your benefit. This corpse of mine must buckle to and step out smartly so that you should all feel better and not have to despise me. Well, go on, despise me then! What difference will it make to me where I'm going?" That's what I should have liked to shout at them. Instead of which, I acted the Roman, the man of iron - not a sign of fear, not a moan. And while they were admiring me (at least I suppose they were) I was despising myself for my absurd heroism.'
'And so,' said Costals, 'you lie to yourself, and worse still, you do it to impress others.'
'What do I care about the opinion of others! Perhaps if they'd shown some gratitude for the example I gave. But all they did was treat me as a lunatic. "Dandillot never eats tinned food because it's not natural ... Take off your scarf when you see Dandillot, otherwise he'll pitch into you: don't you know he breaks the ice to go for a swim in winter?" My wife laughs at me openly. Solange pretends to take my ideas seriously, but I know she only does it out of kindness. My son used to do the opposite of what he knew to be my principles, on purpose, simply to annoy me. So the results have been negative all along the line. Not only have I set an example which nobody followed, but it's also possible that the example was not worth setting. And yet, it might all have been very different if, like you, I had written something.... Ah, yes, you've nothing to worry ab
out!'
It occurred to Costals that the world would believe that M. Dandillot had died of cancer, but perhaps in reality he was dying from not having received the recognition he felt to be his due. As lamps need oil, so men need a certain amount of admiration. When they are not sufficiently admired, they die. The only way of softening the last days of M. Dandillot would have been to flatter his vanity. Costals was touched, too, to see the old man so naïvely, or so nobly, envying the achievement of a writer of thirty-four. The tragedy of not being able to express oneself suddenly struck him as being quite horrible.
M. Dandillot spoke warmly of Costals' future: 'You'll get everything you want, etc....' But there was a sting in the tail: 'Nevertheless, in spite of all this, your standing with the public is not what it ought to be. I don't know whether you're aware of the fact....'
'He's embittered,' thought Costals, 'so he's determined that I should have reason to feel embittered too. It would console him a bit. And yet he's obviously well disposed towards me. Ah, well! One mustn't expect too much of people.'
The whole thing seemed to him all the more exquisite for the fact, of which he was still firmly convinced, that M. Dandillot had never read more than ten pages of his work.
The writer went on:
'My dear sir, you must not think that your lessons have been in vain. You are giving me one this very minute which confirms my own way of thinking: that it's madness to restrain oneself except for the most powerful reasons.'
Moribund though he was, M. Dandillot was still sufficiently alive to contradict himself madly, which is the essence of life itself. The conclusion Costals had drawn was not at all to his liking. He protested:
'Everything that's good in the world was born of restraint.'
'I don't believe a word of it!' said Costals sharply, thinking to himself: 'That's the sort of tawdry platitude with which poor old humanity tries to justify all its sweat and tears.'
'Let me go on believing so, at least,' said M. Dandillot. 'If everything I've done has been in vain, let me feel at least that I rose above myself in doing it.'
It was then that Costals realized the extent of the old man's defeat. And he felt a great surge of pity towards him.
It occurred to him that Seneca had written more or less what M. Dandillot had just said. He told him so. But at the mention of Seneca, M. Dandillot burst out angrily:
'Don't talk to me about those humbugs! I used to fill up whole exercise-books with quotations from the moralists: I'll make a bonfire of them all before I die. Where did I read that splendid expression the other day: "a dunghill of philosophies"?' [Panaït Istrati (Author's note).] Really Monsieur Costals, you as a literary man must admit that you need a typist who can copy a manuscript intelligently more than you need a new conception of the universe. Those charlatans! I love life, I get nothing but enjoyment from it, and yet I'm supposed to be pleased at the prospect of leaving it forever! Doctors probe my inside, and I'm supposed to find the pain enjoyable! I've known old men who talked with serenity of their approaching end, who, knowing that death was imminent, continued to go about their business as if nothing was the matter. Well, they were all blockheads, idiots. Intelligent people are afraid, paralysed by fear. Those scoundrels of philosophers should be locked up in padded cells if they believe what they say. And if they're just laughing at us, they should be made to laugh on the other side of their faces. Yes, I'm surprised no emperor ever thought of exterminating the whole brood of philosophers at one fell swoop, on the same grounds as the early Christians.'
'For a dying man,' thought Costals, 'he seems a bit worked up. But perhaps it does happen that way.'
M. Dandillot closed his eyes for a moment with an expression of intense fatigue. 'That's what comes of walking twenty-five miles a day at the age of sixty,' Costals said to himself. 'Alas! One can't use up one's energy with impunity. But one mustn't say so. We must go on playing boy-scouts!' His eyes still closed, M. Dandillot raised his forearms and let them fall on the arms of his chair in a gesture of resignation and sadness.
'What I want is sleep. But Mme Dandillot and Solange keep waking me up to give me medicaments. The medicaments don't help, and sleep does; but no matter, I must be robbed of sleep because of the medicaments. Right up to the very end, one must behave according to what's "done", and not according to reality.'
Costals, who had imagined that this lunch was a trap set by the nuptial Hippogriff, and that M. Dandillot had got him behind closed doors in order to enumerate his daughter's assets, was more and more surprised to see that there was never any mention of her, or rather that M. Dandillot included her in the group - his 'family' - of which he spoke with such lack of warmth. And he began to think that Mme Dandillot alone knew what was happening between himself and Solange. Either she accepted it, because it gratified her pride, and looked no further, in which case the Dandillots were rather odd people. Or else she wanted to give their liaison the flavour of an engagement, for the sake of appearances, but just the flavour, not the reality. Or she had made up her mind to see the thing through to the end. But in any case it looked as though M. Dandillot had been left out. And this was quite natural, since he would soon be dead.
M. Dandillot opened his eyes again, and with a vague motion of the hand (at about the level of the books) which seemed to take in everything in the room, said:
'What do I care about all this! Mere trifles to help the living to kill time. Now my eyes are open, and it's all lies. The clock shows the wrong time, because it's stopped. The barometer is out of order. That Corot there is a fake. I won't talk about the books. Everything is false, and yet it's so much a part of the atmosphere we breathe that, as soon as we discover what a fraud it is, we die, as drug-addicts do when deprived of their drugs.'
Suddenly he sat up straight, as though pulling himself together.
'I am grateful to you for two things. For not having tried to delude me about my condition. And for not having tried to console me. You see, if anything could console me, it's the thought that I'm dying a natural death, that I'm not dying for a "cause" … '
Costals did not answer. M. Dandillot added:
'It's quite possible, though, that my death may be other than a natural death. I've something there' (he pointed to a cupboard) 'that will hasten the end, if the pain proves too much for me to bear. Two tubes of veronal. Dissolve, drink, and it's all over.'
'Yes, but supposing the dose isn't strong enough and you recover - think what hell your family would give you!'
'Do you think so?' M. Dandillot said with a small, childlike smile. 'Nonsense, with veronal there isn't a chance of recovering.'
'Why not use a revolver?' said Costals, adding, with a grin: 'Afraid you'll harm the family's reputation?'
'Yes, because of Solange. Besides, revolvers kick, and there's a chance of missing.'
'Not if you aim at the bone just below the temple. No, the real risk is that the gun might jam. I know all about that. Filthy guns. Worse than anything - false security. If one really wants to kill someone, give me a good knife any time. No one has ever found anything better.'
'Since I can't kill myself with a knife, I'll stick to veronal. Do you think it's cowardly to kill oneself?'
'The people who call it cowardly are those who are too cowardly to do it themselves.'
'That's exactly what I think.'
There was a silence, as if they were both aware of having exhausted a subject. Then M. Dandillot went on:
'I've spent forty years doing things I didn't enjoy, and doing them of my own free will. As a young man I sweated over law-books in spite of my wretched memory, although both my family and I knew quite well that I would only be a lawyer for appearance' sake, and only for a year or two. I married without love, or self-interest, or any particular taste for marriage. I had children because my wife wanted them: I don't mind telling you that Solange was not at all welcome.
I took a flat in Paris, although I loved nature and solitude, because it was "the thing to do". I
went on taking the waters year after year, long after I'd satisfied myself that they did me not the slightest good. I did all this without any good reason, simply because everyone round me was doing the same, or because I was told I ought to do it. And now I'm going to die without knowing why I've led a life which I disliked, when there was a time when I could have made for myself a life I would have enjoyed. Isn't that odd?'
'Not at all. Men let themselves be dragged into things: it's the rule. Men live according to chance: it's the rule.'
Suddenly the door opened. Mme Dandillot appeared, and addressing her husband, said:
'I came in to see whether you needed anything.'
'No, thank you.'
'Don't you want the window open wider? You of all people!'
'No, the noise, tires me.'
'I see your bottle of Eau de Cologne is empty. I'll send out for another.'
'No, Eau de Cologne's too cold … '
'We can't heat up Eau de Cologne, I'm afraid. Well, I'll leave you to it.'
For a few moments, Costals and M. Dandillot remained silent. There could be no doubt that Mme Dandillot, behind the door, had heard all or part of their last few remarks.
M. Dandillot resumed in a lower voice:
'If only I could go to a nursing-home! If only I could see new surroundings, new faces, before I die, instead of those I've been seeing for thirty years. But it's a dream: even that is forbidden me. Do you know the only occupation I find tolerable in my present condition? Burning my correspondence. Forty-five years of correspondence. If one added up all the hours one has spent writing letters or doing other equally futile jobs, one would find one had wasted years of one's life. You are still young, so I'll give you a word of advice: never answer letters, or only very rarely. Not only will it not do you any harm, but people won't even hold it against you: they'll soon get used to it. As for me, by destroying my correspondence I'm saying no to the whole of my past life. And I find pleasure in doing so, and also in depriving Mme Dandillot of the pleasure she would have in rummaging through my affairs. . . . It's odd that I should talk like this to someone I don't know.'
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