The Counterfeiters: A Novel

by André Gide

  “What was that book?” I asked, with as much smile as I could muster.

  “A guide to Algeria. But it costs too much.”

  “How much?”

  “Two francs fifty. I’m not that rich.”

  “If I hadn’t been watching you, you’d have slipped out with the book in your pocket, eh?”

  The boy protested energetically. He had never stolen anything, he had no wish to start, etc. I took a two-franc note from my pocket:

  “Here you are. Go ahead and buy the book.”

  A couple of minutes later he emerged from the shop thumbing through the book, which he had just paid for: an old 1871 Joanne bound in blue.

  “It’s dreadfully old. That’s no good for anything.”

  “Oh, yes; it’s got maps. That’s the thing I get the most fun out of—geography.”

  I suspect that the book flattered an instinct for wanderlust; I talk a little more with him. He is about fifteen or sixteen, very modestly clad in a scanty brown jacket, stained and threadbare. He carries a schoolboy’s satchel under his arm. I discover that he is at Henri IV 16 in his next to last year. Not very attractive to look at; but I reproach myself for having left him too quickly.

  If I am able to use the anecdote, it seems to me it would be much more interesting told by the boy himself, for this would no doubt permit more detours and dodges.

  Brussels, 16 June

  Finished the preface for Armance17 in Paris.

  At present there is nothing to keep me from the novel with the possible exception of the Curieux malavisé,18 the rought draft of which I took out before I left, and hope to finish up this summer; and the last chapter of Si le grain ne meurt.…

  Z. told me the story of his sister. She married his wife’s brother; her husband’s health is extremely delicate and she, considerably older, cares for him. She nurses him so well that he finally recovers and runs off with another woman, leaving his exhausted wife behind. The most painful part for her is that she soon learns that her husband has a child by the other woman (he had been too delicate during the time he was faithful, and she had abandoned any hope of ever being a mother).

  And I imagine further: the two women are sisters; he has married the elder (considerably older than her sister), but gets the younger with child. And the elder sister cannot rest until she has won over the child.…

  This afternoon all this seemed lucid; but this evening I am tired, the thing seems quite flat—and I am putting all this down as a matter of duty.

  Cuverville, 9 July 1912

  The first thing to do is to establish the field of action and smooth off a space upon which to erect the book.

  Difficult to explain this properly in metaphors; might as well say more simply: “lay the bases.”

  1. First the Artistic bases: the problem of the book will be set forth through Édouard’s meditation.

  2. The Intellectual bases: the subject of the baccalaureate composition (“to skim the surface—effleurer—to take only the flower”).

  3. The Moral bases: filial insubordination; the opposition of the parents (who apply in this regard the sophistry of England with respect to Egypt or Ireland: if they were given the liberty they demand, they would be the first to repent of it, etc.).

  It must be considered whether that is not where the book should begin.

  22 July

  Note: William James’s extremely remarkable observations on habit (in his psychology text, which I am reading at the moment):

  But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid “other particulars” of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau’s path. All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world.19

  Cuverville, 25 November 1921

  Back here since last night, after a stay in Rome, which, although it greatly distracted me from my work, nevertheless left me with a feeling that I now see much more clearly what I want. During my last stay at Cuverville, in October, I had already worked out the first chapters; unfortunately I had had to stop at the moment when the inert mass was beginning to stir into motion. This comparison is not very good. I prefer the image of the churn. Yes; I churned the subject in my head for several evenings on end without getting the least bit of butter, but without losing my conviction that the curds were indeed going to form in the end. A strange liquid substance which, long after you begin, refuses to acquire consistency, but in which solid particles, stirred and shaken every which way, at last clot together and separate from the whey. At present I have the raw materials, which I must work together and knead. If he didn’t know beforehand from experience that through beating and shaking this creamy chaos he was going to see the miracle repeated—who wouldn’t throw up the job?

  Cuverville, 7 December

  During the thirteen days that I have been here I have written the first thirty pages of my book with hardly any difficulty and currente calamo—although it’s true that for a long time I have had it all worked out in my head. At present I am at a standstill. Looking back over yesterday’s work, it seems to me that I am on the wrong track; the dialogue with Édouard, especially (however successful it may be), leads the reader as well as myself into a region from which I am not going to be able to get back down to real life. Or else I should have to put the principal irony of the tale into the words: “toward real life”—implying plainly that real life exists equally in the region of thought, along with anxiety, passion, and suffering.…

  Of the need to go farther and farther back to explain any given incident. The slightest act requires an infinite motivation.

  I am continually wondering: might such an effect have been the result of other causes? Each time I am forced to acknowledge that it could not; that anything less than all that—and precisely that—would not do, and that I cannot change the least figure without immediately falsifying the end product.

  The problem for me is not how to succeed—but rather how to survive.

  For some time now I have aimed to win my case only on appeal. I write only to be reread.

  1 Lafcadio is the central figure of Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio’s Adventures), which was first published in 1914. He does not appear in The Counterfeiters.

  2 This resembles the story of L’École des femmes (The School for Wives), which was not to appear until 1929.

  3 Cuverville-en-Caux is the site of Gide’s family estate in Normandy, a few miles from Havre.

  4 Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), the great theatrical director who had founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1913, took his company to New York for two seasons of French repertory (1917–19) at the Garrick Theatre.

  5 See Appendix for transcripts of some of these articles.

  6 Paul Méral (pseudonym of Gouchtenaere), young Belgian protégé of Lady Rothermere, made vain efforts to succeed in literature and the theater.

  7 André Gide’s memoirs, Si le grain ne meurt … (If It Die …), first appeared publicly in 1926.

  8 André Suarès (1868–1948) was a French poet and essayist of flamboyant nature and broad views, whose studies of great writers are often penetrating and original.

  9 In Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio’s Adventures) Lafcadio divides the world into the shrewd and crafty, on the one hand, and the crustaceans on the other.

  10 Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958), French novelist and dramatist whose vivid realistic novel in many volumes, The World of the Thibaults, led to his winning the Nobel Prize in 1937.

  11 See Appendix. [Note supplied by the author in the French edition. Such notes will hereafter be indicated by an A. in brackets.]

  12 Dickens and Dostoyevsky are past masters at this. The light that illuminates their characters is almost never diffuse. In Tolstoy the least successful scenes appear gray because they are equally illuminated from all sides. Successive interest. [A.]

  13 The first part of Stendhal’
s De l’amour (On Love) analyzes the birth or crystallization of love, which he was to illustrate in his famous novels.

  14 At Brignoles (Var), on the south coast of France between Toulon and Fréjus, André Gide was visiting the Belgian painter Théo Van Rysselberghe (1862–1926).

  15 Charles Du Bos (1882–1939) was a French literary critic of great taste and penetration, who devoted much of his interest to foreign letters (notably English) and wrote an excellent study of André Gide.

  10 Henri IV is one of the oldest and best lycées or schools in Paris; Gide attended it for a few months in 1888–9.

  17Gide’s preface for Stendhal’s short novel Armance first appeared in 1925.

  18 The Ill-Advised Experiment is an episode in Don Quixote, which Gide may have planned to adapt.

  19 William James: Habit (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1890), p. 62.

  Second Notebook

  Colpach,20 August 1921

  The extreme difficulty I am encountering in making my book progress is perhaps but the natural result of an initial vice. From time to time I am convinced that the very idea of the book is ridiculous, and I come to the point where I no longer even understand what I want. Properly speaking, the book has no one single center for my various efforts to converge upon; those efforts center about two foci, as in an ellipse. On one side, the event, the fact, the external datum; on the other side, the very effort of the novelist to make a book out of it all. The latter is the main subject, the new focus that throws the plot off center and leads it toward the imaginative. In short, I see this notebook in which I am writing the very history of the novel poured into the book in its entirety and forming its principal interest—for the greater irritation of the reader.

  The most questionable strayings of the flesh have left my soul more tranquil than the slightest intellectual error. When I feel uneasy in conscience, it is upon leaving the fashionable salon, not the brothel.

  The more G. sinks into devotion, the more he loses his sense of truth. The state of deception in which a pious soul can live—a certain mystic splendor turns his gaze away from reality. He no longer seeks to see things as they are; he no longer can. When Édouard tells X. that G. seems to him to have lost all love of truth, X. presents the Catholic thesis:

  It is not Truth we must love, but God. Truth is only one of God’s attributes, as is Beauty, which is worshipped exclusively by certain artists. The exclusive worship of one of God’s attributes is a form of paganism, etc.

  The forming into groups.

  The Argonauts. They devote themselves to the “nation”; but there are manifold dissensions in the very heart of the group: how can France be best served?

  On the other hand, the grouping of enemies of society. Partnership for crime. In opposition to these, the conservatives look like cads. The important thing is to know what is worth protecting, what is worth the trouble of …

  As for personal opinions—in short, Valentin simply had none. Or, more precisely, he had them all and tried them out one by one, if indeed not simultaneously. He would follow a discussion as though it were a chess game, ready to advise one or the other of the adversaries, thinking only of the proper way of playing the game and of not giving unjust (that is to say, illogical) advantage to anyone.

  What we call “wrong-headedness” (the other shrugged his shoulders at this ready-made expression and declared it had no meaning)—well, I am going to tell you: it is the person who finds it necessary to convince himself he has a reason for committing every act he wants to commit, the person who enslaves his reason to his instincts, to his interests (and this is worse), or to his temperament. So long as Lucien tries only to convince others, the evil is merely embryonic; this is the first step toward hypocrisy. But have you noticed that, with Lucien, the hypocrisy becomes deeper day by day. He is the first victim of all the false motives he brings forth; eventually he convinces himself that it is these false motives that are guiding him, whereas in reality it is he who bends and guides them. The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

  M. says of Lucien that he is “completely penetrated by his façade.”

  Jude had this intellectual shortcoming, shared by so many young men—which often makes them insufferable to their elders—of exaggerating his praise or his blame. His judgment admitted no purgatory. Everything he didn’t find “admirable” was “frightful.”

  Édouard might very well have encountered on the train that extraordinary creature who forced us to give up our reserved seats. I felt it was beyond my power to spend the night in the same compartment with her.… Imagine a person of indeterminate age and sex, with an absent expression and a flabby body propped up with an assortment of pillows; to this clung two middle-aged women. The compartment closed and overheated, the atmosphere stifling; an odor of medicine and sickness.… I immediately shut the door again. But the car in which we then ensconced ourselves, Marc and I, went only as far as Marseille. When we got there we had to change; and in the packed train the only space we could find was in the compartment where our seats were still reserved. The window was open; one could breathe … and perhaps, after all, I had imagined the bad odor.

  The young girl now seemed to me almost pretty. Her hair, cut page-boy fashion, clung to her temples with perspiration. From time to time she smiled at the two women who accompanied her, who might have been her mother and her aunt. Whereupon the aunt would ask:

  “How do you feel?”

  But the mother would immediately exclaim: “Now, don’t keep asking her how she feels. The less she thinks about it, the better.”

  At times the girl tried to talk, but immediately a shadow seemed to creep over her face, and an expression of insufferable weariness strained her features. A little before we got to Nice, the two women began their preparations for leaving, and when the train pulled into the station they struggled to raise their companion’s inert body; but she began to weep—or not exactly to weep, but to moan—a sort of whining lamentation, so strange that the startled passengers began running up from all sides.

  “Here we go! The same old song again,” exclaimed the mother. “Come, come! You know very well it won’t do any good to cry.… ”

  I offered to assist the women in lifting the patient, in dragging her to the door; but at the end of the corridor, right in front of the open door of the lavatory, she literally crumpled. It was all I could do to hold her by bracing myself against the door-jamb. Then with a huge effort I hoisted her, held her on the steps, getting off with her, while the aunt, who had got off ahead of us, caught her in her arms.

  “She’s been that way now for eighteen months,” the aunt told me when I had joined her. “Such a shame! A girl of seventeen!… And it isn’t a case of real paralysis at all—just a nervous paralysis.”

  “I suppose there were mental causes?” I asked rather indiscreetly.

  “Yes; it came from a fright she had, one night when she was sleeping in the room with my brother’s children.… ”

  I realized that the good woman would have liked nothing better than to talk, and regretted that I had not questioned her sooner. But a porter came up with a wheelchair, and the patient was put into it; the aunt, thanking me, drew away.

  Édouard might encounter her later and reconstruct the past.

  Make Édouard say, perhaps:

  “The bore, you see, is having to condition one’s characters. They live powerfully within me and I will even admit that they live at my expense. I know how they think, how they speak; I distinguish the slightest intonations of their voices. I know that they are to commit certain acts, and that certain others are forbidden them.… But as soon as I must clothe them, establish their position in the social scale, their careers, the amount of their income—above all, invent relationships, parents, a family, friends—I throw up the job. I confess to you that I see each one of my characters as an orphan, an only son, unmarried, and childless. Perhaps that is why I see such a fine hero in y
ou, Lafcadio. But then—imagine yourself having what we call “responsibilities”—with aged parents to support, for example; a paralytic mother, a blind father.… Such things happen, you know. Or better yet, a young sister in delicate health, who needs mountain air.”

  “Might as well make her a bedridden cripple.”

  “Imagine what it would be to have a sister! There you are with a little sister on your hands, who had once said to you: ‘Cadio, my little Cadio, since our parents died, you are all I have left in the world.… ’ ”

  “I would hasten to find her a seducer.”