“Do you find Crozant interesting?” she asked. “I knew him well in Toulon. I lived there for many years before I was married because my father was naval commander there. I remember men found Crozant artificial, some even said disloyal, but women chased after him … I was too young myself, but I heard what people said.”
“Well, yes, I am interested.”
“Oh! I don’t remember very clearly. I think he was a tremendous flirt. He would behave as if he cared passionately for a woman, would court her ardently, showering her with letters and flowers, then all of a sudden he would abandon her and start showing an interest in another while the first had no way of knowing what had caused this change … He subjected himself to an extraordinarily disciplined routine. In order to stay in shape he went to bed at ten o’clock every evening, and they used to say that, when the appointed hour came, he would have shown the prettiest woman in the world the door … In matters of love he was hard and cruel, behaving as if the whole thing was a meaningless game to himself and to everyone else. You can imagine how much pain he caused with a personality like that.”
“Yes, I see what you mean. But why would anyone love him?”
“Oh, well, that, you know … All right, I had a friend who loved him, and she told me, ‘It was appalling but I couldn’t cure myself of him for a long time. He was so complicated, endearing, and demanding, brutal and terse one minute, but sometimes gentle and beseeching too … It took me several months to realize he could only bring me unhappiness.’ ”
“And did your friend manage to escape?”
“Yes, very successfully. She can laugh when she talks about him now.”
“And do you think he’s trying to cast his spell on Hélène de Thianges at the moment?”
“Oh, for sure! But this time he has more than met his match. Besides, a woman like her, who is young and has some social standing, would do well to save herself. François ruins the lives of women he comes across, because he can’t help talking about his lovers to all and sundry. In Toulon, every time he made a new conquest, the whole town would know about it the following day.”
“But this François of yours is a loathsome character.”
“Oh, no!” she said. “He’s very charming … That’s just the way he is.”
We are almost always the craftsman of our own unhappiness. I was wise when I promised myself I would not talk of François to Odile. Why then was it impossible for me not to mention this conversation when we were in the car taking us home? I think it was because arousing Odile’s interest, seeing her listen intently to what I was saying was a pleasure whose appeal I had difficulty resisting, perhaps also because I was under the illusion—absurd though it may seem—that this harsh criticism of François would distance Odile from him forever.
“And you say he’s a composer?” Odile asked when I stopped talking.
I had unwisely called up the demon. It was no longer in my power to drive him away. I had to spend the rest of the evening relating everything I knew about him and his unusual way of life.
“He must be a strange man to know. Shall we invite him to dinner sometime?” Odile asked with apparent indifference.
“Gladly, if we see him again, but he has to go back to Toulon. Did you like him?”
“No. I really don’t like the way he looks at women, as if he can see through them.”
Two weeks later we met him again at Aunt Cora’s house. I asked him whether he had left the navy.
“No,” he said in his abrupt, almost insolent way. “I’m doing a six-month posting with the Hydrographical Service.”
This time he had a long conversation with Odile; I can still picture them sitting on the same upholstered sofa, leaning toward each other and talking animatedly.
On the way home, Odile was very quiet.
“Well then,” I said, “what do you think of my sailor?”
“He’s interesting,” said Odile, and she said nothing more all the way home.
. XII .
On several consecutive Tuesdays, François and Odile took refuge together in Aunt Cora’s Chinese salon as soon as dinner was over. Naturally, this was very painful for me, but I was keen to do my best not to show it. I could not help talking about François with the other women; I hoped to hear them say they found him boring, so that I could then pass this on to Odile. But almost all of them admired him. Even the sensible Hélène de Thianges, who was so wise that Odile called her Minerva, told me, “He’s very attractive, I can assure you.”
“But how? I try in vain to be interested in what he’s saying; it strikes me it’s always the same old things. He talks about Indochina, nations conquering other nations, Gaugin’s ‘intense’ life … I thought it quite remarkable the first time I heard it. Then I realized it was a star turn; watching it once is enough.”
“Yes, perhaps. You’re partly right. But he tells such incredible stories! Women are like big children, Marcenat. They still have a sense of wonder. And, anyway, the scope of their real lives is so limited that they’re always longing to escape it. If you only knew how boring it is looking after a household, meals, guests, and children every day! Married men and bachelors in Paris are all part of the same social and domestic machinery, and they have nothing new, nothing fresh to offer us, whereas a naval man like Crozant is like a breath of fresh air, and that’s why we find him attractive.”
“But really, don’t you think Crozant’s whole stance smacks of unbearable false romanticism? You mentioned his stories … I can’t stand all those adventures … that he’s clearly invented.”
“Which ones?”
“Oh, you know perfectly well: the one about the Englishwoman in Honolulu who threw herself in the water after he’d left; the one about the Russian woman who sends him her photograph framed by a coil of hair. I think it’s all such bad taste …”
“I hadn’t heard those stories … who told them to you? Odile?”
“No, no, everyone did, why would you think it was Odile? … Tell me honestly, don’t you think that’s unpleasant, shocking, even?”
“If you like, yes … All the same, he has unforgettable eyes. And not everything you’re saying is accurate. You’re seeing him through the prism of myth. You should talk to him in person, you’ll see he’s very straightforward.”
We often saw Admiral Garnier at avenue Marceau. One evening I maneuvered so that I was alone with him and asked him about Crozant.
“Ah!” he said. “A true sailor … One of our great leaders of the future.”
I resolved to stifle the feelings of disgust that François de Crozant aroused in me, to see more of him and to try to judge him impartially. It was very difficult. When I had met him with Halff, he had been rather disdainful toward me, and I had had the same uncomfortable impression the first time we met again. For a few days now he seemed to have been making an effort to overcome the boredom that my surly, hostile silence inspired in him. But I thought, perhaps correctly, that he was now interested in me because of Odile, and this did nothing to endear him to me. Far from it.
I invited him to dine with us. I wanted to find him interesting, but did not succeed. He was intelligent but, deep down, fairly shy, and he overcame his shyness by affecting a brusque assertiveness that I found exasperating. I thought him far less remarkable than my former friends, André and Bertrand, and could not understand why Odile, who had swept them aside so contemptuously, showed such sustained interest in what François de Crozant had to say. The moment he was there, she was quite transformed and even prettier than usual. One time François and I had a conversation about love in front of her. I had said, I think, that the only thing that makes love a truly beautiful sentiment is faithfulness, in spite of everything and until death. Odile gave François a quick glance that I thought peculiar.
“I really don’t understand the importance of faithfulness,” he said with the staccato diction that always gave his ideas an abstract, metallic feel. “You have to live in the present. What matters is getting all
the intensity out of every moment. There are only three ways of achieving this: with power, with danger, or with desire. But why would you use faithfulness to keep up a pretence of desire when it has evaporated?”
“Because true intensity is to be found only in something lasting and testing. Don’t you remember the passage in Confessions where Rousseau says that barely touching the gown of a chaste woman affords more acute pleasure than possessing a woman of easy virtue?”
“Rousseau was not a well man,” said François.
“I loathe Rousseau,” said Odile.
Feeling them united against me, I set about defending Rousseau, about whom I was actually indifferent, with clumsy vehemence, and the three of us realized that we would now never be able to have a conversation together without it becoming confidential and dangerous beneath its veneer of transparency.
Several times when François was talking about his work I became so fascinated that I forgot my hostile feelings for a few minutes. After dinner one evening, as he walked across the salon with his rolling seaman’s stride, he asked, “Do you know how I spent my evening yesterday, Marcenat? With Admiral Mahan’s book, studying Nelson’s battles,” and, in spite of myself, I felt the little thrill of pleasure that seeing André Halff or Bertrand used to give me.
“Really?” I replied. “But were you doing it for your own pleasure or do you think it could be useful for you? Naval procedures must have changed so much. All those stories of boarding enemy ships, favorable winds, and the position to adopt to give a broadside, is that of any value still?”
“Don’t go believing that,” said François. “The qualities that result in victory, on land and at sea, are the same today as they were in Hannibal’s day, or Caesar’s. Take the Battle of the Nile, why were the English successful? … First, Nelson’s tenacity when, having searched all over the Mediterranean for the French fleet and failing to find them, he didn’t abandon his hunt; then the promptness of his decision when he finally found his enemy at anchor and the wind in his favor. Well, do you think those fundamental qualities—tenacity and audacity—are no longer valid because the Dreadnought has replaced the Victory? Not at all, and besides the basic principles of any strategy are immutable. Here, look …”
He took a piece of paper from a table and a pencil from his pocket.
“The two fleets … this arrow is the wind direction … This cross-hatching here, the shallows …”
I leaned over him. Odile had sat down at the same table, her hands together with her chin resting on them. She was admiring François and, from time to time, watched me from beneath her long eyelashes.
“Would she be listening like this,” I thought, “if I were describing a battle to her?”
Another fact that struck me during the few visits that François de Crozant made to our house was that Odile often dazzled as she related anecdotes and expressed ideas that I had told her about while we were engaged. She had never mentioned them to me again; I thought she had forgotten everything. Yet now here was all my poor knowledge resuscitated to amaze another man with the masculine clarity of a woman’s mind. As I listened to her, I remembered that this had been the case with Denise Aubry too, and that when we take great care to instruct an individual, we are almost always working for another man’s benefit.
The strange thing is that the beginnings of a true relationship between them probably coincided with what was a brief period of relative security for me. François and Odile, who had openly compromised themselves in front of me and all our friends for several weeks, suddenly became extremely cautious, rarely appearing together and never in the same group in a salon. She did not talk about him, and if, out of curiosity, another woman pronounced his name in her presence, she replied with such perfect carelessness that I myself was taken in by it for a few weeks. Unfortunately, as Odile herself said, I was demonically intuitive wherever she was concerned, and it was not long before logical reasoning explained their behavior to me. “It’s precisely because they are seeing each other freely behind my back,” I thought, “and don’t have much left to say to each other in the evening, that they now avoid each other and make a show of hardly speaking to each other.”
I now habitually analyzed what Odile said with frightening clairvoyance, and I found François hiding in her every sentence. Thanks to Doctor Pozzi, François was now a friend of Anatole France, and he went to the Villa Saïd every Sunday morning. I knew this. Now, in the last few weeks, Odile had taken to telling the most interesting and private stories about France. One evening when we dined with the Thianges, Odile, who was usually so quiet and modest, astonished our friends by commenting with some verve on France’s political ideas.
“You were dazzling, my darling!” I told her afterward. “You’ve never talked to me about all that. How did you know about it?”
“Me?” she asked, both pleased and worried. “Was I dazzling? I didn’t notice.”
“It’s not a crime, Odile, don’t be defensive. Everyone thought you were very intelligent … Who taught you all that?”
“I don’t really know. It was the other day, taking tea somewhere, someone who knew Anatole France.”
“But who?”
“Oh, I can’t remember … I can’t see that it matters.”
Poor Odile! She did make such blunders. She wanted to keep to her usual tone of voice, not to say anything that might give her away, but still her new love was just beneath the surface of her every utterance. It reminded me of flooded meadows that still look intact at a glance, the grass seems to stand tall and vigorous, but every step you take reveals the treacherous layer of water already seeping into the soil. Though attentive to direct indicators such as naming François de Crozant, she did not see the indirect indicators that flashed over and above her own words and paraded his name for all to see like great illuminated signs. For me who knew Odile’s tastes, ideas, and beliefs so well, it was at once easy, interesting, and painful to watch them swiftly altering. Without being very pious, she had always been a believer; she went to mass every Sunday. She now said, “Oh, I’m like the Greeks in the fourth century B.C. I’m a pagan,” words I could attribute to François as surely as if he had signed them. She would say, “What is life? Forty paltry years spent on a lump of mud. And you expect us to waste a single minute being bored for no gain?” And I thought, “François’s philosophy, and a rather vulgar philosophy to boot.” Sometimes I needed a moment’s thought to spot the link between some newfound interest of hers that struck me as out of the ordinary and the true object of her thoughts. For example, she who never read a newspaper spotted the headline, “Forest Fires in the South,” and snatched the page from my hand.
“Are you interested in forest fires, Odile?”
“No,” she said, rejecting the newspaper and handing it back to me. “I just wanted to see where it was.”
I then remembered the little house surrounded by pine forests that François owned near Beauvallon.
Like a child playing hunt-the-thimble who puts the trinket he wants to hide in the middle of the room, on the carpet, right under everyone’s nose, making them all smile indulgently, Odile was almost touching with her endless naïve precautions. When she relayed a fact she had learned from one of her friends or one of our relations, she always named her informer. When this was François, though, she would say: “Someone … Someone told me … I’ve heard that …” She sometimes displayed an incredible knowledge of naval facts. She knew we were to have a new faster cruiser or a new type of submarine or that the English fleet would be coming to Toulon. People were amazed.
“That’s not in the papers …” they said.
Terrified and realizing that she had said too much, Odile beat a retreat. “Isn’t it? I don’t know … Maybe it’s not true.”
But it was always true.
Her entire vocabulary had become François’s, and Odile now spouted this man’s repertoire—the repertoire that had caused me to tell Hélène de Thianges that his conversation was just a st
ar turn. She talked about the “intensity of life,” the joy of conquest, and even Indochina. But filtered through Odile’s veiled mind, François’s hard-edged themes lost their sharp contours. I could follow them quite clearly through her but could see they were distorted, like a river crossing a wide lake and losing the rigid framework of its banks, reduced to an indistinct shadow eaten into by encroaching waves.
. XIII .
So many corroborating facts proved to me beyond doubt that, even if Odile was not François’s mistress, she at least saw him in secret, and yet I could not make up my mind to have it out with her. What was the point? I would reveal all the tiny nuances and verbal coincidences my implacable memory had registered, and she would laugh out loud, look at me tenderly, and say, “You do make me laugh!” What could I reply? Could I threaten her? Did I want to break off with her? And besides, despite appearances, could I have been mistaken? When I was honest with myself, I knew I was not mistaken, but life then felt unbearable and for few days I would cling to some unrealistic hypothesis.
I was very unhappy. Odile’s behavior and her secret thoughts had become a constant obsession for me. In my office on the rue de Valois, I now hardly got any work done, I spent days on end with my head in my hands, dreaming and thinking; at night, I could get to sleep only toward three or four o’clock in the morning, after pointlessly mulling over problems whose solution I could see only too clearly.
Summer came. François’s posting finished and he went back to Toulon. Odile seemed very calm and not at all sad, which I found quite reassuring. I did not know whether he wrote to her. In any event, I never saw any letters, and I was less aware of his disturbing shadow looming over Odile’s sentences.
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