I could not take a vacation until August because my father was going to take the waters in Vichy in July, but as Odile was unwell for almost the whole winter, it was agreed that she would spend the month of July at the Villa Choin in Trouville. A couple of weeks before she was due to leave, she said, “If it makes no difference to you, I’d rather not stay with Aunt Cora but go to a quieter beach. I can’t bear the Normandy coast; there are too many people, especially in that house …”
“What do you mean, Odile? Don’t tell me you’re the one who doesn’t want to see people now, when you’re always criticizing me for not wanting to see anyone!”
“It depends on one’s state of mind. Right now, I need peace and quiet, time to myself … Don’t you think I could find a little place in Brittany? I don’t know Brittany at all and they say it’s beautiful.”
“Yes, my darling, it’s very beautiful, but it’s a long way away. I wouldn’t be able to come and see you on Sundays as I could in Trouville. Anyway, you’ll have the villa in Trouville to yourself, Aunt Cora won’t be there until August first … Why the change?”
But she was obviously keen to go to Brittany and kept gently bringing the subject up until I gave in. I could not understand. I had been expecting her to ask to be closer to Toulon; it would have been easy because the summer was awful that year, and everyone was complaining about how wet it was in Normandy. Although I was sad to see her go, I derived some pleasure from knowing she was heading in this reassuring direction. I went with her to the station, feeling rather sad. She was particularly loving that day. On the station platform she kissed me.
“Don’t get bored, Dickie, have some fun … If you like, you could go out with Misa, she’d like that.”
“But Misa’s at Gandumas.”
“No, she’s coming to Paris to stay with her parents all of next week.”
“I don’t feel like going out when you’re not here … I stay at home, on my own, moping.”
“You mustn’t,” she said, stroking my cheek in a motherly way. “I don’t deserve that sort of attention. I’m not interesting … you take life too seriously, Dickie … It’s just a game.”
“It’s not a very cheerful game.”
“No,” she said, and this time she too had a note of sadness in her voice. “It’s not a cheerful game. Mostly, it’s difficult. We do things we don’t mean to do … I think it’s time I boarded the train … Goodbye, Dickie … Are you going to be all right?”
She kissed me again, turned on the step and gave one of those luminous smiles that chained me to her, and immediately disappeared into the compartment. She hated goodbyes from the window, and sentimentality in general. Misa later told me she was hard. That was not entirely accurate. She could actually be generous and kind, but she was driven by very strong desires and, precisely because she was afraid that feelings of pity might cause her to resist her own wishes, she refused to give in to them. It was in these circumstances that her face took on the blank, impermeable-looking expression that was the only thing that could make her look ugly.
. XIV .
The following day was a Tuesday and I dined with Aunt Cora. She carried on entertaining up until August but there were fewer people in summer. I ended up next to Admiral Garnier. He talked about the weather, about a thunderstorm that had flooded Paris toward the end of the afternoon, then said, “By the way, I’ve just found a position for your friend François de Crozant … He wanted to study the Brittany coast. I found him a temporary job in Brest.”
“In Brest?”
I watched the glasses and flowers spin around me; I thought I would pass out. But the social instinct has become so strong in us that I believe we could even succeed in dying while feigning indifference.
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I told the admiral. “Was this recently?”
“A few days ago.”
I carried on a long conversation with him about the port of Brest, its value as a naval base, its old houses and its Vauban architecture. My thoughts were racing on two extraordinarily distinct planes. On the surface, they shaped the bland, polite sentences with which I maintained the image of myself in the admiral’s mind as a calm creature enjoying this lovely cool evening and the last fleeting clouds. On a deeper level, in a silent veiled voice, I kept saying to myself, “So that’s why Odile wanted to go to Brittany.” I pictured her walking through the streets of Brest with him, leaning on his arm and wearing that animated expression I knew so well and loved so much. Perhaps she would stay with him one evening. Morgat, the beach she had chosen, was not far from Brest. Perhaps it would be the other way around, François would come to meet her by the sea. He must have a launch. They would walk along the rocks together. I knew how lovely Odile could make the scenery seem on a walk like that. Something surprising then struck me: although it hurt, I felt a hard, intellectual sort of pleasure now that I knew at last. For all the terrible problems I had wrestled with whenever Odile’s decisions were concerned, the conclusion that had come to me with astonishing clarity when she first mentioned going to Brittany was, “François’s already there.” And he was. My heart was devastated, my mind almost satisfied.
Back at home, I spent nearly the entire night wondering what I would do about it. Take the train to Brittany? I would most likely end up on some small beach to find Odile radiant and rested; I would look foolish and not even feel reassured, because I would immediately think François had been and left again, which would in fact be likely. The awful thing about what I was feeling was that nothing could cure it, because, whatever the facts, they could be interpreted unfavorably. For the first time, I asked myself, “Must I leave Odile, then? Given that her character and mine mean I can never rest easy, given that she does not want, and never will want, to be more considerate toward me, wouldn’t it be better for us to live apart? We have no children; divorce would be easy.” I then remembered very clearly the state of humdrum happiness and confidence I had known before meeting her. In those days, although my life had little grandeur or power, it was at least natural and pleasant. But, even as I formulated this plan, I knew I had no wish to realize it and that the thought of living without Odile was not even conceivable.
I turned over and tried to get to sleep by counting sheep and picturing a landscape. Nothing works when the mind is obsessed. At some points I was furious with myself. “Why love her rather than anyone else?” I asked myself. “Because she’s beautiful? Yes, but other women have lovely faces and are far more intelligent. Odile has serious flaws. She doesn’t tell the truth; that’s the thing I hate most in the whole world. So? Can’t I free myself, shake off this hold?” And I kept telling myself, “You don’t love her, you don’t love her, you don’t love her.” But I knew perfectly well it was a lie and that I loved her more than ever although I did not understand why.
Toward morning I tried to persuade myself that this coincidence proved nothing and that Odile might not even know François was so near her. But I knew this was not the case. I fell asleep at dawn and dreamt I was walking along a street in Paris near the Palais Bourbon. The street was lit by an old-style streetlamp, and I could see a man hurrying away ahead of me. I recognized François from behind. I took a revolver from my pocket and fired at him. He fell. I felt relieved and ashamed, and woke up.
Two days later I received a letter from Odile: The weather’s lovely. The rocks are lovely. I’ve met an elderly lady at the hotel who knows you. Her name is Madame Jouhan; she has a house near Gandumas. I bathe in the sea every day. The water is lukewarm. I have been on excursions locally. I really like Brittany. I went for a trip in a boat. I do hope you’re not unhappy. Are you having fun? Did you dine with Aunt Cora last Tuesday? Have you seen Misa? It finished with: With fond love to you, my darling. The writing was slightly larger than her natural hand. It was obvious she had wanted to fill four pages so as not to hurt me but had also had a lot of trouble filling them. She was in a hurry, I thought, he was waiting for her. “But I really must write to my husband,�
�� she told him. And, when I imagined my wife’s face as she spoke these words, I could not help thinking it beautiful and longing for nothing more than her return.
. XV .
The week after Odile left, Misa telephoned me.
“I know you’re on your own,” she said. “Odile’s abandoned you. I’m on my own too. I’ve come to stay with my parents because I needed to do some shopping and have a little dose of Paris, but they’re away and I have the apartment to myself. Come and see me.”
I thought that talking with Misa might help me forget some of the terrible, pointless thoughts in whose midst I was floundering, and I arranged to meet her that same evening. She opened the door to me herself; the staff were out. She looked very pretty; she was wearing a pink silk negligee copied from a pattern lent to her by Odile. I noticed she had changed her hairstyle, and it now looked like Odile’s. The weather had changed since the storm and, toward evening, it was very cold. Misa had lit a wood fire in the hearth, and she sat on a pile of cushions by the fire. I sat close to her and we started talking about our families, the terrible summer, Gandumas, her husband, and Odile.
“Have you heard from her?” Misa asked. “She hasn’t written to me, which isn’t very kind.”
I told her I had had two letters.
“Has she met any people? Has she been to Brest?”
“No,” I said. “Brest is quite far from where she is.”
But it seemed a strange question. Misa was wearing a bracelet of blue and green glass beads. I said I liked it and took her wrist to look at it more closely. She leaned toward me. I put my arm around her waist; she did not resist. I could tell she was naked beneath that pink dress. She looked at me anxiously, questioningly. I leaned toward her, found her lips and, as I had on that day when we wrestled, felt the firm twin pressure of her breasts against my chest. She let herself drop backward and there, before that fire, on those cushions, she was my mistress. I felt no inkling of love, but I desired her and thought, “If I don’t take her, I’ll look like a coward.”
We ended up sitting watching the dying embers of the last log. I held her hand and she looked at me with a happy, triumphant expression. I felt sad; I wished I could die.
“What are you thinking?” asked Misa.
“I’m thinking of poor Odile.”
She became hostile; two hard lines formed across her forehead.
“Listen,” she said, “I love you, and I want you to stop talking nonsense now.”
“Why nonsense?”
She hesitated, looking at me for a long time.
“Do you really not understand,” she asked, “or do you just pretend not to understand?”
I could anticipate everything she was about to say and knew I should stop her, but I wanted to know.
“It’s true,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought you knew but loved Odile too much to leave her or talk to her about it … I’ve often thought I ought to tell you everything … only I was Odile’s friend. It was hard for me … Well, never mind! I now love you a thousand times more than I love her.”
So she told me that Odile was François’s mistress, that it had been going on for six months, and that Odile had even asked her, Misa, to pass on their letters so that the Toulon postmark did not attract my attention.
“Can you see how difficult that was for me … especially because I loved you … Haven’t you noticed that I’ve been in love with you for three years? … Men don’t understand anything. Well, at least everything’s all right now. I’ll make you so happy, you’ll see. You deserve it and I so admire you … You’re an admirable person.”
And she showered me with compliments for several minutes. It afforded me no pleasure whatsoever. I kept thinking, “This is all so wrong. I’m not a good person at all! I can’t cope without Odile … Why am I here? Why do I have my arm round this woman’s waist?” We were still sitting side by side like happy lovers, and I hated it.
“Misa, how can you betray Odile’s trust? What you’re doing is appalling.”
She looked at me in astonishment.
“Oh, this is too much,” she said, “I can’t believe you’re defending her.”
“Yes, I am. I don’t like what you’re doing, even if you are doing it for my sake. Odile’s your friend …”
“She was. I don’t like her anymore.”
“Since when?”
“Since I’ve loved you.”
“I sincerely hope you don’t love me … I love Odile just as she is,” I said, looking at Misa defiantly, but she was shaking. “And when I try to work out why I love Odile, I wouldn’t know how to describe it … I think it’s because I’m never bored with her, because for me she is life itself and happiness.”
“You are odd,” she said bitterly.
“Perhaps.”
She seemed to go into a dream for a moment, then let her head drop down onto my shoulder and, in a voice filled with deep-seated passion that should have touched me if I had not been so impassioned and blinded myself, she said, “Well, I do love you and I could make you happy in spite of yourself … I would be faithful to you, devoted … Julien’s at Gandumas; he leaves me well alone. If you like, you could even come to see me there because he spends two days a week at la Guichardie … You’ll see, you’ve lost the habit of being happy, I’ll get you back into it.”
“I can only thank you,” I said coldly, “but I’m very happy.”
This scene carried on far into the night. We adopted positions and made gestures associated with love, but I could feel a savage, incomprehensible resentment rising within me. And yet we parted tenderly with a kiss.
I swore to myself that I would never go to see her again, and yet I often went to her house while Odile was away. Misa was unbelievably daring and gave herself to me in her parents’ salon when a chambermaid might come in at any minute. I would stay with her until two or three in the morning, almost always without a word.
“What are you thinking?” she kept asking, trying to smile kindly.
I would be thinking, “She’s so deceitful to Odile,” and would reply, “About you.”
Now, when I look back on it all calmly, I can see that Misa was not a bad woman, but I treated her harshly at the time.
. XVI .
Odile eventually came home one evening, and I went to pick her up at the station. I had promised myself I would tell her nothing. I was well aware what such a conversation would be like. I would be reproachful; she would deny everything. I would relay what Misa had said; she would say Misa was lying. I meanwhile would know that Misa had told the truth. It was all pointless. As I walked along the station platform, surrounded by strangers and a smell of coal and oil, I kept telling myself, “Given that I’m only happy when I’m with her and given that I will never break up with her, I might as well enjoy the pleasure of seeing her again and avoid annoying her.” Then the next minute I would be thinking, “What a coward! It would take only a week’s effort to force her to change her ways or to get used to coping without her.”
A member of the staff came and hung up a sign: FAST TRAIN FROM BREST. I came to a stop.
“Come on,” I thought, “this is too ridiculous. What if you had gone to stay in a different hotel in Florence in May 1909? You would have spent your whole life not even knowing Odile Malet existed. But you’d be alive, you’d be happy. Why not start, right now at this exact moment, assuming she doesn’t exist?”
It was then that I spotted in the distance the headlamps of a locomotive and the curve of a train undulating toward us. It all felt unreal. I could not even picture Odile’s face anymore. I took a few steps forward. Heads leaned out of windows. Men were jumping from the train before it stopped. Then a walking crowd formed. Porters pushed trolleys. All at once I spotted Odile’s outline some way away, and a moment later she was beside me flanked by a porter carrying her gray bag. She looked well and I could tell she was in good spirits.
As we climbed into t
he car she said, “Dickie, we’re going to stop to buy some champagne and some caviar, and we’ll have a little supper like the day we came home from our honeymoon.”
This might strike you as the height of hypocrisy, but you had to know Odile to judge her. She had most likely truly savored the few days she had spent with François; she was now prepared to enjoy the present moment and make it as wonderful for me as she could. She noticed I was glum and not smiling.
“What is the matter, Dickie?” she asked desperately.
My resolutions to be silent were never very solid, and I let the thoughts I was trying to hide burst out in front of her.
“The matter is that people say François is in Brest.”
“Who told you that?”
“Admiral Garnier.”
“That François is in Brest? And then what? What difference does that make to you?”
“The difference it makes to me is that he was very close to Morgat and it would have been easy for him to come to see you.”
“Very easy, so easy that, if you must know, he did come to see me. Does that upset you?”
“You didn’t tell me that in your letters.”
“Are you sure? But I honestly thought … Anyway, if I didn’t tell you in a letter it’s because I couldn’t see that it was in the least bit important, and it wasn’t.”
“That’s not what I think. I’ve also heard that he was engaged in a secret correspondence with you.”
This time it looked as if I had hit home: Odile was almost beside herself. It was the first time I had seen her look like that.
“And who told you that?”
“Misa.”
“Misa! She’s a wretch! She lied to you. Did she show you any letters?”
“No, but why should she invent something like that?”
“Well, I don’t know … Out of jealousy.”
“That’s a cock-and-bull story if ever I heard one, Odile.”
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