“You’re mad, darling. I’ll never marry again.”
“You will, you will … You must … And then when you think of me, don’t be too resentful. I loved you well, Dickie, and I do know how good you are. I can assure you I never paid you many compliments because I’m shy, and I don’t like to anyway … But I often saw you doing things that no other man would ever have done in your shoes. I used to think, ‘Dickie really is a tremendously good man.’ And I even want to tell you something that might please you: in lots of ways, I like you better than François, it’s just …”
“It’s just?” asked.
“It’s just … I can’t get by without him. When I’ve spent a few hours with him, I feel strong, I feel I’m living more fully, better. It may not be true; I might have been happier with you. But there it is, it didn’t work out. It’s not your fault, Philippe, it’s no one’s fault.”
When we parted company late in the evening, she spontaneously offered her lips for a kiss.
“Oh dear,” she said, “how miserable we are!”
A few days later I received a letter from her, a sad and well-meaning letter. She told me she had loved me for a long time and had never had a lover before François.
That was the story of my marriage. I don’t know whether, in relating it to you, I have managed to do justice to my poor Odile as I would have liked to. I wish I could make you feel her charm, her mysterious melancholy, her profound childishness. People around us, our friends and my family, naturally judged her harshly after she left. I who knew her well, as well as that silent little girl could be known, think no woman was ever less reprehensible.
. XIX .
After Odile left, my life was very unhappy. The house felt so gloomy that I found it difficult being there. Sometimes, in the evening, I went into Odile’s bedroom and sat in an armchair by her bed as I used to when she was there and thought about our life. I was troubled by vague feelings of remorse, and yet I had nothing specific to hold against myself. I had married Odile because I loved her, when my family would have wanted a more dazzling marriage for me. I was faithful to her until the evening with Misa, and my brief betrayal was caused by hers. I may well have been jealous, but she did nothing to reassure a loving husband who was clearly concerned. All this was true, I knew it was, but I felt responsible. I started to glimpse what was for me a quite new understanding of the relationship there needed to be between men and women. I saw women as unstable creatures always striving to find a strong directing force to pin down their wandering thoughts and longings; perhaps this need made it man’s duty to be that infallible compass, that fixed point. Love, however strong, is not enough to set your beloved free if you do not also fill that person’s life with a wealth of constantly changing interests and pleasures. What can Odile have seen in me? I came home every evening from my office where I had seen the same men and dealt with the same questions; I sat in an armchair, looked at my wife, and was happy that she was beautiful. How could she have found happiness in this static contemplation? Women are naturally drawn to men whose lives move on, who take them along in that movement, who give them something to do, who ask a lot of them … I looked at Odile’s bed. What would I not have given to have seen her body lying there, her head of blond hair? And how little I had given in the days when it would have been easy to keep all that. Instead of trying to understand her tastes, I condemned them; I wanted to impose my own onto her. The almost terrifying silence around me now in that empty house was punishment for an attitude that held no unkindness, but no generosity of spirit either.
I should have moved, left Paris, but I could not make up my mind to; I took painful pleasure in clinging to the least thing that reminded me of Odile. At least in that house, when I lay half awake in the morning, I felt I could hear her clear soft voice calling, “Good morning, Dickie!” through the door. That January was a springlike month, the naked trees stood out against perfectly blue skies. If Odile had been there, she would have put on what she called “a little jacket,” wound her gray fox around her neck, and gone out first thing in the morning. “Alone?” I would have asked in the evening. “Oh!” she would have replied, “I don’t remember …” Confronted with this absurd mystery, I would have felt a pang of anxiety that I now missed.
I spent my nights trying to establish when this trouble had begun. On our return from England we were perfectly happy. Perhaps all it needed was for one sentence in some early conversation to have been said in a different tone, gently but firmly. Our fates are determined by a single gesture, a word: in the beginning it would have taken only the smallest effort to stop it, but then a vast mechanism was set in motion. I now felt that the most heroic acts could not have rekindled in Odile the love she had once had for me.
Before she left we had come to an understanding about the divorce proceedings. We had agreed that I would write her an insulting letter, thereby allowing her to cite the letter against me. After a few days I was summoned to the law courts for the conciliation process. It was appalling seeing Odile in such circumstances. There were some twenty couples waiting, the men separated from the women by a wire mesh to prevent difficult scenes. People threw insults at each other, some women were in tears. The man next to me, a chauffeur, said, “I find it comforting that there are so many of us.” Odile nodded at me very gently, very affectionately, and I knew I still loved her.
At last it was our turn. The judge was a kindly man with a gray beard. He told Odile not to be distressed. He talked to us about the memories we shared, about the bonds of marriage, then he encouraged us to try one last time to be reconciled. I said, “Unfotunately, that’s no longer possible.” Odile stared straight ahead. She seemed to find this painful. “Perhaps she has some regrets …” I thought. “Perhaps she doesn’t love him as much as I think she does … Perhaps she’s already disappointed?” Then, because we were both silent, I heard the judge say, “Then, would you kindly sign this statement.” Odile and I left together, side by side.
“Would you like to walk a little?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s such a lovely day. What a gorgeous winter.”
I reminded her she had left a lot of things that belonged to her at home and asked whether I should arrange to have them taken to her parents’ house.
“If you like, but, you know, keep anything you want … I don’t need anything. Anyway, I won’t live very long, Dickie, you’ll soon be rid of my memory.”
“Whatever makes you say that, Odile? Are you ill?”
“Oh, no! Not at all! It’s a feeling I have … Whatever happens, find someone else soon. If I could be sure you’re happy, it will help me to be.”
“I could never be happy without you.”
“Of course you could, quite the opposite. You’ll soon see what a relief it is being free of this intolerable woman … I’m not joking, you know, it’s true: I am intolerable … Isn’t the Seine pretty at this time of year!”
She stopped by a window display of marine maps; I knew she liked them.
“Would you like me to buy them for you?”
She looked at me very sadly and tenderly.
“You’re so kind,” she said. “Yes, I’d like that; they can be the last present I have from you.”
We went in to buy the two maps. She called a taxi to take them away and took off her glove to give me her hand to kiss.
“Thank you for everything …,” she said.
Then she climbed into the car without a backward glance.
. XX .
Plunged into the depths of solitude, I found my family were of little help. Deep down, my mother was happy to see me rid of Odile. She did not say as much, because she could see I was suffering but also because we spoke so little at home; all the same, I could tell, and that made conversation with her difficult for me. My father was very ill. He had had a stroke, which had left his left hand paralyzed and his mouth slightly deformed, spoiling his handsome face. He knew his days were numbered and had grown very quiet, very se
rious. I did not want to go back to see Aunt Cora, whose dinners stirred too many sad memories. The only person I could see at the time without too much distaste and discomfort was my cousin Renée. I saw her one day at my parents’ house; she behaved very tactfully and did not mention my divorce. She was working and studying for a law degree. Rumor had it she did not want to marry. Her conversation, which was most interesting, was the first to tear me away from the constant analyses of my emotional troubles with which I was consumed. She had devoted her life to research and a profession; she seemed calm and contented. Was it possible to renounce love, then? I could not yet conceive of any other purpose for my life than devotion to Odile, but I found Renée’s presence very soothing. I asked her to have lunch with me. She accepted, and I went on to see her quite frequently. After a few such meetings, I tamed my emotions and talked about my wife with great sincerity, trying to explain what it was about her I had loved.
“When your divorce is pronounced, will you remarry?” she asked.
“Never,” I said. “And you? Have you never thought of marrying?”
“No,” she said. “I have a career now; it fills my life. I’m independent. I’ve never met a man I really liked.”
“What about all your doctors?”
“They’re friends.”
Toward the end of February I wanted to spend a few days in the mountains but was recalled by telegram because my father had had another stroke. I went home and found him dying. My mother tended to him with admirable devotion; during the last night when he had already lost consciousness, I remember watching her standing beside that inert body, wiping that brow and moistening those poor twisted lips, and was almost amazed by the serenity she maintained in her enormous pain. I thought she owed that calm to the sense she must have of his life’s perfection. An existence like my parents’ struck me as both beautiful and almost impossible to understand. My mother had not pursued any of the pleasures sought by Odile and most other young women I knew. She had renounced all romance and change when she was very young, and she was now reaping the rewards. I made a painful appraisal of my own life. It would have been sweet indeed if, toward the end of this difficult journey, I could picture Odile standing beside me, wiping a brow already drenched in the sweat of my death throes, a white-haired Odile softened by the passing years and who had long since left behind the storms of youth. Would I be alone, then, when I faced death? I hoped it would be as soon as possible.
I no longer received any news, even indirectly, of Odile. She had warned me that she would not write, because she thought my pain would be abated more swiftly by total silence; she had also stopped seeing our mutual friends. I thought she had rented a small villa near François’s, but I was not sure of this. For my part, I had decided to leave our house, which was too large for me alone and held too many memories. I found a delightful apartment in an old mansion block on the rue Duroc, and I worked hard to furnish it as Odile would have liked. Who could tell? Perhaps one day she would come there, unhappy, hurt, and asking for shelter. When I was moving house, I found fragments of letters Odile had received from her male friends. I read them. Perhaps I was wrong to, but I could not resist the acute longing to know. I have already told you that these letters were tender but innocent.
I spent the summer at Gandumas, in almost complete solitude. The only calm I could find was by lying in the grass far from the house. It then felt as if all links to society were broken and, for a few moments, I was in contact once more with deeper, more real needs. Was a woman worth such torment? … But books flung me straight back into my dark meditations. All I looked for in them was my pain and, almost in spite of myself, I chose those that would remind me of my own sad story.
I returned to Paris in October. A few young women took to coming to visit me on the rue Duroc, drawn—as they always are—by a man’s loneliness. I do not want to describe them to you; they merely passed through my life. What I should point out is that it took no effort (but afforded some surprise) for me to revert to the attitude of my youth. I behaved as I had toward my mistresses in the days before my marriage. Pursuing them was a game, and I was amused to see the effect a single sentence or bold move could have. Once the game was won, I would forget the woman and seek to start all over again with another.
Nothing provokes more cynicism than a great love that was not shared, but nothing produces more modesty either; I was utterly surprised to feel loved. The truth is: a passion that fully preoccupies a man draws women to him when he least wants them. Even if he is sentimental and tender by nature, when he is obsessed with another he becomes indifferent and almost brutal. Because he is unhappy, he sometimes allows himself to be tempted by the offer of affection. As soon as he has tasted this affection, he tires of it and does not disguise the fact. Without wishing to and without even realizing it, he plays the most appalling game. He becomes dangerous and conquers because he himself has been vanquished. This was the case with me. I had never been more convinced of my own inability to attract women, I had never felt less desire to attract them, and I had never received so much clear proof of devotion and love.
But my mind was still too disturbed for me to derive any pleasure from these successes. When I look at my diaries for 1913, all I can find in among the meetings and assignations noted on every page are memories of Odile. I have written out a few of them for you at random:
October 20—Her demands. We love difficult creatures so much better. It was such a pleasure, with a hint of anxiety, putting together a bouquet of wild flowers for her, cornflowers, oxeyes, and chrysanthemums, or a symphony in white major, arums, and white tulips …
Her humility. “I know exactly how you would like me to be … very serious, very pure … very much the bourgeois French lady … and yet sensual, but only with you … You’ll have to mourn her passing, Dickie, I’ll never be like that.”
Her modest pride. “I do have some little qualities, though … I’ve read more than most women … I know many beautiful poems by heart … I can arrange flowers … I dress well … and I love you, yes, sir, you may not believe it but I love you very much.”
October 25—There must be a love so perfect that a man could share all his loved one’s feelings at the exact same moment. There were times (in the days when I did not know him well) when I was almost grateful to François for being so like what Odile might love … then jealousy became stronger and François was too imperfect.
October 28—Loving the little bit of you that other women have in them.
October 29—There were times when you wearied of me; I loved that weariness too.
A little farther on, I come across this brief note: I have lost more than I possessed. It very clearly expresses what I felt at the time. When Odile was there, beloved though she was, she had flaws that distanced her from me a little; when Odile was gone, she became the goddess once more. I decked her out with virtues she did not have and, having finally modeled her on the eternal concept of Odile, I could be her Knight. A superficial acquaintance and the distortions of desire had had their effect during our engagement, and now forgetting and distance were having the same effect in turn, and, alas, I loved the unfaithful faraway Odile in a way that I never managed to love Odile nearby and tender.
. XXI .
Toward the end of the year, I learned that Odile and François were married. It was a painful time, but the certainty that the harm could not now be remedied actually helped me find the strength to live again.
Since my father’s death, I had introduced a lot of changes to the administration of the paper factory. I spent less time on it, which gave me more free time. This meant I was able to renew contact with friends from my youth who had been distanced from me by my marriage, particularly André Halff, now a member of the Council of State. Occasionally I also saw Bertrand, who was a cavalry lieutenant stationed in Saint-Germain and came to spend Sundays in Paris. I tried to return to books and studies I had abandoned several years earlier. I followed courses at the Sorbonne a
nd the Collège de France. In doing this I discovered that I had changed a great deal. I was surprised to find how little importance the problems that once filled my life now had. Can I really have wondered so anxiously whether I was a materialist or an idealist? Any form of metaphysics now felt like a puerile game.
Even more than these male friends, I now also saw a number of young women, as I have told you. I left the office at about five o’clock in the afternoon. I spent more time at social events than in the past and even realized rather mournfully that on these occasions (perhaps in an attempt to rekindle her memory) I tried to find pleasures that Odile had struggled to impose on me in the past. Knowing that I was now alone and fairly free, a lot of women I had met through Aunt Cora sent me invitations. At six o’clock on Saturday evenings I went to Hélène de Thianges, who was at home every Saturday. Maurice de Thianges, Member of Parliament for the Eure region, brought connections of his. Alongside these politicians, there were writers, friends of Hélène’s, and eminent businessmen because Hélène was the daughter of an industrialist, Monsieur Pascal-Bouchet, who came up from Normandy some Saturdays with his second daughter, Françoise. There was a great deal of intimacy between the regulars at this salon. I liked to sit beside a young woman and discuss the finer points of feelings with her. My wound still caused me suffering, but I could spend whole days without thinking of Odile or François. Occasionally I would hear someone talking about them; because Odile was now Madame Crozant, there were some who did not know she had once been my wife, and, having met her in Toulon where she was now famous as the city’s greatest beauty, they would tell stories about her. Hélène de Thianges tried to stop them or take me to another room, but I was keen to hear.
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