And so we led a fairly intimate and in some ways almost conjugal life, but Philippe had never told me he loved me, and even frequently said he did not love me and that this was a very good thing for our friendship. One day when we met by chance in the Bois de Boulogne, where we both happened to be out for a morning walk, he said, “I’m so glad to see you that I feel a bit like a young boy. When I was sixteen I used walk through the streets of Limoges hoping to bump into someone like this, a young woman called Denise Aubry.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“Yes, and then I tired of her, just as you will tire of me if I don’t keep a measure of happiness myself.”
“But why?” I asked. “Don’t you believe in mutual love?”
“Even when it’s mutual, love is terrible. A woman once told me these words and I thought them very accurate: ‘A love that’s going very well, in other words trundling along, is difficult enough, but a love that’s not going well is hell.’ It’s true.”
I did not reply; I had made up my mind that I would let him go whichever way he wanted and do whatever he wanted. A few days later we went to the opera together to watch my beloved Siegfried. It was such a pleasure for me to listen to it beside the man who had become my hero. During the “Forest Murmurs,” without thinking what I was doing, I put my hand on Philippe’s; he turned and looked at me with a happy, questioning expression. In the car on the way home, he in turn took one of my hands, brought it to his lips, and then held it. When the car stopped by my door, he said, “Good night, darling.” I replied brightly and with some emotion, “Good night, my dear friend.” The following morning I received a letter he had written during the night and had had delivered to me: Isabelle, this unique, demanding emotion is not just friendship … He described a few phases of his romantically inspired childhood; he told me about the woman he had called “the Queen,” then “the Amazon,” and who had always obsessed him:
This sort of woman who put me in such a state of exultation always remained the same. She had to be fragile, unhappy, and frivolous too, and yet wise. You see, the authoritativeness of a Renée could not be associated with her. But the very moment I met Odile, I felt she was the one I had always been waiting for. What can I tell you? You have a little of that mysterious essence that gives life all its value in my eyes and without which I wanted to die. Love? Friendship? What does the word matter? It’s a deep, tender feeling, a great hope, a vast gentleness. My darling, I long for your lips and the nape of your neck where my fingers can stroke the soft prickle of your close-cropped hair.
Philippe
That evening I went out with him. We had arranged to meet at the Gaveau concert hall and listen to some Russian music. When I arrived I smiled and said, “Hello … I received your letter.” He looked rather distant and said, “Oh yes,” and went on to talk of something else. But in the car on the way home I surrendered to him the lips and the neck he had wanted for so long.
The following Sunday we went to the Fontainebleau forest. “You’re such a Wagnerian,” he said, “it would be fun to show you a place near Barbizon that really reminds me of the climb to Valhalla. There are blocks of rock under the fir trees, great piles of them reaching up to the sky. It’s chaotic and gigantic but also very ordered, I mean it’s all very Twilight of the Gods. I know you don’t like landscapes, but you should like this one because it’s a bit like a theater.”
I wore a white dress, only white, so that I could be a Walkyrie myself. Philippe complimented me on it. Despite my efforts, he rarely liked my dresses; he almost always eyed them critically and said nothing. I could tell he liked looking at me that day. I found the forest as lovely as he had described. A winding path rose up between the huge moss-covered rocks. Philippe took my arm several times to help me climb up over the stones, then he put his hands around me to hoist me up. We lay down in the grass with my head leaning on his shoulder. A circle of fir trees around us formed a dark well shaft whose edges framed the sky.
. V .
I wondered whether Philippe intended to make me his wife or his mistress. I even loved this uncertainty. Philippe would be the arbiter of my fate; the solution must come from him alone. I waited trustingly.
Sometimes a more specific indication seemed to hover beneath the surface of his words. Philippe would say, “I must show you Bruges; it’s a delightful place … we haven’t yet made any sort of trip together.” I found the thought of traveling with him enchanting, and smiled tenderly, but over the next few days there would be no more talk of departures.
July was blazing hot. All our friends were dispersing, heading off for vacations. I did not want to leave Paris, it would have meant being far from Philippe. One evening he took me for dinner at Saint-Germain. We stayed out on the terrace for a long time, with Paris laid out at our feet, a black ocean reflecting the twinkling stars in the sky. Couples laughed together in the shadows. Voices sang from arbors. A cricket nearby lulled us with its song. In the car on the way back he told me about his family, and several times he said, “When you come to Gandumas … When you get to know my mother …” The word marriage had never been spoken.
The following morning, he left for Gandumas and spent two weeks there, writing to me a great deal. Before he returned, he sent me the long record of events I have mentioned, the one of his life with Odile. I was interested and surprised by this account. In it I found an anxious, jealous Philippe I would never have imagined, a cynical Philippe too, in some crises. I understood that he wanted to paint himself for me as he truly was, in order to avoid any painful surprises. But this portrait did not frighten me. What did it matter to me if he was jealous? I had no intention of betraying him. And what did it matter if he sometimes diverted himself with the company of young women? I was prepared to accept everything.
Everything about his behavior and the things he said now suggested he had made up his mind to marry me. This made me happy, and yet a slight anxiety spoiled my happiness: it seemed to me that the hint of irritation I sometimes glimpsed when he listened to me talk or watched me do something was growing keener and appearing more frequently. Several times, during the course of evenings that started with our minds in perfect agreement, I felt that something I had said suddenly made him clam up and become wistfully thoughtful. Falling silent myself, I then tried to reconstruct what it was I had said. All my comments struck me as harmless. I tried to understand what had jolted him but found nothing. I found Philippe’s reactions mysterious and unpredictable.
“Do you know what you should do, Philippe? Tell me everything you don’t like about me. I know there are things … Am I wrong?”
“No,” he said, “but they’re such little things.”
“I’d so like to know what they are and try to correct them.”
“Well,” he said, “next time I go away, I’ll write to you about them.”
At the end of the month, when he went to spend two days at Gandumas, I received the following letter:
Gandumas, by Chardeuil (Haute-Vienne)
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU:
WHAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT YOU:
You. Nothing.
Yes, what I’ve just written is true in a sense, but not entirely. Perhaps it would be more accurate to put the same traits in both columns, because there are some details that I like as fragments of you, when I wouldn’t like them in isolation in someone else. Let’s try again.
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU:
WHAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT YOU:
Your dark eyes, your long eyelashes, the line of your neck and shoulders, your body. The slightly awkward stiffness in your gestures. The way you look like a little girl caught doing something naughty.
Mostly a combination of courage and weakness, of propriety and passion. There is something heroic about you; it’s very well hidden under a lack of willfulness about minor things, but it’s there. Mostly a refusal to see and accept life as it is; an idealism usually found in Anglo-Saxon magazines; irritating sentimentality. Your severity about
other people’s weaknesses.
The girlish side of you. The old lady side of you.
Your sporty dresses. Your yellow smock dress; the ornamentation on your hats (a blue feather); your dress with the ocher lace; everything over-laden, everything that alters the silhouette.
Your conscientious little soul, your simplicity, your orderliness. Your well-kept books and notebooks. Your economizing; your caution with household things and emotions.
Your wisdom. Your lack of impulsiveness.
Your modesty. Your lack of pride.
I could go on for ages with the left-hand column. Everything I’ve put in the right-hand column is inaccurate. Or I should at least add:
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU:
What I don’t like about you.
Because it is all a part of you, and I have no wish to change you, except in the tiniest things that are grafted onto the real you. I know, for example … but I really must get on with some work. Hachette are asking me to manufacture a special kind of paper for a new publication, and a foreman has just come in to submit a suggested “composition” for it. Oh, I find it so difficult tearing myself away from a letter to you! One more thing for the list:
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU:
The long voluptuous daydream I fall into the moment I think of you.
Chamfort tells this story: a lady told the Chevalier de B***:
“What I like about you—”
“Ah! Madame,” he interrupted. “If you know what it is, I’m lost …”
What I like about you, Isabelle …
Philippe
That letter made me daydream a great deal too. I went back through my memories and found critical looks from Philippe. I had long since noticed that he attached extraordinary importance not just to the least thing I said but also to my dresses, my hats, every detail of what I was wearing, and this had saddened me, almost humiliated me. I was now surprised to recognize in myself some ways of thinking learned from my mother, as well as her instinctive contempt for luxury. I was amazed to find such concerns in Philippe, in my hero. I realized that he was different from me, but I thought it beneath him to spend any length of time thinking about such minor things. And yet that was his way, and I wanted to please him. And so I made an effort to be as he seemed to wish. I did not altogether succeed, and what worried me most was that I could not see clearly what it was he wanted. My economizing? My lack of impulsiveness? Well yes, that was true. I felt cautious, weighing up everything I did. “How strange,” I thought. “All through my childhood I was a fanciful girl, rebelling against sensible, austere surroundings, and now Philippe, looking in from the outside, seems to be finding inherited characteristics I thought hadn’t tainted me.”
As I read and reread the letter, I couldn’t help pleading my case: “A little girl caught doing something naughty. But how could I not look like a scolded child, Philippe? I was raised with a severity you would struggle to imagine. I could not leave the house unless I was escorted by Mademoiselle Chauvière or my mother … Oh, Philippe, your Odile spent her childhood with parents who did not mind, who let her go free. You suffered painfully for that … My irritating sentimentality? But there was so little sentimentality around me … What I want from love is a warm, caressing climate, something my family refused me … My modesty? My lack of pride? … How could I be sure of myself when all my childhood I was told I was flawed and unremarkable …?” When Philippe came back, I tried to repeat this passionate defense to him, but he smiled and proved so tender that I immediately forgot the letter. The date for our marriage was set and I became perfectly happy.
My parents came back for the ceremony. They did not dislike Philippe. He meanwhile liked my father’s aloof irony, and he said that my mother’s strict austerity had a particularly “Marcenat” sort of poetry. My family were amazed to discover that we were not to have a “honeymoon.” I would have liked to: it would have been such a joy for me to see Italy or Greece with Philippe, but I could tell he did not want to and I did not insist. I understood how he felt, but my parents were very keen that we should observe “the protocol of happiness,” and on the day of our wedding my mother predicted a dangerous future for my marriage. “Don’t let your husband think you love him too much,” she said, “or you’ll be lost.” I did not hesitate for a moment and replied somewhat tartly, “I’ll take care of my own happiness.”
. VI .
I still remember the first three months of our life together as the most harmonious of times. The perfect pleasure of living with Philippe. Slow discovery of love. Growing understanding of our bodies. His tactful kindness and consideration. Everything seemed so lovely with you, Philippe, and so easy. I would have liked to drive all the sad memories from your mind and give you every joy, to sit at your feet and kiss your hands. I felt so young. My repressed childhood, my demanding job during the war, my feelings of helplessness as a single woman—I had forgotten them all; life was beautiful.
We spent those first three months at Gandumas, which I liked very much. I had longed to get to know the house and grounds where Philippe grew up. I thought about Philippe as a child, a little boy, with a tenderness that was both voluptuous and maternal. My mother-in-law showed me photographs, schoolbooks, and locks of hair she had kept. I thought her a sensible, intelligent woman. We shared many tastes and the same affectionate but concerned fear for a Philippe who was no longer quite the same one she had raised.
She said that Odile had had a profound and not very good influence on him.
“Before his first marriage, you would never have seen Philippe anxious or highly strung. He was a firm, balanced man; he took great interest in reading and his work, and was very like his father who was first and foremost a slave to duty. Under his first wife’s influence, Philippe became much more … difficult. Oh, it’s only superficial things and his character’s stayed the same, but, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some trouble in the early days.”
I asked her to tell me about Odile. She had not forgiven her for making Philippe so unhappy.
“But, Mother,” I said, “he adored her; he still loves her. So in spite of everything, she must have given him something …”
“I believe he’ll be much happier with you,” she said, “and I’m grateful to you for that, my dear Isabelle.”
We had several conversations that might have seemed strange to anyone listening, because I was the one defending the mythical Odile that Philippe had created and passed on to me.
“You amaze me,” my mother-in-law said. “It’s true; you appear to have known her better than me, and you never even spoke to her … No, I can assure you, I feel only pity for the poor little thing, but we really must speak the truth, and I’m describing her as I saw her.”
Time flew by like a magic spell; I felt as if my life had started the day of my wedding. Before leaving for the factory in the morning, Philippe would choose books for me to read. Some of them, particularly the philosophers, remained inaccessible to me, but as soon as there was anything to do with love, I read it quite happily. In a small notebook I copied out the passages that Philippe had marked in pencil in the margin.
At about eleven o’clock I would go for a walk in the grounds. I very much liked accompanying my mother-in-law to the garden village she had had built in memory of her husband on the slopes overlooking the Loue valley. It was a cluster of clean, hygienic houses that Philippe thought ugly, but they were comfortable and practical. In the center of the village, Madame Marcenat had created quite a group of collective institutions that I found interesting. She showed me her school of domestic science, her infirmary, and her child-care center. I helped her, qualified by my wartime experience. I had anyway always had a taste for organization and order.
I even took great pleasure in going to the factory with Philippe. In a few days I learned what it was he did at work. I thought it rather fun; I liked sitting facing him in his office piled high with paper in every color, reading letters from newspaper administrators an
d editors, and listening to workmen’s descriptions of processes. Occasionally, when all the employees had left, I would sit on Philippe’s lap and he would kiss me with one eye anxiously on the door. I noticed with delight that he had an almost constant need for my body; the moment I was close to him, he would take me by the shoulders or the waist. I learned that the most perfectly real aspect of him was the lover, and I too discovered a delicious sensuality I had ignored all those years but that now colored my whole life.
I liked being in the slightly wild region of Limousin, a place I felt was suffused with Philippe. The only place I avoided was that observatory in the grounds where I knew he had gone with Denise Aubry and later Odile. I started feeling a peculiar posthumous jealousy. Sometimes I wanted to know. I interrogated Philippe about Odile with almost cruel bitterness. But these flashes of ill temper were fleeting. My only fear was to discover that Philippe was not happy in quite the same way I was. He loved me, I could not doubt that, but he did not have my grateful sense of wonderment about this new life.
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