by André Gide
“What an idiot!” murmured Sarah. “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he is saying.”
“I’m saying the truth.”
I had never heard Armand speak in this way before. I thought him—I still think him—a delicate, sensitive nature; his vulgarity seemed to me entirely put on—due in part to his being drunk, and still more to his desire to amuse the English girl. She was pretty enough, but must have been exceedingly silly to take any pleasure in such fooling; what kind of interest could Olivier find in all this?… I determined not to hide my disgust, as soon as we should be alone.
“But you,” went on Armand, turning suddenly towards me, “you, who don’t care about money and who have enough to indulge in fine sentiments, will you consent to tell us why you didn’t marry Laura?—when it appears you were in love with her, and when, to common knowledge, she was pining away for you?”
Olivier, who up to that moment had been pretending to be asleep, opened his eyes; they met mine and if I did not blush, it must certainly have been that not one of the others was in a fit state to observe me.
“Armand, you’re unbearable,” said Sarah, as though to put me at my ease, for I found nothing to answer. She had hitherto been sitting on the bed, but at that point she lay down at full length beside Olivier, so that their two heads were touching. Upon which, Armand leapt up, seized a large screen which was standing folded against the wall, and with the antics of a clown spread it out so as to hide the couple; then, still clowning, he leant towards me and said without lowering his voice:
“Perhaps you didn’t know that my sister was a whore?”
It was too much. I got up and pushed the screen roughly aside. Olivier and Sarah immediately sat up. Her hair had come down. Olivier rose, went to the washhand stand and bathed his face.
“Come here,” said Sarah, taking me by the arm, “I want to show you something.”
She opened the door of the room and drew me out on the landing.
“I thought it might be interesting to a novelist. It’s a notebook I found accidentally—Papa’s private diary. I can’t think how he came to leave it lying about. Anybody might have read it. I took it to prevent Armand from seeing it. Don’t tell him about it. It’s not very long. You can read it in ten minutes and give it back to me before you go.”
“But, Sarah,” said I, looking at her fixedly, “it’s most frightfully indiscreet.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, if that’s what you think, you’ll be disappointed. There’s only one place in which it gets interesting—and even that— Look here; I’ll show it you.”
She had taken out of her bodice a very small memorandum book, about four years old. She turned over its pages for a moment, and then gave it to me, pointing to a passage as she did so.
“Read it quickly.”
Under the date and in quotation marks, I first of all saw the Scripture text: “He who is faithful in small things will be faithful also in great.” Then followed: “Why do I always put off till to-morrow my resolution to stop smoking? If only not to grieve Mélanie” (the pastor’s wife). “Oh, Lord! give me strength to shake off the yoke of this shameful slavery.” (I quote it, I think exactly.) Then came notes of struggles, beseeching, prayers, efforts—which were evidently all in vain, as they were repeated day after day. Then I turned another page and there was no more mention of the subject.
“Rather touching, isn’t it?” asked Sarah with the faintest touch of irony, when I had done reading.
“It’s much odder than you think,” I couldn’t help saying, though I reproached myself for it. “Just think, I asked your father only ten days ago if he had ever tried to give up smoking. I thought I was smoking a good deal too much myself and … Anyway, do you know what he answered? First of all he said that the evil effects of tobacco were very much exaggerated, and that as far as he was concerned he had never felt any; and as I insisted: ‘Yes,’ said he, at last. ‘I have made up my mind once or twice to give it up for a time.’ ‘And did you succeed?’ ‘Naturally,’ he answered, as if it followed as a matter of course—‘since I made up my mind to.’—It’s extraordinary! Perhaps, after all, he didn’t remember,” I added, not wishing to let Sarah see the depths of hypocrisy I suspected.
“Or perhaps,” rejoined Sarah, “it proves that ‘smoking’ stood for something else.”
Was it really Sarah who spoke in this way? I was struck dumb. I looked at her, hardly daring to understand.… At that moment Olivier came out of the room. He had combed his hair, arranged his collar and seemed calmer.
“Suppose we go,” he said, paying no attention to Sarah, “it’s late.”
“I am afraid you may mistake me,” he said, as soon as we were in the street. “You might think that I’m in love with Sarah. But I’m not.… Oh! I don’t detest her … only I don’t love her.”
I had taken his arm and pressed it without speaking.
“You mustn’t judge Armand either from what he said today,” he went on. “It’s a kind of part he acts … in spite of himself. In reality he’s not in the least like that.… I can’t explain. He has a kind of desire to spoil everything he most cares for. He hasn’t been like that long. I think he’s very unhappy and that he jokes in order to hide it. He’s very proud. His parents don’t understand him at all. They wanted to make a pastor of him.”
Memo.—Motto for a chapter of The Counterfeiters:
“La famille … cette cellule sociale.”
PAUL BOURGET (passim).
Title of the chapter: THE CELLULAR SYSTEM.
True, there exists no prison (intellectual, that is) from which a vigorous mind cannot escape; and nothing that incites to rebellion is definitively dangerous—although rebellion may in certain cases distort a character—driving it in upon itself, turning it to contradiction and stubbornness, and impiously prompting it to deceit; moreover the child who resists the influence of his family, wears out the first freshness of his energy in the attempt to free himself. But also the education which thwarts a child strengthens him by the very fact of hampering. The most lamentable victims of all are the victims of adulation. What force of character is needed to detest the things that flatter us! How many parents I have seen (the mother in especial) who delight in encouraging their children’s silliest repugnances, their most unjust prejudices, their failures to understand, their unreasonable antipathies.… At table: “You’d better leave that; can’t you see, it’s a bit of fat? Don’t eat that skin. That’s not cooked enough.… ” Out of doors, at night: “Oh, a bat!… Cover your head quickly; it’ll get into your hair.” Etc., etc.… According to them, beetles bite, grasshoppers sting, earthworms give spots … and such-like absurdities in every domain, intellectual, moral, etc.
In the suburban train the day before yesterday, as I was coming back from Auteuil, I heard a young mother whispering to a little girl of ten, whom she was petting:
“You and me, darling, me and you—the others may go hang!”
(Oh, yes! I knew they were working people, but the people too have a right to our indignation. The husband was sitting in the corner of the carriage reading the paper—quiet, resigned, not even a cuckold, I dare say.)
Is it possible to conceive a more insidious poison?
It is to bastards that the future belongs. How full of meaning is the expression “a natural child”! The bastard alone has the right to be natural.
Family egoism … hardly less hideous than personal egoism.
Nov. 6th.—I have never been able to invent anything. But I set myself in front of reality like a painter, who should say to his model: “Take up such and such an attitude; put on such and such an expression.” I can make the models which society furnishes me act as I please, if I am acquainted with their springs; or at any rate I can put such and such problems before them to solve in their own way, so that I learn my lesson from their reactions. It is my novelist’s instinct that is constantly pricking me on to intervene—to influence the course of their destiny. If I h
ad more imagination, I should be able to spin invention intrigues; as it is, I provoke them, observe the actors, and then work at their dictation.
Nov. 7th.—Nothing that I wrote yesterday is true. Only this remains—that reality interests me inasmuch as it is plastic, and that I care more—infinitely more—for what may be than for what has been. I lean with a fearful attraction over the depths of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality.
Here Bernard was obliged to pause. His eyes were blurred. He was gasping as if the eagerness with which he read had made him forget to breathe. He opened the window and filled his lungs before taking another plunge. His friendship for Olivier was no doubt very great; he had no better friend and there was no one in the world he loved so much, now that he could no longer love his parents; and indeed he clung to this affection in a manner that was almost excessive; but Olivier and he did not understand friendship quite in the same way. Bernard, as he progressed in his reading, felt with more and more astonishment and admiration, though with a little pain too, what diversity this friend he thought he knew so well, was capable of showing. Olivier had never told him anything of what the journal recounted. He hardly knew of the existence of Armand and Sarah. How different Olivier was with them to what he was with him!… In that room of Sarah’s, on that bed, would Bernard have recognized his friend? There mingled with the immense curiosity which drove him on to read so precipitately, a queer feeling of discomfort—disgust or pique. He had felt a little of this pique a moment before, when he had seen Olivier on Edouard’s arm—pique at being out of it. This kind of pique may lead very far and may make one commit all sorts of follies—like every kind of pique for that matter.
Well, we must go on. All this that I have been saying is only to put a little air between the pages of this journal. Now that Bernard has got his breath back again, we will return to it. He dives once more into its pages.
XIII : Edouard’s Journal:
First Visit to La Pérouse
On tire peu de service des vieillards.
VAUVENARGUES.
Nov. 8th.—Old Monsieur and Madame de la Pérouse have changed houses again. Their new apartment, which I had never seen so far, is an entresol in the part of the Faubourg St. Honoré which makes a little recess before it cuts across the Boulevard Haussmann. I rang the bell. La Pérouse opened the door. He was in his shirt sleeves and was wearing a sort of yellowish whitish night-cap on his head, which I finally made out to be an old stocking (Madame de La Pérouse’s, no doubt) tied in a knot, so that the foot dangled on his cheek like a tassel. He was holding a bent poker in his hand. I had evidently caught him at some domestic job, and as he seemed rather confused:
“Would you like me to come back later?” I asked.
“No, no.… Come in here.” And he pushed me into a long, narrow room with two windows looking on to the street, just on a level with the street lamp. “I was expecting a pupil at this very moment” (it was six o’clock); “but she has telegraphed to say she can’t come. I am so glad to see you.”
He laid his poker down on a small table, and, as though apologizing for his appearance:
“Madame de La Pérouse’s maid-servant has let the stove go out. She only comes in the morning; I’ve been obliged to empty it.”
“Shall I help you light it?”
“No, no; it’s dirty work.… Will you excuse me while I go and put my coat on?”
He trotted out of the room and came back almost immediately dressed in an alpaca coat, with its buttons torn off, its elbows in holes, and its general appearance so threadbare, that one wouldn’t have dared give it to a beggar. We sat down.
“You think I’m changed, don’t you?”
I wanted to protest, but could hardly find anything to say, I was so painfully affected by the harassed expression of his face, which had once been so beautiful. He went on:
“Yes, I’ve grown very old lately. I’m beginning to lose my memory. When I want to go over one of Bach’s fugues, I am obliged to refer to the book.… ”
“There are many young people who would be glad to have a memory like yours.”
He replied with a shrug: “Oh, it’s not only my memory that’s failing. For instance, I think I still walk pretty quickly; but all the same everybody in the street passes me.”
“Oh,” said I, “people walk much quicker nowadays.”
“Yes, don’t they?… It’s the same with my lessons—my pupils think that my teaching keeps them back; they want to go quicker than I do. I’m losing them.… Everyone’s in a hurry nowadays.”
He added in a whisper so low that I could hardly hear him: “I’ve scarcely any left.”
I felt that he was in such great distress that I didn’t dare question him.
“Madame de La Pérouse won’t understand. She says I don’t set about it in the right way—that I don’t do anything to keep them and still less to get new ones.”
“The pupil you were expecting just now …” I asked awkwardly.
“Oh, she! I’m preparing her for the Conservatoire. She comes here to practise every day.”
“Which means she doesn’t pay you.”
“Madame de La Pérouse is always reproaching me with it. She can’t understand that those are the only lessons that interest me; yes, the only lessons I really care about … giving. I have taken to reflecting a great deal lately. Here! there’s something I should like to ask you. Why is it there is so little about old people in books?… I suppose it’s because old people aren’t able to write themselves and young ones don’t take any interest in them. No one’s interested in an old man.… And yet there are a great many curious things that might be said about them. For instance: there are certain acts in my past life which I’m only just beginning to understand. Yes, I’m just beginning to understand that they haven’t at all the meaning I attached to them in the old days when I did them.… I’ve only just begun to understand that I have been a dupe during the whole of my life. Madame de La Pérouse has fooled me; my son has fooled me; everybody has fooled me; God has fooled me.… ”
The evening was closing in. I could hardly make out my old master’s features; but suddenly the light of the street lamp flashed out and showed me his cheeks glittering with tears. I looked anxiously at first at an odd mark on his temple, like a dint, like a hole; but as he moved a little, the spot changed places and I saw that it was only a shadow cast by a knob of the balustrade. I put my hand on his scraggy arm; he shivered. “You’ll catch cold,” I said. “Really, shan’t we light the fire?… Come along.”
“No, no; one must harden oneself.”
“What? Stoicism?”
“Yes, a little. It’s because my throat was delicate that I never would wear a scarf. I have always struggled with myself.”
“That’s all very well as long as one is victorious; but if one’s body gives way …”
“That would be the real victory.”
He let go my hand and went on: “I was afraid you would go away without coming to see me.”
“Go where?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You travel so much. There’s something I wanted to say to you.… I expect to be going away myself soon.”
“What! are you thinking of travelling?” I asked clumsily, pretending not to understand him, notwithstanding the mysterious solemnity of his voice. He shook his head.
“You know very well what I mean.… Yes, yes. I know it will soon be time. I am beginning to earn less than my keep; and I can’t endure it. There’s a certain point beyond which I have promised myself not to go.”
He spoke in an emotional tone which alarmed me.
“Do you think it is wrong? I have never been able to understand why it was forbidden by religion. I have reflected a great deal latterly. When I was young, I led a very austere life; I used to congratulate myself on my force of character every time I refused a solicitation in the street. I didn’t understand, that when I thought I was
freeing myself, in reality I was becoming more and more the slave of my own pride. Every one of these triumphs over myself was another turn of the key in the door of my prison. That’s what I meant just now by saying that God had fooled me. He made me take my pride for virtue. He was laughing at me. It amuses him. I think he plays with us as a cat does with a mouse. He sends us temptations which he knows we shan’t be able to resist; but when we do resist he revenges himself still worse. Why does he hate us so? And why … But I’m boring you with these old man’s questions.”
He took his head in his hands like a moping child and remained silent so long that I began to wonder whether he had not forgotten my presence. I sat motionless in front of him, afraid of disturbing his meditations. Notwithstanding the noise of the street which was so close, the calm of the little room seemed to me extraordinary, and notwithstanding the glimmer of the street lamp, which shed its fantastic light upon us from down below, like footlights at the theatre, the shadow on each side of the window seemed to broaden, and the darkness round us to thicken, as in icy weather the water of a quiet pool thickens into immobility—till my heart itself thickened into ice too. At last, shaking myself free from the clutch that held me, I breathed loudly and, preparatory to taking my leave, I asked out of politeness and in order to break the spell:
“How is Madame de La Pérouse?”
The old man seemed to wake up out of a dream. He repeated:
“Madame de La Pérouse …?” interrogatively, as if the words were syllables which had lost all meaning for him; then he suddenly leant towards me:
“Madame de la Pérouse is in a terrible state … most painful to me.”
“What kind of state?” I asked.
“Oh, no kind,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, as if there were nothing to explain. “She is completely out of her mind. She doesn’t know what to be up to next.”