You tell me you don't 'deserve' to take the veil. Say rather 'I am not destined' or 'I have not been chosen'. That is quite possible. But do not speak of deserving. Just as the love of one person for another has no need to be deserved, so the grace God gives a person to consecrate to him is given to that person in preference to an infinity of deserving persons without his having deserved it. I would even go so far as to say that, if I were God, what I should like in a person would be my grace, just because it is privilege. This said, you are right not to be too self-satisfied. To be too firmly convinced that God approves of an action is often a clear sign that it is not being done for him and through his spirit, just as it is often a sign that a human action is defective to be too sure that it will be applauded.
Perhaps there are forces within you that could be harnessed to God's purposes. I don't know what you may have to lose by it, but I know it's negligible. It must have been one of the Fathers of the Church who invented the expression: he who loses wins. It pains me to think of you becoming involved in the imbecility of the world. You go to town, you go to the fair, and far from being overwhelmed with disgust by what you see there, you take pleasure in it. If you believe, what are you doing in the world? There is nothing innocent in the world once one believes (to enjoy the taste of a glass of water is to slap Christ's face); nothing that can even be justified. However trifling your activity, it is ridiculous; I should like to see your actions die out one by one, as lights go out at midnight in a town. One of my fellow-writers having spoken of the 'virtue of contempt', an ecclesiastic, writing in some review or other, danced a veritable fandango of scorn and derision: 'The virtue of contempt! A fine sort of Christian!' But the Gospel is full of Christ's contempt for the world; and this very morning I read somewhere: 'What a joy to know how contemptible the world is! How weak one is not to despise it as much as it deserves!' Who wrote that? The 'gentle' Fénelon, the 'swan'. (Medit. V) But better still - the last word in fact: the dying Jesus prays for his executioners, and refuses to pray for the world. Non pro mundo rogo. 'I pray not for the world.' (St John XVII, 9). There's a thunderbolt that impresses me more than the one that occurred when he expired. He prays for his executioners, because that is an extravagance worthy of his genius, but he refuses to pray for the corrupt and foolish multitude which he cursed in the Gospel. 'I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me.' Wonderful, shattering words - it does me good to hear them! and now. Mademoiselle, be one of those for whom Jesus does not pray.
The sin against the Holy Ghost touches me deeply. Maybe there is at this moment a religious house waiting for you to bury yourself in body and soul, as I bury myself body and soul in my writings; it awaits you as the earth awaits the morning dew. That you are alive, I can believe. But alive with spiritual life? I have no means of knowing what there is in you; perhaps there is nothing. You have no more pressing objective than to find out what your impulses and inclinations amount to. Only a priest can disentangle them. A good confessor is the foundation of the edifice you must build. Go and see Father M— at the monastery of the — at L—. I know Father M—; he has the distinction of having been the greatest sinner in the world - which means that he will understand your sins the better, knowing what sin is. He will induce in you such a state of humility that the confession of those sins will be as enjoyable to you as the flames were to the martyrs. He will never anticipate the grace within you, supposing it to be there, but will follow it humbly and firmly, after testing it with the greatest care. Although today people no longer enter into religion unthinkingly, as they used to do (and as people continue to enter into matrimony), the Church cannot be too careful in making sure of a vocation. You should not be made a nun by men but by God.
You pray for your father? You would do better to pray for yourself. Have you forgotten how insistent the Gospel is on that point? And you would do better to read the Gospel, and understand it, than to go so often to Mass, to Communion, etc. Abuses are often more dangerous than errors, because one is less on one's guard against them. Piety should be devoid of gestures, like sorrow, and, I might almost venture to say, as silent. How eloquent the silence of Moses before God!
Do not cease to remind yourself, whatever I may write to you, that I am not a Christian believer. Faith is darkness - the expression falls frequently from religious pens; and I am all crude brightness. Do not cease to bear in mind that I have no faith, that I do not miss it, that I do not ever expect to have it, that I do not ever wish to have it. 'There is a road which, though it may sometimes appear the right one, leads to hell.' Perhaps I am that road. In imagination and in hope I have damned myself a hundred thousand times. In action - in the total and absolute fulfilment of my desires - I have damned myself another hundred thousand times. And in memories and regrets I have damned myself another hundred thousand times. And that is part of my glory. And I have helped enough women to damnation to help one in the opposite direction. For I am a spirit of grace, and spirits of grace radiate like grace itself, which assumes every form. And I am - essentially - he- who-assumes-every-form.
I have written to you in a language that must be partly incomprehensible to you. You may forage what you can from it.
Forgive me, Mademoiselle, for my presumption.
Costals
to Pierre Costals
Paris
Andrée Hacquebaut
Saint-Léonard
24 December 1926
You do not write to me for more than three weeks. Then at last a slender post-card with no more than a dozen words on it brings me your greetings and asks for my news. My news? I cannot go on telling you ad infinitum that I'm unhappy. I must, however, find some way out of this state of crisis which is killing me. The day when it is proved to me beyond a shadow of doubt that every outlet is closed to me as far as love is concerned - and that day cannot be far off - I shall persist no longer. It would be horrible to cling on. The only alternative is voluntary renunciation, a pure and dignified life. I belong to the sacrificial generation, the girls whose chances of love were decimated by the war with its toll of young men: we too are widows. As for man-hunting, for adventure, I am not yet ripe for that.
It seems to me that such a renunciation would open up fresh fields for me. 'I'm beaten, it's all over and done with. Therefore, everything that happens to me from now on will be a bonus. Since I no longer seek, it may be that I've already found.' I have often noticed in myself a sudden reversal of this kind when I reach the climax of some experience I've been going through: a burst of furious pride, a sort of emotional desiccation and detachment, a sudden asperity towards fate: 'After all, come what may, I still have myself.'
I still have you, too, of course. In my confusion and despair I have a kind of peace: 'He cannot, he will not be my happiness. But he is my truth. He does not want me to love him - I would fail to please him and would destroy myself. Nevertheless, it fills me with a great peace, in spite of my life's failur3, when so many women will never find the man who would make their hearts throb, or will love heaven knows whom out of the need to love, it fills me with a great peace to have discovered at least this certainty: that there exists a man who is everything to me, whom I could have loved with my whole being. I no longer need to search or to wait - the exhausting fate of lonely women.' Yes, telling myself this appeases me. The impression of having achieved, of having had, of escaping at last from that vague and indefinable torment, from the inordinate appetite for love - the renouncing of a precise treasure, and not innumerable and unknown possible treasures - why, in comparison it's almost tantamount to possessing.
Christmas! An abyss of boredom and mediocrity with the people among whom I have to spend it. A day of rain and nostalgia and misery. Why are there days when all those hostile things which at other times lie dormant and innocuous rise up and assail one all at once? It's agonizing to have to undergo this onslaught. And I think of the Christmases of those who love one another, of the adorable Christmas in Werther. What a pity I can no
longer put my shoes in the fireplace! I would have put two pairs, because there are four things I long for madly: a husband (with love), a gramophone, a book about Cosima Wagner, and a hat decorated with an aigrette, a hat I won't describe to you, because you would make fun of me.
A Happy New Year! I'm very fond of you, you know, Costals. And if happiness could be given like a diamond, it would long ago have passed from my hand into yours. Once more I offer you my undying devotion. But when, oh when will you ever make use of it?
A.H.
This letter remained unanswered.
Saint-Léonard. January. Seven degrees of frost. At night, in spite of the stove, the water freezes in the Hacquebaut house.
What is most immediately striking about Andrée's room is that everything in it, furniture, hangings, objects, is at least twenty years old and looks it: for twenty years nothing has been bought, or next to nothing. The only things of any beauty are some reproductions of famous pictures, chosen with taste, and a very unfeminine taste (a taste in which there is a feeling for grandeur).
The sound of a hooter outside. How often this hooter has made her heart miss a beat! In spite of the cold, she opens the window. The postman's big bicycle-lamp lights up the door of the neighbouring house. Then it moves, comes nearer. As the lamp passes Andrée flings out a wish to it as though it were a shooting star: 'O God, make it stop!' But the lamp moves away into the distance. Out there, too, is the man she calls to, who also goes by without stopping.
Already fairly isolated from humanity, she is isolated even more by the cold. The snow-bound atmosphere muffles sounds. Everything lives in slow motion, everything shrivels up. Express trains no longer run. The mail arrives a day late. But what does it matter, after all? Never a letter from Costals. Luckily she knows that in February she will be going to Paris for a month.
She had always suffered from the feeling of having nobody at the other end of the line, from not knowing what person, what cause to dedicate herself to. As a child she already showed symptoms of the disease that Costals, in a neologism worthy of a medical student, called Andrée's 'letteritis'. In those days she used to write letters to herself, rather like the English poet in the last war, who at each port of call on the way to the Dardanelles, hired an urchin to wave a handkerchief when the steamer sailed (Costals professed to find such a trait utterly repulsive: he could not possibly have shaken hands with a man with that sort of sensibility). Later on, she had contributed for some time to the correspondence columns of the women's papers, which are the young girl's substitute for men, as lap- dogs are the grown woman's substitute for babies. This correspondence had ceased when she began writing to Costals.
She scribbled page after page to him, for hours on end, stopping only because of cramp in her hand. As with most women, what she wrote in the form of letters was in fact her diary - huge pages without margins, unnumbered, with words scratched out or written over, and lines added in every direction and even across other lines. Whenever Costals received one of these letters, he would weigh it in his hand with a sigh, assessing the number of pages it must contain: for a man who, like most men, could not read long letters, it was an affliction every time. It was unusual for the envelope not to be held together with bits of stamp paper lest it should burst under the weight. Inside, Costals would often find a photograph of Andrée which he would tear up in a rage and throw into the waste paper basket without even glancing at it. Ah! if she had seen him then it would have been like a dagger in her heart. But also, in an instant, she would have seen the light at last. Unless, incurably, she were to think: 'Only love could account for such a fit of rage. What has he got against me today?' Sometimes she would perfume her letters with such a pungent scent that he was obliged to hang them out on clothes pegs for the night; but even this was not enough, and the drawer of his desk would reek for days on end. If he complained to her, she would complain back: how could friendship be affected by such trifles? She was incapable of realizing (1) that there was no friendship, and (2) if there had been, yes, it would have been affected, because in anything to do with the quality of personal relations, there are no trifles. It was the same with her writing-paper, which was of an 'impossible' format. As Costals kept her letters, he had pointed out to her how awkward they were for his files, overlapping them and destroying their neatness. It was a waste of breath - so much so that he was occasionally provoked into throwing some of her letters away out of sheer exasperation at seeing their edges frayed like lace in his files.
From time to time, Costals would send a reply to these letters - illegible little notes, scribbled as fast as he could manage, in which he put down whatever came into his head - literally anything - and in which he always teased her a little, because it was in his nature to tease. She believed that one only teases people one loves. In her more lucid moments, she found these notes touching in their goodwill, which indeed they were.
At the beginning, she had also sent him little presents - baskets of flowers or fruit. At first he had been weak or lazy or charitable enough to accept them: 'She would be very hurt if I refused them.' When she sent him a rather elegant cigarette- holder, he sent it back with a friendly letter. For a year she stopped sending presents, then began again - eau de Cologne, sachets of lavender. He wrote to her: 'Dear Mademoiselle, I shall not return your little presents any more. I shall give them automatically to my mistresses' (which was what he had done). That did it. There were no more little presents.
Andrée's other cure for boredom was reading. Books borrowed, books ordered from a lending library, books even bought (mad extravagance - books costing thirty francs! ): she read until her eyes ached. Almost always worth-while books. And almost always something interesting in the reflections she scribbled in the margins.
Letter-writing, reading, what else? She ordered prospectuses from travel agencies, catalogues of rare books, manuscripts, records, catalogues from big stores, and thumbed through them interminably, marking what she would have liked to have, almost without bitterness. She did not resent the fact that millions of fools, thanks to their ill-gotten fortunes, could enjoy the art, the luxury, the things of the mind, which were denied to her. She had tried to 'write', but soon realized that she had no literary talent. Sometimes, at the end of her tether, she would go out and walk aimlessly in the countryside, although she had no feeling for nature, at least the nature round Saint- Léonard. She would only have liked it as a background for living people.
There were times when this life was bearable, when, if she did not feel happy, she was not exactly unhappy. Reading a good book, she would say to herself: 'To think that there are women who work seven hours a day in an office!' At other times she was bored to distraction - so much time on her hands that she did not know what to do with - but nonetheless she resisted manual work, from an acute sense of the value of time. While her mother was alive she had never wanted to help her with the housework, to darn, or sew her dresses. 'Imagine making jam when I could spend the time improving my mind, discovering a great writer I haven't read, learning something, no matter what, if only from reading Larousse!' Only an acute attack of misery would drive her to take up a manual chore. Thus, whenever she felt particularly distressed, she took to darning her stockings. It had become a formula: great unhappiness = darning of stockings - so much so that the crimson 'egg' she used for this purpose gave her a twinge when she came across it in her more serene moments. Since her mother's death, she had had to get down to minor household chores - but never without a feeling of vehement impatience. It was something she simply could not accept.
One day Costals had said to her: 'If I had had the misfortune to have a daughter, I should have been stiff with anxiety until she was married off, all the more so if she had no money. Parents are terribly proud of themselves when they produce a brat, and go round trumpeting it to the world, but when it comes to bringing it up with a little intelligence, nothing doing. Of course I realize how awful it must be for decent people to do what has to be done to get
a daughter settled - intrigue, entertain, etc. - because everything connected with marriage is unquestionably the greatest nonsense that can happen in the life of a human being. But they shouldn't have got themselves into the mess in the first place! It's always the same - producing children, and then not knowing what to do with them. So much care and attention and conscientiousness about birth, and so much frivolity, blindness and stupidity about education. And then we come to the parents who haven't enough money to get their daughters married off, and go on waiting, waiting for God knows what, waiting until she becomes crabbed and can't afford to be so choosy. I know some really criminal parents, whose daughter was made for marriage, but who condemned her to celibacy in order to keep her with them. All this is simply to explain to you that there is only one thing for you to do - to take a job in Paris that is not too exacting and that provides you with your bread and butter, and to concentrate, to the exclusion of everything else, on meeting people, in other words looking for a husband. Your sole aim, for the time being, should be to make social contacts.'
Mademoiselle had taken offence at these words. She was like those bogus artists who rail against the bourgeoisie but who are more bourgeois than anyone. 'Make social contacts' - so that was the advice he gave to a superior girl like her!
The Girls Page 5