The Girls

by Henri de Montherlant

  Andrée

  to Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  2 May 1927

  Dear Mademoiselle,

  This is to acknowledge your two March letters in which you complain of my silence, and your two April letters in which you offer yourself to me. So you see that I've read you.

  You are obsessed with the idea of happiness. So am I. You have no idea how keenly I feel the tragedy of a situation in which neither body nor soul obtains what it desires. I could write page after page on the subject, even more forcefully than you. If in this matter we are in complete sympathy - sumpathein: to suffer with, to suffer from the same suffering as - it is because, from this point of view, I have been you. Not only during adolescence, bound hand and foot as I was by my shyness and my ignorance of the world, but even later, when I was already a man, during certain desolate periods of my life. True, they did not last long. Today I have everything I like, and I like everything I have.

  And so, I repeat, your suffering is not of the kind I need to imagine in order to be able to sympathize with. I know what it's like; it's intolerable, and your situation is intolerable. You are really very unlucky.

  That said, if I understand your last two letters aright, you wish to give yourself to me. Allow me to say, dear Mademoiselle, that this idea does not seem to me a happy one.

  Physiologically I am somewhat peculiar. I only desire: (a) girls of under twenty-two years of age; (b) passive, bovine girls; (c) long, thin girls with raven hair. So you see that you do not at all fulfil the required conditions, which are an absolute sine qua non. Whatever your attractions, upon which I will not expatiate - you know them only too well - I do not feel capable of responding to the desire which you do me the honour of conceiving for me. Nature (the wretch! ) would remain deaf to my appeals. And, as they say, you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

  (Just for the record.) The act which you have in mind would be an immense disappointment to you, especially after the way you have worked yourself up to it. You have no idea what these apish antics are like. A love-scene overheard through a partition sounds like a session at the dentist's. I don't know whether you have ever heard the things a woman murmurs when she gives herself. No? Well, it's a pity, because you would have become a Carmelite there and then. (But let's be fair; I ought to add "... and what a man says when he's trying to pick up a woman?' Surely not, because you would have shot yourself long since.)

  I must also put you on your guard against your belief in the efficacy of desire and will-power. You know my views on the ineptitude of women. One example of this seems to me to be their faith in the power of persistence. No doubt there are men with whom it works. But I belong to the opposite species. And I tell you: no, never!

  Come now, be brave! Please believe that I am wholeheartedly with you in your affliction. But anyway, why be so set on me when the world is full of gentlemen with multifarious assets whom you could make supremely happy? You beat against me like a bird against the window of a lighthouse. You will not break this window. You will break yourself against it, and you will fall to the ground. Good-bye, dear Mademoiselle. I hope I can still count on your friendship, with no ill-feelings. You know I am determined to be forgiven everything.

  Sincerely yours,

  C.

  p.s. - You did not put enough stamps on your last letter. It is the fourth time at least that this has happened, and it's inevitable with the packed envelopes you send me. So I have to pay exorbitant surcharges. You should buy yourself some scales.

  to M. Armand Pailhès

  Toulouse

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  2 May 1927

  ... Another letter from poor Andrée, offering herself right, left and centre. She loves me so much I'm amazed she hasn't yet murdered me. But let her try! She'll get a hot reception. I'm not so easy to get rid of. And I would leap at the opportunity getting rid of her. I don't blame her. I understand her and pity her. She once wrote to me: 'To understand is to love. If I understand you so well, it's because I love you.' Well, I understand her and I don't love her. I'm profoundly indifferent to her; even the thought of making her suffer gives me no pleasure. Which is why I will not give her her two months of love. Or a week of love ('charity week'). Or a night of love. Not even 'an hour with'. [The reference is to a well-known book entitled Une heure avec …. published in the 1920's - a collection of interviews with famous people (Translator's note).]

  I wish you had read the letter I wrote her! Not wishing to give the poor girl my reasons, which could all be summed up as follows: 'I will not love you and I will not take you, because I do not love you and I do not want you', I racked my brains to find a way of refusing her without being too wounding.

  This is not the first time I've been in such a jam. As a young man I had to get a doctor friend of mine to tell an over-enthusiastic American lady that the Venus of the streets had not left me unscathed - which was pure invention. Three years ago I was pestered by the Baroness Fléchier, a woman of fifty years and more. One evening, around midnight, at the end of a tête-à-tête which until then, by sheer strength of will, I had managed to maintain on an exalted level, she put her scrawny old arms under my nose and said: 'You're the first man I've entertained at such an hour who hasn't kissed my arms.' In this predicament, I naturally had to concoct some excuse. I was ashamed of the one I had used against the lady from Alabama, so I told her that unfortunately I was not attracted by women. Since I keep my love affairs a dead secret, I thought this might get by. She believed me, or at any rate pretended to, and I, in a fit of good humour at the thought of my let-off, went and overdid it by swearing to her that never in my life had I held a woman in my arms! On this basis we remained good friends.

  I was loth to give either of these excuses to a 'young' girl, and I wrote to Andrée the most unbelievable nonsense. I told her I only liked tall, thin, twenty-year-olds with raven hair, and that they must also be totally inert. And I told her the act of love was apish. Which it is. But it's also something else.

  And to think that it's all so simple! A single spark of desire, and the thing would have happened four years ago. You know my cosmogony? 'In the beginning was Desire.' Yes, and if there's no desire, there's no beginning.... Incidentally, I saw a stunning girl at the Doignys' last night. Such a ravishing little creature! I had noticed her and followed her for a moment last February at the Review Board, where she was escorting a blind man (an orphaned cousin, she will tell me). While everyone else was jabbering away and paralysing me with compliments, she said nothing. To say nothing to me is, as you know, the surest way of 'saying' a lot to me. Simplicity always scores a point with me - especially after 'remarkable' persons of the Andrée type. I guessed from the very first that this child was not very intelligent, because she's too pretty. (You know I've never - never - found the two things together in a woman: intelligence and beauty.) Eventually she addressed a few words to me - banality itself, of the choicest kind. Naturally I couldn't help teasing her.

  'You say you've read me. What have you read of mine, Mademoiselle?'

  She thought ...

  'Let me see.... Ah, yes. Rien que la terre.'

  'Sorry. That's by Morand.'

  She was quite unruffled:

  'I know I've read something of yours. I can't remember either the title or the subject, but I remember liking it.'

  Bravo! But her ordeal was not yet over. I threw her a sombre look:

  'And ... and ... have you any reservations about my art. Mademoiselle?'

  She opened her eyes wide. 'No, you haven't any reservations, have you?' I repeated in an impassioned voice. She shook her head. So all was well.

  And how ravishing she is! A little round head, like a bird's, and perfectly made hands, literally translucent at the fingertips, like onyx. The beauty of these extremities, and of her nails, would suggest that she was of noble blood, which unfortunately
she isn't.

  I contrived to leave with her, and we found ourselves in the avenue de Wagram. Her conversation was as flat as the pavement, and her acidulous voice made a bad impression on me. But I was touched by her little mule's steps as she walked along beside me - I walking like a mountain, and she like a shrub (there's a good pair of similes for you). All the women stared at her - without warmth - and men turned round. And as for me, there was that prompt familiarity which showed that she attracted me. And the old, vulgar vanity of walking beside a pretty girl knowing that one is taken for her lover. 'Yes, but they must realize from the sound of her voice that she's still a virgin.' And that was a bit of a dampener.

  I felt slightly awkward not knowing her name. When you desire a woman whose name you don't know, learning her name is a kind of preliminary sketch for the act of possessing her. The name is already a soul. She is called Solange Dandillot. Sol: ground, and ange: angel - the two extremes, and I'm equally at home with both!

  And she's the granddaughter of a public prosecutor! That alone would have been enough to make me want her.

  She told me a little about her life, with a characteristically French directness, very refreshing after the eternal self-romanticizing of German virgins. I escorted her home to the avenue de Villiers. Good address; that helped to make me love her. (Oh! ...) She tells me she has no girl-friends. And there's nothing better for a girl than to have no girl-friends - except to have no parents. I offered to take her to the Piérards' next week, and she accepted. I wrote at once to the Piérards, simply for the pleasure of writing her name.

  Why am I telling you all this? Because here is an angel who will not get away from me. Her wings are weighted with lead; all one has to do is to leave her to tire herself out. And this is the answer to the divagations of poor Andrée, who spends her time seeking God knows what God knows where. The Andrée story can be summed up in a single phrase, which would make a good title for a light comedy: If only she had been pretty.

  (I put 'angel' in the feminine. And indeed, since angels are pure spirits, I don't see why they are invariably represented in male form, unless it is to satisfy the unacknowledged homosexuality of the human species.)

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  Friday, 4 May

  I once showed a letter of yours to one of my friends who is a graphologist, without telling her who the writer was. 'Beware of this man', she told me. 'He is of the race of serpents.' And it's quite true: you are the masculine serpent in all its hideousness. Another of my friends once swallowed a snake's egg while drinking from a well. The egg hatched in her digestive system, and it was not till long afterwards, when she was X-rayed, that they found she had a snake inside her body. In the same way, I let you into my heart some time ago in all innocence. And now I see the reptile there.

  Treacherous and hard-hearted killer! Oh, no complaints, it's a nice clean job. No blood, nothing compromising. And a wonderful alibi: 'What, me! After all I've done for her! I who even now am "in complete sympathy" with her, I who understand her suffering so well, I who have lavished encouragement and condolence and consolation on her!' Your condolences make me want to slap your face - your charitable advice, your insulting detachment, your disinterestedness, which is nothing more than impotence or sadism. 'Never!' you say. And why? Because I'm thirty years old, because I'm not 'passive', etc., etc. The most squalid street-girl has enjoyed your caresses as she might enjoy those of any other man, whereas a woman for whom you are everything, a woman for whom those caresses would have been the summit of human happiness, not for what she would have received from you (you're not God's gift to women), but for what she would have given you.... The woman of the gutter or the brothel, whom you despise, gets that from you, whilst I, whom you love with your heart, with your kindness.... Your kindness! What does it amount to? The kindness of a man who watches his friend drown without lifting a finger! But it isn't even a question of kindness, but of fairness. Fairness means responding to the love that is offered to you with an equal love.

  'I can only love girls of under twenty-two.' Rubbish! In Fragility, Maurice says to Christine: 'You no longer have the eyes of a girl, but those of a woman. Now there's something behind them' (p. 211). That is not the sort of thing one tosses off idly. One must have felt it. You can only love 'passive, bovine' women? Do you want them made of wood, or stone, or iron, or reinforced concrete? But anyhow you're lying. Remember what you wrote about the Polish girl: 'I love the (physical) pleasure I give her. Even if that were all, it would be enough' (Purple, p. 162). You can only love 'long, thin' persons? That's a good one! Must I remind you of the description of Hélène in Fragility or Lydia in Purple! [A number of quotations from Costals' work, all with the same object of proving his inconsistency, have been omitted here. They occupy two whole pages, back and front, of Andrée's letter (Author's note).] And my 'persistence'? Me, persist! Me, want to intrude on your life, when I spend my own trying to extricate myself from you and you from me; when I have reached the point of longing for you to offend me even more deeply than you have already, so that my wounded pride may assuage the pain of losing you,- when, in exchange for something durable, our friendship, I offer you the means of getting rid of me forever! 'The act which you have in mind would be an immense disappointment to you.' Why? That's a typically masculine idea. Woman excels in enlarging, ennobling everything with her imagination and heart, while man belittles everything with his carping spirit, not to say his natural pettiness. A woman loves more than ever after being physically possessed, especially by the man who initiated her. The opposite is unheard of, if my friends are to be believed. And even if it did turn out to be a disappointment, wouldn't this be infinitely preferable to the slow poison of unfulfilment, which makes it impossible to free yourself from the other person? And even if it did turn out to be distasteful, what a relief to have got it out of one's system at last! No more Costals! Disappointment, I welcome you! Disgust, I welcome you! But of course such a solution would offend your pride. You do not want me, since you cheerfully allow me to disappear from your life, but you want to lose me with all the honours of war. No woman must be allowed to see you as other than a hero. You're afraid of being deglamorized, poor angel. Well, I can tell you that the true hero is the man who dispenses happiness. And if I were to be disgusted by anything, it would not be 'the act of love' with you, it would be your cowardice in avoiding it. My admiration for you has been shaken, for the first time, by your pathetic excuses. Yes indeed, I have nothing but pity and contempt for your miserable affection, which is too lukewarm to assimilate the flesh, for fear of having to cope with its ferments. There's my fertility God! People envy you, and yet your life is mean and shabby - yes, do you realize that? Oh, all those 'superior' men! Impotent parasites! It would serve them right if the common people, the horny-handed sons of toil, cut off their heads - and other parts as well, since they don't know how to use them to give happiness to those who need happiness more than life itself. Ah! why did you not take me if only to humiliate me? You could cure me of a love that is killing me, and you won't! So one must suffer 'nobly', eh? One must be sublime. Monsieur is very strong on sacrifice - the sacrifice of others, of course. 'In any case we'll remain friends, won't we?' In other words: 'It would be the simplest thing in the world for me to give you the happiness you desire. But I do not wish to. Nevertheless I want you to remain in my life, just enough to gratify me without inconveniencing me or complicating my existence. I don't like your face or your body or your appearance; you can give that vulgar part of yourself to whomsover you like. But please, dear Mademoiselle, keep the more ethereal parts exclusively for me. Not to mention (for the record) the right to make you suffer.' Well, I've had enough of heroism. You've cured me of heroism. For life.

  I used to have dreams of a man dominating me, sweeping me off my feet. I chose a conquistador, a solitary prince, a man ten times more masculine, more intelligent, more se
lf-sufficient, more wonderful than anyone else, the man who said in reply to the Catholic interviewer who reproached him with having abused the gift of pleasure: 'Well, what of it! I've rejoiced in God's creation.' To him I would have given my mind, my youth, my virgin body, my lips which have never once been kissed. Him I should have been only too happy to obey. For him I was ready to sacrifice everything, my life, even my honour. I offer him all this, and he will have none of it! I foresaw everything, accepted everything: during, the loss of my peace of mind; afterwards, the wrenching apart, his infidelity, his neglect, my despair, my lost reputation. I foresaw it all, except that my offering might be rejected. I foresaw everything that would happen afterwards: what I did not foresee was that there would be no afterwards. I wanted your embrace, and all I got was your 'kindness' and your pity: either a patronizing and paternal old man, or a capricious, teasing boy. My psychology was that of simple, humble people, who believe that desire is inevitable between a man and a woman who are young and normal and fond of each other. I hadn't thought of the affectations of the upper classes and the 'intellectual élite.' There, you make me talk like a Communist.

  Saturday

  'Never!' Your 'never!' You know, even if you knocked that 'never' into my head like a nail, I should still rebound under the hammer. For if I really believed in that 'never', there would be nothing for it but to lie down and die: there are things one could die of, literally, without much effort; one has only to let oneself go. But I don't believe in it, I can't believe in it. One day you'll suffer, you'll pay the penalty for never in your life having forgone a single desire, not even a passing whim, and for having forced a creature who adores you to forgo a desire that for her was unique, irreplaceable, vital. And when that day comes, Costals, there will be no more 'nevers'. No, I cannot believe that if, one day, I were reduced to crawling at your feet and begging you to give me, not two months, but a single week of illusory happiness, you would refuse me. It's not that in itself it means so very much to me. But to know that it will happen some time, some day. All I ask of you is one week, and then it will be finished forever, if you so wish. During that week I should be capable of burning up my whole life and dying, like Lucifer, in the flames. No, no, no, I cannot believe you will go on refusing me forever. Even if you took me without either love or desire, like a woman you picked up in the street ...