The Girls

by Henri de Montherlant

  The fact that I find it charming ought to make me feel that I'm a cad. Am I a cad? Brunet, at any rate, pays me compliments: 'Don't you think it's terrific to have a pater like you?' In fact, he's amazed: 'Why are you so nice?'

  The thing is that there are some people I love and some I don't. That sounds too simple. But it's the key to it all.

  No, the heart is not affected, nor the flesh, but something is. Whence comes this obscure and passionate desire to please her? If only I could hear a tremor in her voice ...

  Mademoiselle Dandillot did not write a 'nice letter'. She telephoned. The gist of her reply was: 'I must confess that I didn't really understand your letter. But I like you very much. So why don't we meet again?' They arranged to go to a concert. Costals chose the most expensive in Paris, because when one goes out with a woman it does not matter whether a thing is good or bad, but only that it should cost a great deal of money.

  The entry of the female chorus conjured up a vision of lady prisoners at the gates of Saint-Lazare: ancient, deformed, sinister, incredibly frumpish. Then came the musicians, squat little fellows with handkerchiefs tucked into their necks like diners: Froggy for ever! [ In English in the original (Translator's note).] The efforts of these poor wretches to look like artists (long hair down their necks, locks falling over their temples) were enough to bring tears to one's eyes. Sitting on metal garden chairs in an unbelievable church-hall décor - squalid 'foliage' and peeling 'pilasters' - they offered a spectacle which seemed so enchanting to some of the audience that they examined it through opera-glasses. [Need I point out that this chapter is a sort of leg-pull written by someone who allows himself an occasional flight of fancy, and that only those without a sense of humour could take offence at it ? One can caricature what one loves all the more sharply the more one loves it. The things I have written or could have written about Algeria and Spain! Sympathy with music-lovers, gratitude towards musicians : such being my sincere feelings, I can allow myself to cut a few capers. And I seem to remember that in some of my other books I have spoken of music (church music, Russian, Spanish and Arab music, etc.) with a seriousness and enthusiasm which should, if necessary, excuse these pages (Author's note).]

  'If music softens manners', said Costals, 'it doesn't ennoble faces. There are about sixty musicians there, so I realize they can't all be expected to have genius written all over their faces. But why don't they give them masks, as in the theatre of antiquity, or hide them in a pit as at Bayreuth?'

  Monsieur was very fastidious. However, Solange seemed to approve. But he felt that she was in a mood to approve of everything he said. He cast his eyes over the audience, and the extraordinary ugliness of these men and women, the squalid, grotesque and antiquated décor of the hall, made him look away. Literally repelled, his eyes swivelled up to the ceiling, in the hope of seeing the forms of a nobler humanity painted there. But on the ceiling too there was nothing but fussily decorated gilt plaster, blackened with dirt as though by factory smoke. It was obvious that generations had breathed in this hall. If Costals had not been with Solange, he would have left at once: it was almost more than he could bear.

  Soon, the lights were switched on and platform and auditorium were brilliantly illuminated. It was a monstrous idea; both, in fact, should have been plunged in darkness.

  As there was some delay in starting, people began to grow impatient and to drum their feet. But after a few seconds it died down. Then there was another little outburst, equally short-lived. Odd little gusts of bad temper in this crowd, odd because so brief. Even an outburst of patriotism would have lasted a few seconds longer.

  At last the conductor lowered his baton and all the people on the platform began simultaneously to make a noise.

  As the musicians frenziedly wielded their bows it seemed to Costals that he could smell the lady-violinists' armpits, and he was moved by this; it was the best part of the show, he thought.

  Solange, sitting sideways, had moved closer to him. He stroked her smooth, clear neck. He noticed that she had brought her face close to his, as thought to enter his aura. Little islands of skin showed here and there through her blouse, like sand-banks in a white salt flat. The features of her face that he found unattractive he saw as emergency exits through which he could escape should the occasion arise, or as ambiguous clauses in a contract: that rather heavy chin would one day allow him to leave her with a light heart. He kissed the nape of her neck; she did not flinch (that little-girl odour of her hair!) And his blood stirred like foliage as his hand traced, through her dress, her suspenders and her long thighs. He was surprised that such a respectable girl allowed her thighs to be stroked in public. He had not realized that already she wanted anything he wanted.

  'I think there's something ... how shall I put it? oppressive about that first movement (of the symphony),' said Mile Dandillot, who was indeed oppressed, but for other reasons. 'Don't you?'

  'I don't think anything.... Look here, tell me honestly, do you like music?' he asked after a moment with a suspicious look.

  She raised her eyebrows as if to say: 'So so....' Then she said:

  'What I don't like is church music.'

  'Ah!' he thought, 'how unaffected she is! The delightful thing about her is that she has no interest in anything. So she doesn't try to dazzle you with specialized knowledge. And also that she hasn't an idea in her head, which for a woman, is the surest way of not having wrong ones.'

  He put his arm around her. She was leaning right over now, almost lying on him. Pretending to pick something up from the floor, he kissed her body, scenting the rubbery odour of her suspender-belt through her skirt. From time to time he pressed his face against the nape of her neck and kept it there, as though to absorb, slowly, everything this woman had to give. 'No', he told himself delightedly, 'never has anyone behaved as badly as this with a woman in public!' He had always enjoyed being self-contradictory, and it pleased him to think that if he had seen another couple behaving in this way, he would have found it difficult to restrain himself from calling out to them: 'I say, what are hotels for?'

  Leaning back a little, he saw behind Solange's back the young woman in the seat next to her; she was sitting well back in her seat, listening with her mouth half-open and her eyes closed. She was not pretty, but Costals desired her: (1) because he found it appropriate that, at the very moment he was caressing one young woman for the first time, he should desire another; (2) because she appeared to be asleep and this inevitably aroused in him the idea of taking advantage of her sleep; and (3) because it struck him that in order to experience such ecstasy from something as insipid as this music, she must be mentally deranged, and since he only liked simple, healthy girls like Solange there was something agreeable about wanting a deranged woman.

  Suddenly the young woman flung her head back in a wild gesture, like the caracara bird when it has finished its call, the very picture of sensual delight. It was obvious that one of those sounds had penetrated to the most sensitive point of her being.

  So Costals stretched his arm behind Solange's seat and placed his hand on the back of the other seat in such a way that the other woman's shoulder leaned against it. But the gentle pressure he imparted to it produced no reaction from the young woman, who was completely engrossed in her semiquavers. He gave up. And in any case, since these contortions gave him cramp in his arm, the game was not worth the candle. Anyone foolish enough to imagine that all this was just a try-on, a sly and underhanded sacristan's trick, will be disconcerted to know that: (1) Costals really wanted to embark on a serious adventure with the unknown woman, to arrange a meeting with her, and (2) to do so without attracting Solange's attention (for example by passing a note to the unknown woman behind Solange's back) would have been excellent sport, like one of those feats at the circus during which the band stops, and therefore not at all the work of a sacristan but rather of an archangel.

  The noise from the platform ceased and there was some applause, accompanied by demonstrations of hat
red on the part of a few members of the audience against those who were applauding.

  Thereafter the music took a new turn from which it was clear that this was the real classical thing.

  'Well, do you like this!' Costals asked Solange.

  'I don't mind it.'

  'You don't ... Splendid! Absolutely splendid!'

  'You don't understand,' she said, a bit nettled. 'The cubist music they were playing before this gave me the creeps. But this I don't mind.'

  'I can see you don't care two hoots for it,' said Costals, 'and that's as it should be. You're a good child.'

  'But I do care!' said Solange, with the woman's genius for squandering her advantage.

  'No, no,' said Costals, chivalrous as ever, 'You don't care two hoots.' He was interrupted by a chorus of 'Ssh!'

  Suddenly the most terrible cries rang out on the platform. It was as though a woman, at the very instant of giving birth, learned that she had not only lost all her money but that her lover had abandoned her. On hearing these yelps, Costals screwed up his face and instinctively tried to block his ears, but the hall exploded in a thunder of cheers. Such profound disagreements bring home to a man that a society is no longer for him. Costals remembered the truly 'immortal' pages in La Nouvelle Héloïse on the Frenchman's idea of music. 'They can appreciate no other effects but vocal outbursts; they are sensitive only to noise,' writes Rousseau.

  'I don't think women are made for singing,' said Solange. 'Could that be profound?' the writer wondered. 'But 'what is profundity? A chamber pot is profound, too.'

  Raucous voices (young people's?) were shouting 'Encore!' and people were still clapping: public manifestations of admiration in Europe are more or less what one would expect from the savages of Oceania. Three or four times the singers returned to take a bow. And Costals thought: 'Poor fellows!' The conductor, who was an obvious charlatan (for which reason he was admired, especially by the women), left the platform and returned several times, doubtless in order to receive several rations of applause. These re-entries were exactly like those of a clown. And yet the entire audience was in the seventh heaven.

  Thereafter, as though to cure everyone's eardrums, the genii of music, or rather the bank clerks, played very softly: it might have been a clyster-pipe band. There were even moments when, literally, not a sound could be heard. These moments were magnificent.

  Costals looked round the audience. A third of it was made up of people who spontaneously enjoyed the noise they heard; another third of people who enjoyed it only through an intellectual effort, remembering everything they had heard and read about each piece; the remaining third consisting of people who felt nothing, but absolutely nothing. All of them, however, adopted the most elegant poses in order to receive this manna. Pig-faced men with eye-glasses pretended that the slightest whisper in the hall spoiled their ecstasy. Pig-faced men in spectacles bent down towards their brats (for six-year-old children were to be seen in the audience, evidently brought there as a punishment for some grave misdemeanour) to draw their attention to some sacrosanct passage so that they should know once and for all that that was where they ought to feel moved. A number of women, like Solange's neighbour, considered it unseemly to do otherwise than keep their eyes closed. In unanimous mutual mimicry these people aped one another's earnest expressions, while from the platform the miasma of sound continued inexhaustibly to spread.

  They're depraved,' said Costals, casting a look of reprobation round the hall. 'Apart from the simpletons - for the donkey must have his bran. [An untranslatable pun here. The French has son, which = 'sound' or 'bran' (Translator's note).] At all events, an unhealthy place, and I wouldn't like to take the responsibility of chaperoning you here any longer. Shall we go?'

  'Yes.'

  Always that 'yes'! Had he said to her: 'Let's stay', or 'Come to my flat', or 'Let's go to Kamchatka', it seemed to him that her answer would have been the same: 'Yes.' And when he repeated it to himself with the same intonation she used, something stirred in his heart, like a bird in its nest.

  So they left this temple of collective auto-suggestion. Costals remembered that when he was twelve years old his grandmother had taken him to another temple of the same sort. They were doing Le Malade imaginaire. When it came to the scene in which the actors pursue each other into the auditorium, the old lady, who from the beginning had shown signs of impatience, got up and said: 'Come on, let's go. It's too stupid.' An unforgettable impression it had made, on a child who was already only too inclined to judge for himself. There was a family in which received ideas cut no ice.

  He could have taken a taxi, but preferred to see her home on foot: they both needed time to recover. He was so confident of obtaining whatever he wanted from her that he thought it advisable to keep something to look forward to: what, after all, would be left once he had taken her? Besides, for him it was a matter of principle that a self-respecting man should let a few opportunities slip. Accustomed to success in everything, he took pride in loading the dice against himself.

  Not far from her house he stopped her underneath a street- lamp and stood in front of her, gripping her arms. Assuming no doubt that he was about to kiss her, she took a few steps backwards into the shadow - out of shyness or modesty. He drew her towards him; her arms hung limp, and she did not lift her face. As he bent down to kiss her on the mouth, she suddenly let her head fall so low that Costals' lips brushed the fringe of her hair. Putting a finger under her chin, he lifted her head and kissed her on the forehead; she remained quite still. Feeling a little dampened, he walked on, and she followed him. He had to force himself a bit in order to sound friendly as he asked: 'Do you want to go to the Bois after dinner on Friday?' Calmly, but with an eager expression on her face, she agreed. 'Your nose is shiny,' he told her. 'Powder it.'

  As soon as Costals had turned away from her after saying good-bye, Mademoiselle Dandillot, instead of following him with her eyes until he had disappeared, which would have been the recognized thing to do, pressed the button on the outer door and climbed the stairway, the lift being out of order. As soon as she began the ascent, she had a painful intuition that she would be unable to reach the fourth floor, on which she lived, without something happening which she dreaded but could not define. She went up gripping the banister with one hand while the other kept contact with the wall, against which she scraped her hand-bag, tearing the leather on a nail. She reached the door of her flat, like an exhausted swimmer reaching a buoy, opened it, went into her bedroom, and sat down on her bed. 'What's the matter with me?' she said out loud, making a face. A late tram rattled past below; she winced and said, again out loud: 'Oh, those trams!' then winced again on hearing a motor-horn. Then she thought she had left the electric light on, not only in the hall but even in the rooms where she had not been; she went to see. By now her whole body was shot through with the sort of vibration that shakes a steamer when it pitches heavily and the propeller revolves outside the water. She lay down, her hands gripping the edges of the mattress, rolled over first to the right and then to the left, like the carcass of a dog being rolled over by the surf. She got up and removed her dress, so impatiently that she forgot to unfasten it and her head got stuck in it. She snatched a magazine from the table and tore it in two, her face still contorted, then tore the pieces in two. 'Am I going to have a fit of hysterics?' A sudden wave of nausea overcame her, and she felt herself turn pale. She went over to the mirror, overcome with an obscure desire to give herself a fright. Then her stomach heaved violently and sent her flying to the wash-stand, where, clutching the basin with one hand and holding her forehead with the other, she vomited.

  When she felt better, she put on her night-dress and lay down on her bed without taking off her shoes. Her love for Costals became confused in her mind with the relief of having vomited. A sentence engraved itself in her head, mysterious and inevitable as an inscription in a phylactery: 'He has given me profound peace.' The whole of her life until these last few days seemed to her like a broad
stretch of landscape, even and serene. Then a shell had fallen. And now the countryside was shattered and transformed, but the calm and the light remained the same. She turned over and stretched herself out on her stomach in a familiar, childish position, burying her fore-arms under the bolster to seek the coolness there, as one buries them in the desert sand, which becomes colder and colder the deeper one goes. She said again: 'He has given me profound peace,' and dropped her shoes off by scraping the heels against the side of the bed. Then she went to the book-shelf, took down the novel Costals had given her, got into bed, put out the light, and lay down still holding the book, which she slid under the sheet, a finger between the pages.

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Thérèse Pantevin

  La Vallée Maurienne

  15 May 1927

  My Beloved,

  I suffer, I am plagued with temptations, I suffer. Yesterday in church, while the priest was reciting the litany of the Blessed Virgin, I interspersed her name with yours. 'Heart most gentle. Heart most mild. Heart most wonderful. Heart without stain.' And I thought to myself that I ought to add: Miserere mei, 'Have pity on me.'

  Have pity on me, Monsieur. I am a poor girl. Pity is the real miracle, not Our Lord's walking on the water. Pity is all-embracing and sufficient to itself. I think it can even dispense with an object.

  Take me in your lap so that I do not die.

  Marie

  Write to me and tell me you have pity on me.

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  Tuesday, 19 May 1927

  Your last letter crossed with mine. It has softened my rancour without reviving my ardour. You have a way of rubbing salt in wounds which you're ostensibly trying to heal.... You're a past master at distilling the sugar and the acid at one and the same time, at simultaneously licking and biting, like a wild animal. Are you by nature fundamentally good, but corrupted by a perverse intellect? Or fundamentally bad, but with enough decency to feel some remorse? Do you play at being good, or do you play at being bad, or do you just play? Perhaps it's a terrible law of nature that the superior man lends but never gives himself. In fact you've written as much: 'A creator who gives himself surrenders himself.' But you take the art of self-withdrawal to the ultimate pitch of refinement. Everything that comes from you is equivocal, double-edged. And the disturbing thing is that the first impression you give is one of simplicity and directness. You pour out poison and medicine in turn, almost simultaneously, but in such a subtle way that one is neither killed by the poison nor cured by the medicine. One remains in an ambiguous state which would be suffering enough in itself even if the elements of suffering were not dominant in it. Before your last letter I sustained myself on the horror I felt for you: for the one before was a masterpiece of pure malice. (Malice, that supreme banality, from a person one has placed above everyone else! And all that time wasted in fighting against one another, when it could be spent fighting side by side!) That horror had something solid about it, which I found almost restful. Your last letter - apart from the postscript, which must be a joke - shows so much understanding that one no longer knows where one is.... My heart goes out to you in spite of myself, as from a little sister to a big brother - that feeling which used to be so familiar to me. You stab me to the heart, yet it is with you that I am tempted to seek refuge. Then one says to oneself: 'If he understands so well, and yet does not lift a finger to save me, he is all the more criminal.' One feels more resentful towards you, and yet one cannot help having a sort of insane confidence in you. One can neither hate you wholeheartedly nor love you wholeheartedly: one adores you in a fog of anger and reproach, one hates you without being absolutely sure that it isn't love. Is that what you wanted, you who appear so passionate but are in fact so much in control of everything you do? Are you a sort of satanic alchemist concocting the feelings you want people to have for you with the same icy indifference as you measure out the feelings you entertain for others? Or is your attitude spontaneous, natural, guileless, unaware? Whatever it is, I don't know what you're like to those who do not love you, but I do know what you're like to those who do. Flagellum amantibus: a scourge to those who love him.