The Girls

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by Henri de Montherlant


  They walked away unsteadily. He was holding her by the wrist. The lights had been turned off in the Bois; they had to go back as far as the Porte Maillot on foot, looking for a taxi. Now he was holding her left breast in the palm of his hand, and he felt it beat, as though it were the heart of creation beating in his palm. He made a few remarks, about the inconvenience of not being able to find a taxi. She made no reply. The impression she gave was of someone in a stupor, under some sort of spell. A little worried by her silence, he kissed her on the nape of the neck, as if to show her he still loved her. A young man called to them from a passing car: 'Not like that! On the mouth!' She did not laugh.

  Still more worried, he asked her: 'What are you thinking about?' She replied: 'About this evening ... ' O little girl!

  At last they hailed a taxi.

  From the avenue des Acacias to the avenue de Villiers, the taxi brought back a dead girl. No sooner was she inside it than she threw back her head. During the quarter of an hour the journey took she said not a single word, her eyes closed, her mouth glued to his, as though it were from there that she drew her breath and if she left it for an instant she would expire. Once, the taxi slowed down and almost stopped under the multi-coloured lights at a crossroads, and a face only a few inches away looked in at them through the rear window. He disengaged himself and brought her little bunched fist to his lips and kissed her nails and fingers. But then she lifted her face a little for him to take once more, and this slight movement was the only sign she gave to prove that she was not unconscious. In the avenue de Villiers he woke her. He said good-bye to her and added: 'I'll telephone you the day after tomorrow.' She got out without saying a word, like a sleepwalker, or like a ghost.

  The taxi drove off. At the first bar that was still open, he said to the driver: 'Would you like a drink?' At the counter, he drank two glasses of white wine. He stopped the taxi before they arrived at his house, to get some air. It seemed to him that the terrestrial globe was rotating far below him, and that he walked stepping from cloud to cloud.

  to Mademoiselle Rachel Guigui

  Paris

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  23 May 1927

  Well, dear Guiguite, this is it: we're going to drop you. We've taken up with an angel of heaven, and we've decided to concentrate on her, being no longer of an age when each one has her share of us but all have us in full. [Paraphrase of a line from Victor Hugo's Feuilles d'automne (Part I) on the subject of mother-love: 'Chacun en a sa part et tous l'ont tout entier.' cf. p. 347 (Translator's note).] We would come to her half-heartedly, our palate would be jaded - and we want to experience the sensation in all its glory. We expected a long night, pierced at last by the dawn of her consent, but this angel was carried off her feet forthwith: we scarcely had time to desire her. It's very serious; physically not perhaps pure gold, but emotionally pure gold, and if we make light of it that is because it's our way. In short, my dear, we are in the heart of the sublime, and since that is a region where you have no place, we will keep you in suspended animation, with your consent, until the day, which cannot be far off, when our angel in her turn will have to clear out: the sublime, alas, cannot be sustained indefinitely. Upon which, we send you our love, together with some cash (provision has been made).

  C.

  p.s. We use the pronoun we because we're accused of being conceited when we say I. It's true, we sounds much more natural - one should have thought of it before.

  Extract from the Diary of Mademoiselle Germaine Rival, Paris

  Tuesday. - My last day here. Beautiful store-house dust that I shall inhale no more, behind these blocked-up, barricaded windows, amid the noise and disorder of crates being feverishly unpacked. And the little wooden staircase with its brass rail, that I shall descend once more but never climb again. It was like a companion-ladder in a ship. When I climbed it, I used to think the house was about to get under way and sail out to sea.

  It was bound to come to this. When I took this job, C. did not reproach me in the least, although he must have been displeased: even when he's paying no attention to me, he wants to feel that I'm within reach. My new job was not likely to be more than a mild inconvenience to him, but the merest shadow of an inconvenience is for him a crushing burden. At the time he simply said to me: 'You won't stay a month. Imagine, a teacher! You're not one of them. They'll find an excuse to fire you.' He was getting at me through my pride. Three days later he became even more insidious: 'When they've thrown you out, I might perhaps take you to Italy.'

  'Is that a promise?'

  'A promise! Does a man like me ever promise anything?'

  It isn't true, he promises all the time, but a man like him rarely keeps his promises. And never apologizes. 'I'm afraid I've changed my mind. You must take me as I am. Anyway, it comes under a statute of limitations.'

  Even without promising, he put the idea of Italy into my head: that was all he wanted. Every time we saw each other he brought it up again: 'If you're sacked, and if we go to Italy, which, mind you, I don't promise....' It was because of that 'if' that I eventually found a pretext and demonstrated with the others. I could have got myself fired for 'professional incompetence' (in other words, sabotage), but I couldn't face that: I, too, must be taken as I am. The motives of the demonstration were debatable. And anyhow I couldn't care less whether L—'s common law sentence was transformed into political expulsion or not. I didn't like L—'s face. Now I've been forced into giving the impression that I'm 'red'. Mummy is heart-broken. 'You who were brought up by the nuns!' and so on.

  In this firm it isn't the manager who represents God for me, it's the cashier in his iron cage: deaf, dumb, blind - God personified. Another woman waiting on one of the benches in the hall, looking for a job, and there's nothing for her. That Renaud girl has just arrived with her narrow shoulders, her little face like a shrivelled lemon. It's hard at first, when you're only sixteen, and not used to it . . . She never stops thinking about her home, her pauper's lodgings, where at least she's not tied down and where she's sheltered from coarseness and abuse. That one over there has something wrong with her machine. She looks at me despairingly, appealing to me to come and help her.

  'I don't know what's wrong, Mademoiselle.'

  'Your driving-belt has slipped. I'll fix it.'

  Now it's Lucienne, the one who says: 'I detest God.' (She'll get over that.)

  'Mademoiselle, I've got a head-ache.'

  'Go out into the yard, and come back in five minutes.'

  'What if the manager sees me?'

  'You can tell him I gave you permission.' She goes off. Then another says: 'Mademoiselle, Lucienne won't come back.' (Even the 'reds' are always sneaking on one another.) I reply: 'Of course, I hadn't expected anything else.' I can't get used to acting the part of a red. To show that I'm on their side, I should have to surrender my authority, but I just can't bring myself to do it.

  (Yes, Andrée Barbot, you can stare at me, my girl. You won't get me to lower my eyes. You may drag a nervous smile out of me, but no more. You see, it's you who've lowered your eyes first. Nasty little beast!)

  The five minutes are up, and Lucienne returns. I know quite well they're afraid of me. And I'm afraid of myself for having come to loathe these poor wretches. But apparently it's essential. 'Regard them as enemies. Be harsh.' They'll be talking for years about the hard-hearted overseer. As miserable as they. Perhaps even more so. Definitely more. But they don't rebel. What a flop, after all the drama! What a lot of 'no's' on the petition! Hardly a single 'yes', and a few signatures without either 'yes' or 'no'. And yet there were a large number of us who voted 'for'. What strikes one about nearly all of them is their lack of courage. Why should they rebel? Not only are they not shocked by tyranny and injustice, they actually like it: what they like is the fact of authority. And they don't like kindness either. If you're not unkind to them, they despise you.

  I work with four men and sixteen women here. When I ask myself how many of them
I shall say goodbye to, I can think of two men and three women. An interesting ratio.

  Perhaps there's a password I don't know which would have made it possible for me to win them over. To be leaving without having discovered it.... To have received no help from anyone.... C., when I spoke to him about it, exploded: 'Me! Secrets of leadership from me! I neither give orders nor take them.' Of course, there's only one thing he wants: to escape.

  Next day. - Worse than anything I had imagined:

  'You know, we won't be seeing each other for a while.'

  He could have told me anything he liked - that he was ill or something. But no, he always has to tell the truth.

  'I've found a marvellous girl. Pure gold! I mustn't dissipate my energies right and left. I must come to her fresh. But when it's all over with her, we'll start again. It will be a matter of six weeks or so.'

  He wanted to give me a thousand francs. His wretched money! I refused.

  'You refuse? Just like an Arab!'

  'What do you mean, like an Arab?'

  'When an Arab is dissatisfied with the amount you give him, he flings it to the ground. And he doesn't pick it up again. But you'll pick up the thousand francs. Because you're French. Because you're a woman. And because you have no reason to refuse it. I do something that annoys you. To make up for it, I do something that pleases you. What could be more reasonable? '

  If he lied, I should feel strong enough to stand up to him.

  But the way he puts things, there's nothing one can say. I didn't even mention Italy.

  In the end I accepted. I shall buy a radio set with the money, and tell Mother I won it in the lottery. It's a 1,450- franc set, but I can get it for a thousand through Pierrette's boy friend. I asked C. to send me some records too, because he knows more about the latest music than I do.

  No sooner had Costals and Solange sat down to dinner in the garden of this bogus 'hostelry' not far from the forest of Montmorency than Costals began to suffer. He hated all their fellow-diners, the men with their 'distinguished' airs ('Dear lady, doesn't this sky remind you of that Canaletto we saw in the gallery at Verona?'), the women with their faces set in a mould of boredom, stupidity and malevolence - all of them eaten up with self-esteem, and never more so, strange to say, than when they were apologizing to one another, all of them entrenched behind the barricades of their private language, their esoteric rites, their conviction of being a race apart, all of them irremediably exiled from everything natural and human, so much so that there were moments when they almost aroused pity, as though they were somehow cursed. There were a hundred and fifty people inside this enclosure, and the only sign of dignity was in the faces of the waiters, and the only sign of purity - a sublime purity - in a white greyhound.

  It was not because they were rich that they disgusted Costals, but because they were so unworthy of their riches. Truly, it was a case of pearls before swine. There was not the slightest hint of envy in him, for the good reason that he himself either had what they had, or could have had it if he wanted it. But it was only by consorting with such people that he could obtain the things a writer of average talent can normally expect in France - honours, employment, 'position'. And he was incapable of consorting with them without feeling a disgust that was so painful to him that it was wiser to avoid occasions for it. As a result it was often said of him in those circles that he was aloof. And he was indeed aloof from 'those circles'.

  There came a moment when his disgust grew so intense that the slightest pretext was enough to turn it into a physical revulsion. Seeing the expression of unbelievable stupidity on the face of one of these women, an expression intended to make it quite clear that she despised her husband (she was trying to look like Marlene Dietrich, and succeeding), Costals pushed his plate away and threw his head back....

  'What's wrong?' asked Solange. 'Do you feel ill?'

  He had turned so pale that she was frightened. He apologized without giving any explanation, and changed his place at the table so that he faced towards the forest and there were no longer any diners within his field of vision. It was not the first time that excessive disgust had caused this sort of revulsion. He had turned pale in the same way one day in the boulevard Saint Michel on seeing a parade of students, all wearing canary-yellow bow ties (a symbol?) and walking along with their arms round each other's shoulders bawling something, behind a placard on which the figure 69 was scrawled. They were escorted by policemen, with one of whom Costals had exchanged a smile of gloomy commiseration; he could not bear to think that these men of the people might suspect him of indulgence towards the demonstrators. How, incidentally, had the policeman managed to smile? In his shoes, Costals thought to himself, forced by the exigencies of the service to accompany these brats of the rich and to watch the obscene mummeries inspired by their idleness and stupidity, he could not have restrained himself from hitting them over the head.

  He had always been surprised by the patience of those who, in 'good families', were charitably referred to as the lower orders. He had always wondered why it was that the humble people of Europe and the natives of the colonies did not hate more. For it was obvious that many of them felt no hatred; and he was touched by this, without understanding why it was. Periods of social peace, he thought, are neither natural nor logical, however agreeable they may be for some people; revolt is the natural order of things. Whatever its excesses and incidental injustices (lamentable though they be) the day of revolt is the day when the situation becomes normal again and therefore satisfying to the mind: the age of miracles is over.

  If Costals had been alone in these surroundings, or with old friends, or with his son, he would have gone to dine with the chauffeurs. Even supposing their language was not particularly fastidious, which was certain to be the case, they at least had an excuse, having had no education, no culture, no leisure. Whereas these people, who were spiritually so impoverished, had had every opportunity. And moreover the chauffeurs were concerned with something other than making a good impression and repeating what they thought it was the smart thing to say.

  From time to time Costals gave Solange a sombre look. It was because of her that he was here. This was the price he had to pay for his liaisons with women, unless they were women of the people - the necessity to take them to vile places, fashionable drawing-rooms, grand hotels, night-clubs, theatres, smart beaches. They knew, of course, that they had to affect to despise these places when they were with him. They repeated what he said about them himself, and went even further. Such splendid indignations. But you had only to see them in these pleasure spots, livening up at once, preening themselves, strutting about, to realize that this was what they loved, this was where they felt most alive - even the nicest and the most decent of them, even the simplest. There was nothing to be done about the equation: woman = chichi. And Costals' past was full of relationships weighed down, not to say poisoned, by the shame he had felt at having to belie himself in order to amuse women by accompanying them in a way of life which he despised. Just as a man, thirty years after having left his adolescence behind, no matter how loving and devoted his parents may have been, associates them first and foremost with infinitesimal grievances - 'They made me spend a year studying law for nothing', or 'They made me wear flannel vests at the height of summer' - in the same way, no matter how much pleasure a woman had given him, Costals could not help thinking: 'The days she made me waste (not to mention the money) doing shameful things! For instance, it's because of her that - I still blush to think of it - I spent a week at Deauville.' For the moment he did not hold it against Solange that he had felt obliged, because he was with her, to dine in a pretentious restaurant, but he carefully put aside this motive for resentment - a generous resentment, so to speak - to take it up again on the day he wanted to break with her.

  Earlier that evening, as they drove through the forest of Montmorency (passing motorists laughed as they saw him kissing her like mad, and Costals laughed back at them in a youthful, plebeian complicit
y he enjoyed), he had said to her: 'After dinner, at the hostelry, supposing I took a room ... would you come up with me for a while?' She had answered 'yes'. Still the same yes! And now their dinner, begun in ill-humour, was coming to an end with a sort of secret melancholy. There were times when he had taken girls in a sort of Jove-like whirlwind which left no room for anything but the glory of rape. At other times, such as now, he felt a twinge of uneasiness at the thought that an act of such cardinal significance in the life of a virtuous woman was bound to have so much less importance for him. And then he thought: 'In an hour's time I shall know how she does it.' Thereafter curiosity would cease to sustain his feelings for her, and he wondered what would become of those feelings once they were left on their own.

 

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