by Paul Morand
A lift, as vast as an operating theatre, let him out at the second floor. He noticed the baby-scales: it was the maternity floor.
In a moment, he was going to see a small bundle with clenched fists that would look like an elderly, red-faced grandfather, and which would be his daughter…
He reflected that this child would come out of the clinic in two weeks’ time, that she would take her proper place in the world, that he would not see her eyes gleam at the sights of all the jewels, just as Aladdin’s lamp gleamed at every wish, that he would not take her to the ball and that she would not be in love with him.
He sat down on a painted metal chair, waiting for the nurse who had gone for dinner to return. He could have entered without being announced, but between him and that door—which many men would have charged through with emotion and haste and with legitimate pride at seeing the gift of creation realized that makes an artist out of every father—between him and Hedwige there was a chasm that he could not bring himself to cross. He gazed at the door level-headedly, with the cool detachment of a yogi. With that cruel lack of curiosity that those who are about to leave this life show towards those who are staying there or entering it, he thought of Hedwige just behind that door, less than ten metres away from him, and he remained seated, not feeling the slightest surge of affection for her, without any emotion, without a trace of that abounding passion that had urged him to go and call on his wife. At Saint-Germain, at the Mas Vieux, she had been for him—the most frenzied, the most anxious of men—a symbol of peace of mind. Now he had found a more perfect peace of mind away from her and without her. Death is more soothing than the most sedative of partners.
Hedwige was no longer necessary to him.
*
Behind the door, a child’s cry. From the other side of life someone was calling.
Pierre could barely hear the call; he was like a dead man who, through his tombstone, deep in a forgotten cemetery, could hear the cock crow.
“My seed has germinated,” he said to himself, “and I am prolonging myself…”
For one last time he almost felt himself living as he did before, that is to say urging himself on, but it was more a vague memory than the reflex itself. He stood up and took a step on the polished linoleum. The newborn baby was still wailing. It was a very tiny human bleat.
“She already has her own song,” he thought.
He pressed his ear against the padded wax-cloth material. He could hardly hear the child any more. He was already on the dark bank of a river, and on the far side he imagined a tiny creature with a large head, with the body of a tadpole and bones that were still soft, who was waving at him, giving him a very vague wave that was neither a farewell nor a hello or a “come back”; just the sort of wave you might give if you were allowed only one, one simple wave of recognition, as if to say: “I’m here, I’ve arrived, you can go away and not worry.”
Pierre took no further step forward. He did not open the door. His hand lay motionless on the door handle. He listened again, but he could hear nothing apart from breathing as regular as the human tick-tock of the heart of this same child that he had once listened to through her mother’s body.
“I feel very calm,” he said. “Now there’s a little watch that Hedwige will not throw out of the window.”
The nurse must have forgotten him. Pierre had forgotten his own existence: it was a very long way behind him. He had done his time. His heroic frailty no longer urged him onwards, but now drew him backwards. It seemed to him that he had already left this earth, which he could still see, but without it belonging to him any more.
The man in a hurry had reached the foothills of eternity.
He hesitated a further moment in front of the white door. Should he go in?
“What’s the point…”
He shrugged his shoulders, turned around and went back downstairs.
THE END
Paris, November 1940—March 1941
Notes
1 The École Nationale des Chartes is one of France’s prestigious grandes écoles. It provides training for librarians and archivists.
2 A mocking reference to Madame de Sévigné and the tone of her letters to her daughter, who married the Comte de Grignan.
3 A pioneer of French aviation (1901–36) whose plane crashed mysteriously off the coast of Dakar.
4 The best-known auction house in Paris.
5 A graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique.
6 ‘Silent cloisters, monastery vaults/ It is you, dark caverns, you, who know how to love.’ (Alfred de Musset.)
7 An allusion to the typically southern hero of Alphonse Daudet’s burlesque novel, Tartarin de Tarascon and its sequels.
8 Precursors of the Guides Michelin, the Guides Joanne were a series of guidebooks named after their creator, Adolphe Joanne. After 1919 they became known as the Guides bleus.
9 Untranslatable pun. In French à l’arrêt means “stationary”, whereas être aux arrêts means “to be under arrest”.
10 In French the word coureur can mean “runner”, but also “womanizer”.
AN ART OF LIVING
A LETTER TO PAUL MORAND
FROM A CLOSE FRIEND
From Lettres de château by Michel Déon (Gallimard, 2009)
After a freezing winter, the heatwave of summer 1976 came like a second omen. Who was to blame? The gods? We had fired them. The politicians? They were on holiday and, in any case, they turned out to be the most surprised of all. The press was not yet riding its climate hobbyhorse, which it desperately depends upon for survival. It was not a matter of climate change or of planetary disaster, but of those people dying from indifference, some frozen, others wilting or starving. By printing two-column headlines on their front pages, newspapers were certainly able to exaggerate the prospect of a world reduced to a ball of ice or a burning desert. An elderly man is not averse to contemplating the notion of this kind of devastation.
In 1976 Paul Morand was eighty-eight years old, my own age, which today, in 2008, may perhaps draw me closer to him, not that we were ever very far apart, in fact. In one sense, we share the same curiosity: how much time is there left?
Five years previously he had published Venices, bringing his work to a close, leaving behind odds and ends in his bottom drawer, but resolved solely to maintain his Journal inutile [his “pointless diary”, as he himself called it], which stopped on the 10th of April 1976 with his replies to questions posed by a women’s magazine:
ELLE: “What do you think of love today?”
I: “It’s the age of the caveman.”
ELLE: “What will follow it?”
I: “The age of the barrack room (Mao, Brezhnev).”*
In May 1976, we were expecting him in Ireland. He would be travelling with Claude Gallimard, whose firm published both of us. On transferring flights at Heathrow, where the plane for Shannon was delayed, the departure board announced a shuttle flight leaving for Jersey, a place he did not know. He gave Claude the slip and jumped aboard. It was to be the final flourish of a traveller who behaved as though he were being pursued by the Devil.
We know what happened next: Brittany, his wandering around in the Mini Cooper sports car (Paris to Vevey in six-and-a-half hours), from Les Hayes to Bourdonné, from Brittany to Switzerland, from the Château de l’Aile to avenue Charles-Floquet and the emptiness of the vast apartment where everything reminded him of his wife Hélène. Heat discourages one’s determination, including the will to go on living. Ever since her death, surrounded by friends though he was, his life had been beset by grief. On the evening of the 22nd of July, the hostile or merciful hand of death gripped him by the throat. He still had enough strength to be driven to the Hôpital Necker, where he died on the 23rd.
We had, of course, been sorry about his volte-face at Heathrow, while at the same time we understood his reasons. As far as Ireland was concerned, an article about hunting in La Revue des voyages and a short story, ‘Bug O’Shea’, had said a
great deal.
For him, there remained the Unknown: Jersey.
Up until his last breath, this nomad would reject a French cemetery. His family was buried in a grave in Yerres.† The prospect of finding himself—should we say “waking up?”—in some confused mass, in serried ranks, among the tombs of a large city and having “enemies or strangers” roaming around appalled him. It is understandable. In Trieste, he had chosen “a sort of forgotten pendulum above the Adriatic ogive”, the funerary monument to Hélène’s family. She was already buried there.
He was delighted to be accepted in this refuge even though he risked being regarded as an intruder:
“It is,” he wrote, “a noble stone pyramid, six metres high, a piece of Italian eloquence, above which an angel twice as tall as a human opens a black marble door to the afterlife, as thick as that of an empty safe.”
At the same time as he changed burial places, he changed dogmas:
“I shall be watched over by the Orthodox faith towards which Venice has led me, a religion of joyful stillness that continues to speak the language of the Gospels.”
He was not frightened of death. He dreamt of it as though it were another life:
“Perhaps there are kindred souls who wait for the deceased and greet them with cries of joy, like newborn babies, on the other side of life…” (1930)
It is true that he did not envisage this final resting place without a few luxuries or liberties. He was born into a well-to-do middle-class background—his family was “radical”—that society so well depicted by Gide or Martin du Gard. At the age of eighteen, after a flirtation with Marxism at a time when it could still be considered chic, he was induced away by the influence of Hélène and that disillusionment which awaits all the world’s great “seers”.
“Would anyone,” he noted sadly, “wish to take responsibility for my suicide or for doing my work?”
One of his last letters illustrates the tone of a correspondence that never became bogged down in generalizations:
FROM P.M. TO M.D:
11th November 1975
Thank you, cher Michel, for your letter of the 25th which arrived the day after a small stir caused by Castries’ speech. He spoke of “a Gaullist gathering… a disparate hotchpotch”. Debré almost left the Coupole when Maurice Schumann was admitted…
FROM M.D. TO P.M.,
THIRTY-THREE YEARS LA TER:
March 2008
Cher Paul, there is nothing to stop one from replying to the same letter twice. The first reply is probably lost. The second rounds it off many years later. If I dare respond to your “cher Michel” with “cher Paul” after addressing you goodness knows how many times with the traditional “cher ami” it’s because we are the same age at last: eighty-eight. The years in between have slipped away in the sands of time. Wisely, Paul, you would not have stopped growing older and I would never have caught you up and so at about this time we would be celebrating your 120th birthday. This is also the day that I dare to use your first name. A step not taken lightly. From Venice, in 1974, you complained: “In Paris there’s no longer any difference between the pavement and the road: at parties I lose myself among so many first names…”
They would lose themselves in the company of Cocteau who, to hear him talking about his circle of friends, lived in a kindergarten filled with Loulous, Jeannots, Francettes, Zizis, Dédés… I forget, having failed to ask him, which infantile names he used for Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Picasso or perhaps… Einstein.
I notice you have begun to use the familiar tu form of address. As a respectful friend I should not display too much humility, even though I find it hard to use tu myself, but anyway… let’s try. Your time clock stopped at eighty-eight years. Mine also stands at eighty-eight. We are therefore on a relatively equal footing. It’s worth pointing out that this number eight has clung to you since your birth. In 1988, you would have reached a century. Reduced to ashes, you have remained tremendously fruitful. I should have made a note of everything that has been published: new editions, unpublished work, updated material, correspondence, preparations for a Pléiade edition, and the Journal inutile. You have probably never been so much in the public eye since you left us. The volumes of my Morand collection bristle with yellow bookmarks. If I pick up any of your books at random, one of these bookmarks unveils a sentence that catches the eye:
“I should like to die at the age of eighty-seven, thus a further two years of reasonable life, although without much interest.”
The trouble is that one doesn’t make up one’s mind about anything apart from considering suicide as a cowardly but comfortable solution. In this context, who, from the age of five, has not wanted to hang himself time and again, to bleed himself dry or to drown? Our most enduring sorrows stem from childhood. The rest of existence is spent either defying them or rectifying ruins. Oh, I know, remorse, regret and alarm signals blight our later years, but I can see, in your case—apart from brief confessions in which everything is played down—some wonderfully ribald stories: “… sperm still abundant”.
Life spoilt you. Even the little games at the Académie amused you. Having taken your seat much later than me, you didn’t have time to become blasé or even get irritated. Elected in 1968, you died in 1976, barely eight years later (still that dreaded eight) whereas I accrued thirty years of attendance beneath the Coupole, from 1978 to 2008, in the eighth fauteuil.‡ Yet another eight, a sign of fate that should not be overlooked. Of those who took their seats with you, there are only four survivors: Druon, Ormesson, Lévi-Strauss, Marceau.§ The secret plotting and the political-literary manoeuvring that went on did not have time to tarnish your satisfaction, following two rebuffs, at being one of the forty. Hélène cared about the Académie as much as you did, if not more. Beneath the aura of the Immortel, there is a ferocious struggle for seats at the table. There are certainly the beginnings of many violations of protocol, and hostesses no longer know by heart the dates of election which the hierarchy determined. You did not serve as a young Protocol Attaché in London (1917) without soon understanding the sensitivity of a milieu that frequently has no other proof of its existence on earth. A photograph of you, probably taken in London, shows you in uniform: white silk trousers, shoes with buckles, tailored frock coat. A visiting card is clipped to it: “Paul Morand, Attaché au Protocole” and, below, in your own handwriting: “What a pretentious young man!”
I never enquired about your behaviour during the sessions at the Académie, at the entrance to the hall and on the way out. Did you maintain the traditional silence of the “newcomer” for a year and only speak when you were asked? Did you, at a doorway, allow Jules Romains or Guéhenno to pass first? They loathed you and led a fairly spiteful campaign against your election. The letter which I partially quoted—the rest will come at the end—refers to a brief episode in the guerrilla warfare that our colleagues waged. In his response to the speech made by Maurice Schumann (I should say his “thanks”, according to our rules) the duc de Castries could not stop himself making a cutting remark about the spokesman for Radio-Londres during the war. It was true to tradition and the malicious Castries did not miss his opportunity.
One imagines you being rather discreet, adopting a mounting hardness of hearing out of reticence unless, as Ramón Fernandez suspected in an article in La NRF (1941): “One senses a kind of timidity about Morand, which explains a good deal.”
Wherever you happen to be, your first “timid” reflex is to discover how to get out of the trap. At the Académie this can be somewhat complicated unless one is struck off, a rare event over almost four centuries. Ancient traditions protect us from Supreme Power just as Supreme Power protects us from the rules of the Kings’ Courts. A pity that the Académie should suffer from the vices of democracy over its elections. Your friend and protector, Philippe Berthelot, under whose direction you started out at the Quai d’Orsay during the First World War, said that “democracy is the right of fleas to devour lions”.
I
’ve been dipping into Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (1916-1917), that contemptuous indictment of one of the myths of our time, a myth that has unleashed so many terrible wars and buried entire civilizations. Your pessimism is reassuring. In this diary, maintained so methodically when a hectic life left you with little time to sleep, your mind was quick to seize the core of the matter: the confusion of a nation involved in the first of the great massacres of the twentieth century which was governed by men who behaved as though they were running an electoral campaign. We remain in the wings, the main stage is obscured. Pot-bellied, superfluous generals pass through, at times covered in laurels, at others treated as codgers and fools.
Where are you during this tragedy? While a charnel house is being constructed at Verdun, you are at the Medrano Circus watching an act in which performing geese do a Spanish dance. The Ministry hasn’t sent you there, that Ministry in which you are the perfect civil servant, skilfully organizing your free time. At lunchtime or dinner the chances are that you can be spotted at the Ritz, the Crillon, at La Pérouse or Maxim’s. Wealthy and often titled ladies, already in possession of highly secret decisions made by the Cabinet who sat that very morning, hold open table. Marcel Proust joins you for the pudding course. Rationing isn’t much of a problem. On the two days a week without meat, you console yourself with lobster and fish. If there’s no white wine, you drink champagne. A young and extremely rich Romanian girl, a princess moreover through her first marriage, entertains a great deal and is invited on other days to join the inner circle. Her shrill, peremptory voice is not frightened of coming out with outrageous remarks. Some of her utterances seem to you Heaven-sent: “A man who is not unfaithful to his wife is not a man.”