The White Paper

by Jean Cocteau

  My worry lest my father overhear the commotion and enter prevented me from understanding right away. Then the truth hove through the clouds and, concealing my distress, I herded the madwoman towards the entry, explaining to her that for my part I'd not been robbed of anything, that H*** was simply my friend, that I knew nothing whatsoever of the liaison she'd just got through sketching so clamorously.

  "What!" she continued at the top of her lungs, "what! You are unaware that that child worships me and spends most of every night in my arms? He comes in from Versailles and returns there before dawn! I've had horrible operations! My belly is one mass of scars! Well, there's something you ought to know about those scars. He kisses them and lays his cheek upon them in order to go to sleep."

  It goes without saying that this visit plunged me into an ocean of dread. I received telegrams.

  "Hurrah for Marseille!" and "Leaving for Tunis."

  The return was terrible. H*** thought he was in for the kind of scolding a child gets after playing a prank. I requested Marcel to leave us alone. Then I threw Miss R*** in his face. He laughed it off. I told him it wasn't funny. He denied everything. I shoved him. He denied. I gave him a poke, he admitted everything, and I cut loose. My pain maddened me. I lashed out like a brute. I grabbed him by the ears and beat his head against the wall. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. In a flash I recovered my senses. Tears streaming down my face, I tried to kiss that poor mauled face of his. But I encountered nothing but light blue eyes down over which lids closed dolorously.

  I fell upon my knees in one corner of the room. A scene like that taxes one's profoundest resources. One breaks down like

  a puppet whose strings have been snipped.

  All of a sudden I felt a hand on my shoulder. I raised my head and saw my victim gaze at me, sink to the floor, kiss my fingers, my knees, choke, sputter, groan: "Forgive me, forgive me. I am your slave. Do what you like with me."

  There was a month of truce. A weary truce, a blessed calm after the storm. We resembled those water-logged dahlias which hang their heads after a heavy rain. H*** didn't look well. He was wan, drawn, and often remained at Versailles.

  Whereas I feel no awkwardness in talking about sexual relations, some modesty checks me whenever I think to describe the torments I am capable of experiencing. I'll devote a few lines to them and be done with it. Love ravages me. Even when calm, I tremble lest this calm cease, and the trembling anxiety is great enough to prevent me from tasting any sweetness in calm. The least hitch wrecks everything. Impossible not to have constantly to foresee the worst, to have to cope with its latent threat. One faux pas and I inevitably wind up in a heap on the ground. Waiting is a torture, so is possessing by dint of dreading having taken away from me what I have been given.

  Doubt made me pass sleepless nights in pacing the floor, in lying down on the floor, in wishing the floor would collapse and go on collapsing forever. I made myself the promise not to betray my fears. Immediately I was face to face with H***, I'd start plying him with questions. He kept still. That silence would either touch off my rage or my tears. I accused him of hating me, of wanting to destroy me. He knew only too well that there was no use answering and that, in spite of anything he could say, I'd start in again the next day.

  We were in September. The 12th of November is a date I'll never forget as long as I live. We were to meet at the hotel at six. Entering, the hotel manager stopped me and, visibly embarrassed by what he had to tell me, said that the police had been there and that H***, along with a bulky suitcase, had been taken to headquarters in a car containing the chief of the vice squad and some plainclothesmen. "The police!" I cried. "What for?" I telephoned to influential people. They made enquires and I found out the truth which, a little before eight that evening, a woebegone H***, released after his interrogation, confirmed to me.

  He had been sleeping with a Russian woman who drugged him. Tipped off that a raid was likely, she'd asked him to remove her smoking equipment and supplies to the hotel. Some tough character he'd taken up with and confided in hadn't wasted much time before squealing on him. It was a professional stool-pigeon. Thus, at one fell swoop, I discovered he'd deceived me not once again but twice. He'd tried to bluff it at the police station and, assuring them all that he was used to it, had sat down cross-legged on the floor and smoked during the questioning much to the amazement of the onlookers. By now he was done for. I couldn't reproach him. I begged him to give up drugs. He told me he'd like to, but that he was hooked, done for, that it was too late.

  I received a call the following day from Versailles. He'd spat blood and been rushed to the rue B*** hospital.

  He was in Room 55 on the third floor.

  When I entered he had scarcely enough strength to look around to see who it was. His nose had become slightly thinner, pinched. His dull eyes rested on his waxen hands. When the nurse left and we were by ourselves, he said: "I'm going to tell you my secret.

  "In me there was a woman and there was a man. The woman was yours, and submissive; the man used to rebel against that submissiveness. Women displeased me, but I went after them to give myself a change and to show myself that I was free. The conceited, stupid man in me was the enemy of our love. I am sorry about that. I miss that love. I don't love anyone but you. When I'm all well again, I'll be different. I'll obey you willingly, without rebelling, and I'll do everything I can to make up for the way I've wronged you."

  I couldn't sleep that night either. Towards morning, I dozed off for a few minutes and had a dream.

  I was at the circus with H***. The circus became a restaurant divided into two little rooms. In one of them, at the piano, a singer announced he was going to sing a new song. Its title was the name of a woman who had

  been extremely fashionable in 1900. After his opening remarks this title was an insolence in 1926. Here is the song:

  The salads in Paris

  Go walking in Paris.

  There's even an endive

  And who'd ever believe

  They've got an endive,

  In Paris?

  The magnifying quality of the dream inflated this absurd song into something celestial and extraordinarily funny.

  I woke up. I was still laughing. That laughter seemed to augur well. I'd not have had so ridiculous a dream, I said to myself, if the situation were grave. I'd forgot that the weariness caused by pain sometimes gives rise to ridiculous dreams.

  At the rue B*** hospital I was about to open the door to the room when a nurse came up and, in a cool voice, advised me that "Fifty-five isn't in his room anymore. He's in the chapel."

  Where did I find the strength necessary to turn on my heels and walk down the stairs? In the chapel a woman was praying by a casket. In it was the corpse of my friend.

  How serene it was, the dear face I'd struck! But what difference now could the memory of blows and kisses make to him? He no longer loved his mother, or women, or me, or anyone. For the only thing that interests the dead is death.

  Horribly alone, I rejected all notions of returning to the Church; it would be too easy to employ the Host like an aspirin tablet or to fill up on negative vitamins at the Holy Table, it is too simple to turn our faces towards heaven every time we become disenchanted with things on earth.

  Marriage remained as a last resort. But had I not hoped to marry out of love, I'd have thought it dishonest to dupe a girl.

  At the Sorbonne I'd known a Mademoiselle de S*** whose boyishness had caught my fancy and I'd often told myself that if I were to have to take a wife someday, I'd prefer her to any other. I renewed our acquaintance, frequented the house in Auteuil where she lived with her mother, and we gradually came round to considering marriage a possibility. She liked me. Her mother feared seeing her daughter become

  an old spinster. Our engagement was effortless.

  She had a younger brother whom I didn't know, for he was finishing his studies at a Jesuit college in London. He came home. How had I failed to anticipate this
newest wickedness on the part of a fate which yet persecutes me and which, donning all sorts of guises, masks nothing but an unalterable destiny? What had attracted me to the sister shone like a beacon in the brother. At the very first glance I beheld the drama in its entirety and understood that a mild and peaceful existence was ruled out for me. It was not long before I learned that, on his side, this brother, a good product of the English school, had fallen head over heels in love with me the moment we'd met. That young man adored himself. In loving me he cuckolded himself. We met in secrecy and matters progressed relentlessly to the fatal stage.

  The atmosphere in the house was charged with a vicious electricity. We skillfully camouflaged our crime, but my fiancee's nerves were set on edge by what she scented in the air, and all the more so because she had no suspicion of what was causing the tension. In the end, her brother's love for me moved into a high-gear passion. Could this passion have hidden a secret destructive impulse or need? Maybe so. He hated his sister. He pleaded with me to break our engagement, to take back my plighted word. I did all I could to slow things down. I tried to obtain a relative calm, and succeeded, succeeded simply in delaying the catastrophe.

  One evening when I'd come to pay his sister a visit I heard sounds of weeping on the other side of the door. The poor girl was lying flat on the floor, a handkerchief in her mouth and her hair all askew. Standing in front of her, her brother was shouting: "He's mine! Mine! Mine! Since he's too much of a coward to tell you the truth, you can hear it from me!"

  I couldn't bear that scene. His voice and his eyes were so ferociously cruel that I hit him in the face.

  "Ah," he cried, "you'll always regret having done that," and he retreated to his room.

  While in the midst of trying to bring our victim back to life I heard a shot. I leapt up, dashed to the door of his room, tore it open. Too late. He lay beside a wardrobe. On its mirror, at the height of one's head, one could still make out the oily imprint of a kiss and the moist smudge left by breathing.

  I could no longer live in these surroundings where misfortune and widowhood dogged my footsteps. Suicide was out of the question because of my faith. This faith and the unending trouble of spirit and flesh I'd been in since quitting my religious exercises led me to the idea of a monastery.

  Father X***, whom I consulted for advice, told me that one could not come to these very major decisions in haste, that the rule was very austere and that, for a start, I ought to test my strength by putting in a season of retirement at M*** Abbey. He furnished me with a letter of introduction to the Superior, setting forth the reasons why this retreat I was contemplating was something other than a dilettante's caprice.

  When I reached the Abbey the temperature was hovering just above freezing. The falling snow was changing into freezing rain, the earth into mud. The gatekeeper summoned a monk at whose side I walked in silence under the arcades. I questioned him upon the schedules of the services, and when he replied a shiver ran through me.

  I'd just heard one of those voices which, more surely, more amply than faces or bodies, inform me as to a young man's age and beauty.

  He pushed back his cowl. His profile etched itself against the stone wall. It was the profile of Alfred, of H***, of Rose, of Jeanne, of Dargelos, of Lousy Luck, of Gustave and of the farm-boy.

  I arrived limp before the door to the office of Don Z***.

  Don Z*** greeted me cordially. He already had a letter from Father X*** on his desk. He dismissed the young monk. "Are you aware," he asked, "that our house can offer few comforts and that the rule here is very austere?"

  "My Father," I replied, "I have reasons for believing that, austere as it may be, the rule here is not austere enough for me. I will confine myself to this visit and shall always preserve a fond memory of the welcome I have been shown today."

  Yes, the monastery drove me away like everything else. The only thing left was to leave, to imitate those white Fathers who consume themselves in the desert and for whom love is a pious suicide. But does God allow one to cherish Him in this manner?

  Never mind, I'll leave—and behind me I'll leave this book. If anyone finds it, let him publish it. It may perhaps help to explain that, in exiling myself, I am exiling not a monster but a man society doesn't permit to live since society views as an error one of the mysterious quirks in the way the divine masterpiece operates.

  Instead of taking unto itself the gospel according to Rimbaud: Lo, we are come unto the age of assassins, contemporary youth would have been better advised to have adopted Love is to be reinvented for its motto. Risky experiments—the world accepts them in the realm of art because the world does not take art seriously, but condemns them in life.

  I perfectly well understand that an anthill ideal like the Russians', aiming at the plural, condemns the singular to exist in one of the highest forms. But you aren't going to prevent certain flowers and certain fruits from being inhaled and eaten by the rich alone.

  A social vice makes a vice of my outspokenness. I haven't any more to say, and so I'll go. In France, this vice doesn't lead to the penitentiary, thanks to the longevity of the Code Napoleon and the morals of some magistrate. But I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.