The Conspiracy

by Paul Nizan

  Lieutenant-Colonel de Lesmaes – who sometimes used to summon Simon to his office to question him about the philosophies of China and India, in which he took an interest and whose great names and systems Simon, in order to avoid disappointing his superior, had to invent on the spot – Lieutenant-Colonel de Lesmaes said to him:

  — You see, Simon, your comrades do not understand the need for external marks of respect: the halt at a distance of six feet, or the salute before addressing a superior, strike them as idiotic. But external marks of respect shouldn’t be seen as pointless annoyances. It’s quite obvious that a man’s first reaction would be to kill his officer: a regiment is burdened with a vast quantity of explosive substances, so such impulses must be disciplined by the external marks of respect. Have you never seen an animal caught in a trap? No? It no longer moves, it knows there’s nothing to be done. Standing to attention is a trap, military discipline a civility motivated by caution. There’s no question of prostituting yourself to the men. Discipline means being the boss, and giving that lot the idea that they’re buggered without you . . .

  — You should reread Alain, Sir, said Simon, who was distressed by this philosophy of command.

  He was quite aware that the system eventually won over many of his companions: it was on 1 May that he heard Corporal Palhardy, who was completing his service before returning to his Poitou smithy, declare:

  — What do you expect the workers to do? They’re not armed against us. And with old Papa Chiappe . . . They get taught some respect . . .

  Simon saw his anger and concern as a systematic revolt against the system that gives birth to modern armies. In reality they were keen but unprincipled: the barracks was simply a place where he could not breathe, as though it had been four thousand metres above sea-level, or below the ground. He often used to go and lean on the parapet of the rampart-walk facing the smoky district of Saint-Ouen, thinking in despair how in the evening he would have to return to the office where he slept beside the regimental flag and boxes full of war trophies, helmets, German colours and braid torn from the sleeves of dead men; opposite a window rent by the violet flashes of Paris; hearing, when he could not sleep, the North trains whistle. He thought only of escape, to which he devoted the same skill as those old re-enlisted soldiers who used to be billeted for a few weeks at the Clignancourt barracks between two terms in the colonies: long enough to tell lurid tales from Cochinchina and the Lebanon and find, among the black ruts of the periphery or in the streets that climb towards the town hall of the 18th arrondissement, women whom they still had the heart to argue over with the pimps of Rue du Poteau. Simon had quickly learnt to imitate fairly accurately all the signatures needed to get him past the guardhouse or the little gate in the bastion where the sergeants’ families lived. That was nothing: life does not consist in a few midnight passes, which do not prevent you from relapsing into the nightmares that barracks and prisons manufacture all night long. Simon was really proud of himself on the day when he simulated a hepatic attack so well that the regimental doctor sent him to spend three weeks in the confined atmosphere of the fever wards and classic grey monastery gardens of the Val-de-Grâce. Among his chance companions, he really liked only the absent without leave, the deserters, those whose Army file bore the fine black-and-red arabesques of punishments for habitual misconduct, the insolent soldiers whose unauthorized absences expired an hour before becoming desertion. Anything seemed to him better than this blind servitude, this feverish barrack-room brooding: hospital, prison, suicide. Nothing discomfits the military authorities more than suicide, whereby a man craftily escapes all the Army’s supernatural threats. But nothing seemed more natural to Simon, who as long as he lived would see as the most heartrending symbol of order, and the noblest image of courage, the plain wooden coffin of a peasant from the Vendée who had hanged himself one night with his tie, after sixty hours’ confinement to barracks, from the banister on the top landing of the stairs in C Block: the officers were dreadfully put out, the men prowled about in front of the open door to the showers which were serving as a mortuary, the colonel’s staff captain recalled the time when a forceful colonel would make all his men march past a swine of a suicide’s corpse, exposed on the stable dungheap.

  As he had hoped, at the Port-Royal barracks Simon found a few freedoms. In this barracks, an astonishing, easygoing disorder reigned, maintained by the to-ings and fro-ings of colonial arrivals and departures, which allowed many prisoners to escape. Those on secondment like Simon, since the sentries scarcely knew them, used to enter and leave their quarters without anyone dreaming of asking them to account for themselves.

  The offices of Area 2 of the Paris Garrison were installed on the first floor of a main building facing onto Rue de Lourcine: it was an isolated refuge, where two secretaries lived – Simon and a private named Dietrich, whom he saw only rarely. Each morning, a company sergeant-major would come and smoke a cigarette in the office. Two or three times a week, a major would pay a brief visit to the men under his command, whose names he had forgotten, although he knew vaguely that one of them had been a student and had been recommended by the high command of the colonial regiments.

  Sergeant-Major Giudici, while awaiting his retirement, which would come soon what with his years of campaigning and his semi-campaigns at sea between Indochina and Marseilles, carried on an existence rich in complicated intrigues, centred upon a number of whores from Rue Pascal and the Carrefour des Gobelins.

  He liked Simon, because he thought he could rely more upon men who had a mysterious education, and whose unknown concerns and civilian world were no doubt too far distant from his own for them to take a notion to intervene dangerously in his affairs: he did not imagine that a young bourgeois could ever become a rival, or a spy.

  The discretionary power of military command, the baseness that habitually attaches itself to the sovereign exercise of absolute power, and the certainty of always being believed before an inferior, generally induce NCOs to look upon their men as servants and to force them into waiting upon their persons: the relationship of subordination which discipline establishes with a view to war turns in peacetime into a relationship of servility. A barracks is scarcely anything but a great assemblage of employers and servants – no feature of military life is more feudal than this. A strange game of social compensation and revenge takes place: a sergeant, who in civilian life has been unable to achieve anything, avenges himself for many former humiliations by ordering a young lawyer or engineer to sweep his room or empty his pail.

  Sergeant-Major Giudici, who had always had underlings, promptly found it natural to entrust Simon with errands to the sombre bars on the streets that cross Boulevard de Port-Royal beneath iron bridges, linking the Mouffetard to the Broca and Santé neighbourhoods.

  Simon at first endured with extreme impatience the obligation to act as the sentimental messenger and intermediary of a non-commissioned officer who was basically nothing but a pimp. He then told himself, recalling certain sergeants he had known at Clignancourt, that a procurer is at least better than an invert or a brute, and that this complicity would give him the right to demand of the Sergeant-Major, with the proper degree of insolence, certain favours and the right to lie low when he felt like it. Besides, Giudici had a kind of lazy affability which his smile, his Bastia accent and his colonial lies endowed with considerable charm. Simon ended by taking pleasure in his brief passages through a frivolous, turbulent and lax universe, of which he had hitherto had no suspicion and which never yielded up to him its true secrets. He would have been no intellectual if he had not been sensitive to all changes of scene and capable of romanticizing them: he was naively astonished to find himself in Rue Pascal, just as he would have marvelled to see himself in China or Peru.

  So Simon would go into some bar, which would usually be painted in melancholy colours, and would ask at the counter whether Madame Jeanne or Madame Lucie was there: when she was ab
sent, he would say that he would call again; when she was there, he would deliver a message from Giudici. The Sergeant-Major’s lady friends would welcome him with the mechanical familiarity common to whores and soldiers.

  — You’re Sergeant-Major Giudici’s orderly? he would be asked.

  — Not exactly, Simon would reply. Just one of his men.

  — You won’t leave without a little drop of something . . .

  He would sip drinks that filled him with the greatest mistrust while Madame Jeanne, or Madame Lucie, read the letter. Sometimes the recipient would exclaim:

  — Oh, the swine! the swine! You can go and tell your sarge from me that he can just bugger off, and he’d better not set foot in here again! Not ever!

  Some days, everything would go off peacefully and Simon would sit down and listen patiently, overcome by the paralysis that affects you when you are having a shoeshine or a haircut, to the rambling confidences of the Luxemburger girl from Rue Saint-Jacques or the mulatto girl from Rue des Feuillantines, as if these stories had been a kind of sweet, purring message. The women had tangled lives and an extraordinarily pernickety concern for their dignity, their amour propre, for absurd points of honour, like points of honour in the days of the Hundred Years War.

  One evening, a young woman brought Simon back in a taxi to the barrack gates, all the way from the café in the 12th opposite the 46th Infantry barracks where he had gone to meet her. It was April, night was beginning to fall, the air was sharp and blue, it was pretty cold for the time of year. Simon, who was growing numb in that spring coolness, said nothing because those exuberant women intimidated him sufficiently for him to be convinced he was not attracted by them. Suddenly he felt a burning hand alight on his thigh and fumble at the buttons of his uniform breeches; he made to push it away, but a rather husky voice said:

  — Just relax, my darling . . . It’ll warm you up. The driver can’t see a thing – as you see, he’s got no rear-view mirror . . .

  Simon released the wrist he was grasping and surrendered himself, till he was shaken by a pleasure whose violence shattered him and gave him ideas about the skill of whores that he had always regarded as mythical. In the darkness, he then kissed an invisible mouth filled with flowing, silvery saliva; he touched the tip of a flattened breast, a shaven sex of horrifying but fiery nakedness. The taxi steered a lengthy course over the icy waters of the evening to the winking lights of Lourcine. When he climbed out, the young woman, whose name it seemed was Gladys, told him to wipe the lipstick from his mouth.

  Simon saw her again. When he left her, on the threshold of her room full of calendars, with its velvet clown cushions on the bed, Gladys would put packets of cigarettes into his greatcoat pockets and tell him that she loved him, using expressions of disgusting obscenity from which he derived a kind of pride.

  These dealings no doubt degraded him, but everything seemed to him justified by the freedom he had to roam aimlessly through the streets of the Left Bank; to go and have a lie down in town, in a lonely hotel room inhabited in the morning by a whore who left in it her aroma of heliotrope and soap, sunk in a private sleep that no bugle tone, no second call, was likely to disturb. He was living in a half-dream that bore no relation to his former or his future life; and when he thought about his Chartes dissertation on Charles V, he mostly felt like laughing.

  IX

  A few days after 1 May, Rosenthal, who was trembling with anger at the thought of the four thousand five hundred preventive arrests which the commissioner of police had organized that year, sent Simon an express letter asking him to come and see him, as though he were in a hurry to retaliate against the forcible measures of the police. André went to put on some civilian clothes he had entrusted to Gladys, then made his way to Avenue Mozart. He would have been ashamed to show himself in the uniform of a colonial regiment anywhere except between the Observatory and the Jardin des Plantes.

  Bernard asked Simon how things were going with him and – since it almost always happens that young men lie rather less to their friends than to their parents and are prone to boast to them about things they would hide from their fathers – Simon told him. It had been understood between them for years that they told each other everything. Or almost everything.

  It made a lengthy recital – the two barracks, the sergeant-majors, the whores, and the story of Gladys and the taxi from the 12th. These confidences, imparted in Rosenthal’s bedroom in front of the Lenin, the Chirico and the Descartes, suddenly appeared remarkable. Bernard grew annoyed: he had a moralistic side to him and found it hard to endure any of his friends enjoying a relaxed existence. Valuing nothing more highly than fullness and tension, he held the opinion that a man must be uneasy. Finally he upbraided Simon for seeming not to realize the baseness of his life, and told him that this indifference was worse than the enjoyment itself. Simon replied that he realized it perfectly well, but could not care less:

  — My only pleasure consists in casting off all restraint, he said. This military life turns my very bones to jelly. I feel myself dissolving altogether. Luckily, I’ve discovered how to turn an idiotic bondage, from which I could get relief only by dint of constant guile and an extremely wearisome presence of mind, into a slightly dreary long vacation . . . My lack of restraint will be only temporary.

  — No, said Rosenthal, whose one pleasure was giving advice and warnings to distraught or heedless people, writing MENE TEKEL PERES on every wall. No, this situation can’t continue. It’s high time to steel yourself. Do you want some tea?

  Simon replied that he was thirsty and Rosenthal rang. A chambermaid knocked at the door and came in. Bernard gave her instructions with an embarrassed politeness: few practical problems struck him as harder to resolve than his relations with his parents’ servants, whom he did not know what to call. Simon, who no longer doubted himself since the adventure with Gladys, looked at the chambermaid. During this brief scene, Rosenthal had time to tell himself that the moral neglect to which Simon had surrendered might perhaps favour his plans, and that an abandoned man must in fact wish to take a hold on himself. The chambermaid went out.

  — Have you ever wondered, said Rosenthal, why I insisted on your going to Port-Royal?

  — Not at all, answered Simon. I regarded your insistence as a favour, for which I’m grateful to you. I’d put in a request, but you know me, I’d have done nothing more about it.

  — I never do favours, said Bernard.

  — Sometimes, said Simon gently. In spite of yourself.

  Rosenthal explained to Simon the metaphysical causes, the significance and the mechanics of the Conspiracy. Simon listened, and found all this audacity exceedingly futile. So when Bernard declared that he was reserving him a role in the very heart of the affair – and was, in effect, charging him with inaugurating the Conspiracy – André felt that he had no desire to act alone for a revolution which, as described by Rosenthal, appeared quite mythical and did not excite him. He answered that he did not want to get mixed up in the venture. Rosenthal then resorted to feminine arguments, which appealed to friendship, loyalty and memories and defied Simon to refuse. Simon continued to jib, adding that the whole business struck him as childish and utterly absurd; but after an hour he gave in, when Rosenthal had shifted the debate onto the plane of insult:

  — If you don’t want to follow us for the sake of either principle or friendship, that means you’re afraid. Are you a coward then?

  Telling himself that he could not bear the idea of being discredited in Bernard’s eyes, Simon took the plunge. Rosenthal, who was delighted less by seeing his Idea start to be achieved and propel someone into real actions than by having once again imposed one of his wishes, reassured his friend:

  — In any case, he said, what can happen to you? The risks are infinitesimal.

  — Well, all right, Simon answered, we shall see.

  They agreed upon a number
of practical ways of transmitting the information that Simon would obtain: Simon was to go and mail his letters in a neighbourhood far away from Port-Royal, and to type the addresses . . . He stood up to leave.

  — Now you’ve got an aim in life, said Rosenthal.

  — Oh! an aim . . . replied Simon. Let’s not exaggerate. Scarcely a pretext, at best . . .

  The defence plan for Paris, Area 2, was locked up in a little deal cupboard, rather like the lockers in school dormitories in which pupils keep their shirts and brushes and the letters sent by their mothers and sisters, which they pretend have been sent by some woman. The familiar character of this grey-painted box fixed to the chocolate-coloured wall robbed of all seriousness the confidential documents which it was supposed to protect. A brass padlock with a four-letter combination was the door’s sole defence: this childish fastening was fairly indicative of the nature of the military world’s secrets.

  After his visit to Avenue Mozart Simon waited another three days, telling himself that the exploits which Rosenthal’s friendship required of him were decidedly a bit theatrical for his taste. Since he was after all his father’s son, he thought modestly about his chances of success and about his future, destroyed perhaps if he were caught; about prison and about his court-martial: he saw himself arrested, interrogated, caught up in the inexplicable machinery of military justice and trials from which he would never emerge. Yet he had no doubt that this illegal undertaking was legitimate and even noble, even though it struck him as uncertain in its results and unworthy of exciting a man in the way that it did Rosenthal. ‘After all, it’s only an intellectual pastime,’ he told himself, to reassure himself and convince himself that nothing would happen. He was true to his years: he was unable to believe that the actions of youth might have any consequences.