The Conspiracy

by Paul Nizan

  XVI

  Back in Paris, a Paris where none of his friends was there to distract his thoughts from himself and where he would dine tête-à-tête with his father in Avenue Mozart or alone in restaurants, Bernard began to invent a great love.

  Nothing is more dangerous than these times spent in solitude or unfamiliar surroundings – these refuges for the heart. Bernard built systems, analysed his senses and his pride. He never even noticed that he had forgotten everything about Catherine’s face and that she was simply an absence, like a persistent ache: such forgetfulness has never prevented anyone from constructing – around a few symptoms, a few snatches of remembrance and a few wakeful nights – the great fables of love. He did not write a single line to La Vicomté, and Catherine like him remained silent. She was a woman who used to say:

  — I don’t like writing . . . And, besides, I don’t know how . . .

  Bernard was not worried. One has to be twenty to believe in the virtues of such silent interludes, and to convince oneself that courtesy and words are not the food of love.

  So he busied himself with preparing for a new life. He informed his father one evening that he was going to look for a small apartment close to the Latin Quarter, since the year of his agrégation was about to begin and he did not want, as in previous years, to waste a huge amount of time shuttling back and forth between the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale and Avenue Mozart – and there was certainly no question of his deciding to room at Rue d’Ulm. M. Rosenthal winked, did not say no and offered his son the money for his future rent: Bernard accepted the cheque.

  After roaming about for a few days between the Observatory and the river, he found an apartment on the sixth floor of a building on Place Edmond Rostand. Beneath his windows he saw the rolling green billows of the trees in the Luxembourg. He imagined Catherine there with him. He brought workmen in, telling himself that when she returned the apartment would smell dreadfully of paint.

  The summer ended badly: that year, September was the season of storms.

  Bernard would sleep till late. In the evenings he would go and prowl about Paris, reflecting how everything was in suspense and he had absolutely nothing to do except wait for the moment when Catherine would be there – and he would wager his life.

  At around six o’clock, when people had had time to forget entirely Paris’s crystal guises, great copper monuments would start to arise in the sky to the west. The pigeons would hobble down the steps in the Tuileries and the Luxembourg and colourless men with secret obsessions, spinsters, and children encouraged to pity animals so that they would have no pity for men, would continue to throw bread feebly to these repulsive birds. Passers-by, sticky with sweat, would lift their heads and sigh with an air of lassitude and impatience. At last, towards evening, the storms would break: open windows would bang in violent draughts, curtains would fly out and flap like captive ghosts, showers of glass would rain down and the swallows would twitter as they wheeled, skimming the earth. Huddled for shelter in doorways, the passers-by would shake themselves and gaze up like dogs at the curdled sky and the loosed arrows of the rain. Everyone would feel that desire to laugh, run and shout which takes hold of men confronted by great atmospheric phenomena. Anguish would evaporate and a limpid sky be reborn.

  But the sky used to contain such ample reserves of anger that fresh clouds would form in the depths of the stifling night. Across the city, sleepers would awake with a start from their first sleep. Not a leaf would be stirring on the trees by now. Along the streets, after midnight, there would still be people sitting on their doorsteps, who would spread their thighs and open their mouths like fish. Atop the canals, on their barges, the watermen would sleep stretched out on the deck.

  Bernard, suffocating in this Paris of impatience, had the impression it would never end. He came within an ace of yielding, taking the train to Blangy: Catherine was only a few hours away from him. However, he managed to be faithful to his self-imposed constraints and did not budge.

  Catherine came back at last, much earlier than he had expected: Claude, who was bored at La Vicomté, had decided to take a fortnight’s winter holiday at Davos and cut short his summer holiday. The bags were unpacked in Avenue Mozart and Avenue de Villiers. Bernard telephoned Catherine to say he wished first to see her elsewhere than beneath the family roof: he asked her to meet him at eleven the following morning, in front of the Triumphal Arch in the Place du Carrousel.

  Bernard did not like the dresses and hats women were beginning to wear in that late autumn season. As he paced along the Carrousel balustrades, he told himself Catherine was perhaps going to have a hat that would crush her hair, or a dress that would make him die of shame: the least flaw could ruin this meeting. He looked from afar at all the women arriving, and thought he recognized Catherine in each of them. At last she appeared: she emerged from the gloomy entrance to the Carrousel on the Palais-Royal side, wearing a pink-and-black crêpe-de-Chine dress and holding her hat in her hand. Her dress fell free, at each step revealing the firm, glossy surface of her legs. Bernard told himself she was more ravishing than ever, more sparkling than he had dared hope. He walked towards her as though her reappearance were a kind of miracle: a victory over time, distance and the great pitiless flywheels of life. All his plans, his hopes, his projects for immediately organizing his existence with her were forgotten. He thought he had been mad to live, like all men, only for long waits: not to be capable of an artless presence in the world.

  ‘I want nothing more,’ he told himself. ‘Everything’s being settled precisely at this very moment, when I’m about to touch Catherine’s bare hand. She’s taking off her gloves, she’s quickening her pace, she’s smiling – I’ve never known such happiness . . .’

  There is no happiness like that of people who expect nothing, who have no more future because everything has been called into question: like people who love one another on the eve of a battle, or of death. Bernard was making this discovery for the first time.

  — Where are we going? asked Catherine. My whole day is yours.

  It was the first day of autumn. The weather was wonderful, the kind of weather that made you want to get away from Paris, where it was pleasant to live only in the evening when the moon’s last quarters rose over the city. Catherine said she would like to go to Trianon. They took the tram near the Louvre and lunched at Versailles, beside the gravel incline that slopes up to the gates of the château. Later, after walking across the park – down avenues that vanished amid great architectural compositions of stone, statuary and expanses of water, and along weathered walls covered with the last roses of September – they stretched out behind Trianon in a wilderness of tall weeds, upon a world of cool velvet: wild tufts idly flattened by vague gusts of wind from the open country, from the plains of Saint-Cyr and Saint-Nom. Suddenly Bernard said to Catherine:

  — My autumn rose . . .

  She raised herself on one elbow and began to laugh:

  — That’s the first word of love I’ve ever heard from you, she said. Do you realize what’s happening?

  Bernard kissed her, thinking that he was completely stupid and engaged in a dialogue in abominably bad taste – but that he was still perfectly happy. Hours later when they stood up, they noticed two men who were looking at them from some distance away: one was holding his bicycle propped against him, and Bernard and Catherine heard him exclaim:

  — Pity they didn’t go all the way!

  Catherine blushed. Bernard, who was trembling a little after all those hours of happiness and half-pleasure, told her:

  — I wish there’d been ten thousand people – the crowd you get on a Sunday when the fountains are working!

  — We’re terribly imprudent, said-Catherine.

  This happiness lasted only for a day. Bernard at once lapsed back into his ambitions of absolute conquest. He had had time to prepare his home and his heart: Catherine fou
nd a lover full of tricks.

  Bernard, who had practised on himself a great deal during the September storms, tried out on Catherine his dramatization of weakness and leisure, and the great fable of the woman who takes the warrior’s mind off things – the fable few women can resist.

  ‘She must pity me,’ he said to himself, ‘believe that I’m overwhelmed by work and anguish, doomed to an early death, engaged in a struggle, destined for the violent fate of revolutions. War itself may break out tomorrow.’

  He let himself appear weakened, said to Catherine:

  — You’re my idleness . . .

  He believed himself sincere then, released from a hardness that had been only a disguise – but he was merely natural. He did not perceive that nothing is more artificial than sincerity, and that nature is the realm of mimicry: of the infinite lies of plants and insects. He was simply seeking the image of himself that might finally, out of all possible variants, enchain Catherine for ever and persuade her to face scandal.

  But everything slid off this over-smooth woman, including the very idea which undoes so many women, that she is necessary to a life – that she can save a man who loves her.

  — How pessimistic you are, she said, stroking his hair.

  — I’m not pessimistic, he replied. I simply think everything is a threat to flashes of happiness. Joy is the most tragic thing in the world, it always springs from misfortune overcome.

  Catherine never said to him what he was waiting for her to say: ‘I don’t want you to die, I shall pluck you from misfortune, I shall remain beside you to protect you.’

  Nothing would bind her for ever. No great role tied her down. She was merely a perpetual reluctance, a tender refusal. Everything was a failure.

  Bernard sometimes wondered if she doubted him and doubted what he would become; if she feared she would never find in him the reasons for pride that women need. He told her one day:

  — You really are a woman, Catherine. Old like all women, cautious, horrible! You never judge a man on his promises, only on his successes . . . How is it you can’t understand that I’m living only for a great future which is still entirely unknown to me?

  — You’re like a child, Catherine replied, who tells one, with tears in its eyes: ‘When I grow up, you’ll see what I can do.’ But I’m neither old nor cautious, I love you just as you are . . .

  The trouble was that Catherine had never thought about these things; she did not understand a word of what Bernard was saying to her; her responses were dictated only by the easy grace young women possess. Bernard was simply speaking to a deaf person. He never suspected that Catherine was a perfect match, as they say, for Claude.

  XVII

  — It’s going to be a nice little awakening for him, said one of the superintendents.

  — He’ll have nothing to complain about, answered a detective-sergeant. He’ll have had more sleep than us.

  The policemen laughed.

  They were in high spirits because they were about to arrest a man they had been looking for, after all, ever since the Public Prosecutor’s office issued a charge right back on 5 July. Also because the weather was still summery, though they were well into October. At least the weather would have been summery if there had not been one of those mists over the Seine valley which herald the frosts and lurid sunrises of winter; but that year they were living in the strange suspension of death which recurs every three or four years, during which the trees retain their leafy crowns until some gust of wind or frosty night that suddenly strips away all the cargoes from their branches.

  The plain-clothes policemen down from Paris and the Saint-Germain gendarmes watched the sleeping house. The drivers of the Prefecture vehicles had climbed down from their seats. The officer commanding the investigation said it was time and walked towards the gate. He rang the bell. Since the boundless silence of morning reigned all about them, every noise being entirely muffled over the river by the wreaths of fog, the ringing reverberated to quite a distance across the countryside. The commander pushed open the gate and a spray of fine droplets fell on him from the leaves of the wisteria. The superintendents followed him. On the first floor, a window opened. Régnier leant out, running his fingers through his hair.

  — Police, said the commander.

  — No! Régnier said.

  The door opened. The commander and the superintendents disappeared.

  The detectives and gendarmes continued to watch the house, guessing at a great to-do within.

  — It’s all going to go off nicely, said one of the detectives.

  — Political arrests, said one of his companions, aren’t always easy to bring off; but once you’ve got your man, they’re usually peaceful enough.

  They had to wait. Perhaps twenty-five minutes or half an hour. The policemen smoked and looked at the landscape, trying to make out in the distance Le Vésinet, Bezons, Sannois, Rueil and Nanterre. The weather brightened, the fog lifted.

  — They’re taking long enough in there, said a gendarme.

  — The gentleman’s taking his bath, a detective replied. Or he’s learning the Writ of Summons by heart.

  Eventually the door of the house opened. The prisoner appeared first, the commander followed; then the two superintendents. From the door to the gate, a cobbled path ran between the two borders. They started out on the round cemented stones. The commander was walking behind the prisoner and, since he considered it humiliating not to be walking at least abreast of him, he effected a little change of step and plunged into the soft earth of a geranium-bed. The prisoner was much taller than the commander. Régnier ran down the last three steps of the perron: he had slipped on an overcoat over his pyjamas, and across his shoulders thrown the plaid for which he had asked his wife on the day of Rosenthal’s visit. He reached the cars and caught the prisoner’s arm.

  — I shall never forgive myself for this arrest, he said.

  — Oh, it’s not your fault at all, my dear fellow, the other replied. It’s not the end of the world. And he started to laugh, not restraining his guffaws.

  — Get in, said a superintendent.

  Finally a detective emerged from the house with the suitcase of the man they had just arrested. He came and threw it into the car at the feet of the commander, who told him to be careful. The cars drove off in the direction of Saint-Germain.

  — Where are we going? asked the prisoner. If it’s not a violation of professional secrecy.

  — Versailles first, the Public Prosecutor’s office in Paris next, and ending up at Rue de la Santé.

  — It’ll be a very pleasant trip today, said the prisoner. Do you like the country?

  — No, said the policeman.

  — And do you believe in the conspiracy for which you’re arresting me? asked Régnier’s guest.

  — If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t be here, said the commander.

  — You amaze me, said the prisoner.

  In front of the gate, on the road, Régnier was by now just a little man clumsily waving his arm.

  The commander was quite pleased with himself. He was telling himself that the indictment issued by the Public Prosecutor’s office to the investigating magistrate on 5 July had contained one hundred and twenty-two names, and the supplementary indictment of 18 October thirty-two; and that, after Vaillant-Couturier’s arrest at Voulangis on 14 September and Monmousseau’s in Place Clichy on the fifteenth, only the man he could hear breathing gently at his side – who was Carré, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, charged with conspiring against the external security of the State – had remained at liberty. Carré sighed and said:

  — One never gets up early enough in the morning . . .

  The cars vanished into the forest of Saint-Germain.

  It had been not quite a month that Carré had been livin
g in François Régnier’s house, where he had arrived one morning with his suitcase to ask Régnier if he would have him: Régnier had simply told him to move in. So ready a response can surprise only those who know nothing about male relationships. Among the bonds that bind men, those of war are strong. Régnier could ask Carré:

  — Do you remember 20 October ’17, in front of Perthes-lès-Hurlus?

  Carré would answer that he remembered. With Régnier he enjoyed a less close relationship than with his party comrades – party loyalties are more powerful than the loyalties of death and blood – but he nevertheless knew he could ask of Régnier what a person has the right to demand from a man he has witnessed in a war.

  Carré had been wandering all over France since the July arrests and his entry into the difficult but exhilarating world of clandestinity. He had thought of Régnier by chance, on a street in Marseilles, when he saw in a shop window his Somme companion’s latest book, at a moment when the party was asking him to return to the Paris region. Since his arrival, Carré and Régnier – who had seen each other seven or eight times since ’18 – had renewed their acquaintance, by talking: they were men who had things to talk about.

  Communism for Carré was not just the form he had given to his action, but the very consciousness he had of himself and his life. His meeting with Régnier gave him the opportunity to express personal values so deep that he no more thought of calling them into question than he did his heartbeats. Nothing disturbed Régnier more deeply than this coincidence between a politics and a destiny – this harmony he despaired of ever achieving between history and the individual. He asked questions.

  These conversations took place under apple trees in the garden, when Carré had completed his day’s work: at a time when he was relaxed, when he smoked and talked, continually running his hand through the beard he had allowed to grow and in which grey hairs were already visible. Régnier asked him: