The Thibaults

by Roger Martin Du Gard

  You congratulate me on my earnestness. You are wrong; it is my curse, my evil destiny! I am not like the questing bee who goes to suck the honey from flower to flower. I am like the beetle that installs itself in the bosom of a single rose, in which it lives till the petals close about it and it dies suffocated in that last passionate embrace—the embrace of that one flower singled out from all the rest.

  My devotion to you, my dear, is like that—faithful till death. You are that tender rose which, in the desolation of the earth, has opened its heart to me. In the depths of your loving heart bury my black despair!

  D.

  P.S. You can write to my house without danger during the Easter hols. My mother never interferes with my letters (not that they’re anything very special!).

  I have just finished Zola’s La Débâcle. I can lend it to you. I haven’t yet got over the emotions it produced. It has such wonderful power, such depth! I am going to begin Werther. There, my dear, we have at last the book of books. I have also taken Gyp’s Elle et Lui, but I shall read Werther first.

  D.

  Jacques replied in a severe tone.

  For my friend’s fourteenth birthday.

  In the universe there is a man who by day suffers unspeakable torments and who cannot sleep of nights, who feels in his heart an aching void that sensual pleasure cannot fill and in his head a fearful chaos of his faculties; who in the giddy whirl of pleasure, amongst his gay companions, feels, of a sudden, solitude with dark wings hovering above his heart. In the universe there is a man who hopes for nothing, and fears nothing, who loathes life and has not the strength to leave it; ‘tis HE WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD!!

  P.S. Keep this. You will read it again when you are utterly forsaken and lift your voice in vain amid the darkness.

  J.

  “Have you been working during the hols.?” Daniel asked at the top of another page.

  Jacques’s answer followed:

  I have just completed a poem in the same style as my “Harmodius and Aristogeiton.” It begins rather neatly:

  Hail, Ccesar! Lo, the blue-eyed maid from Gaul

  Dancing for thee the dance of her dear land,

  Like a river-lotus ‘neath the snowy flight of swans.

  A shudder passes through her swaying form.

  Hail, Emperor I … See the huge blade flash

  In the fierce sword-dance of her far-off home… .

  And so on… . Here’s the end:

  Caesar, thou growest pale! Alas, ah, thrice alas!

  Her sword’s jell point has pierced the lovely throat.

  The cup falls jrom her hand, the blue eyes close,

  All her white nakedness is red with blood,

  Red in the pale light of the moon… .

  Beside the great fire flaring on the lakeside

  Ended is the dance

  Of the white warrior maid at Caesar’s feast.

  I call it “The Crimson Offering” and I have a mimed dance to go with it. I would like to dedicate it to the divine Loie Fuller, and for her to dance it at the Olympia. Do you think she’d do it?

  Still, some days ago I took an irrevocable decision to return to the regular metres and rhymed verse of our great classics. (Really, I think I “despised” them because they are more difficult.) I have begun an ode in rhymed stanzas on the martyrdom I spoke to you about. This is the beginning:

  Ode to Father Perboyre, who died a martyr’s death in

  China, Nov. 20, 1839, and was beatified in fanuary 1889.

  Hail, holy priest, at whose most cruel fate

  All the world shuddered through its length and breadthl

  Thee would I sing, to Heaven predestinate,

  And faithful unto death.

  But since yesterday I have come to think that my true vocation will be to write, not poems, but stories and, if I have patience enough, novels. A great theme is fermenting in my mind. Listen!

  A young girl, the daughter of a great artist, born in a studio and herself an artist (that’s to say, rather unstable in character and finding her ideal not in family life but in the cult of Beauty), is loved by a sentimental but bourgeois young man, whom her exotic beauty fascinates. But their love changes to bitter hatred and they part. He then marries a harmless little provincial girl, while she, heartbroken for lost love, plunges into debauchery (or dedicates her genius to God—I don’t yet know which). That’s my idea; what does my friend think of it?

  The great thing, you know, is to produce nothing that’s artificial, but to follow one’s bent. Given the instinct to create, one should regard oneself as having the noblest and finest of missions there can be, a great duty to fulfil. Yes, sincerity is all that matters. Sincerity in all things, always. Ah, how cruelly that thought torments me! A thousand times I have fancied I detected in myself that insincerity of the pseudo-artist, pseudo-genius, of which Maupassant discourses in Sur I’Eau. And my heart grew sick with disgust. O dearest, how I thank God that He has given you to me, and how greatly we shall need each other, so as to know ourselves truly and never fall into illusions about the nature of our genius!

  I adore you and I clasp your hand passionately, as we did this morning, do you remember? With all my being, which is yours, wholeheartedly, passionately!

  Take care! QQ has given us a dirty look. He can’t understand that one may have noble thoughts and pass them on to one’s friend—while he goes mumbling on over his Sallust!!

  J.

  Another letter, almost illegible, seemed to have been dashed down without a pause:

  Amicus amico.

  Too full, my heart is overflowing! What I can capture of the flood, I commit to paper.

  Born to suffer, love, and hope, I hope and love and suffer! The tale of my life can be told in two lines: What makes me live is love, and I have but one love, YOU!

  From my early youth I always felt a need to pour the emotions welling up in my heart into another, into an understanding heart. How many letters did I write in those days to an imaginary person who matched me like a brother! But, alas, it was only my own heart, carried away by its emotion, speaking, or, rather, writing to itself!! Then suddenly God willed that this Ideal should become Flesh, and it took form in You, my love! How did it begin? There is no telling; step by step, I lose myself in a maze of fancies, without ever tracing it to its origin. Could any one ever imagine anything so voluptuous, so sublime as our love?? I seek in vain for comparisons. Beside our great secret everything else turns pale! It’s a sun that warms, enlightens our two lives. But no words can describe it. Written, it is like the photo of a flower.

  That’s enough!

  Perhaps you are in need of help, of hope or consolation, and here I am sending you not words of affection but the sad effusions of a heart that lives only for itself. Forgive me, my love! I cannot write to you otherwise! I am going through a crisis, my heart is more parched than the stones of a dry watercourse. I am so unsure about everything, unsure of myself; can crueller suffering be??

  Scorn me! Write to me no more! Go, love another!! No longer am I worthy of the gift you make me of yourself!

  What irony is in this implacable destiny that urges me … to what goal? To nothingness!!!

  Write to me. If you were lost to me, I should kill myself!

  Tibi eximo, carissime.

  J.

  The Abbé Binot had slipped in between the last pages of the book a note intercepted by the teacher, on the eve of their flight. It consisted of an almost illegible pencilled note from Jacques.

  On all who accuse basely and without proof, on all those persons, shame!

  Shame to them! Woe to them!

  Their machinations are prompted by vile curiosity, they want to nose

  out the secrets of our friendship. What a foul thing to do!

  No sordid truckling to them! We must face out the storm together!

  Death rather than defeat!

  Our love is above calumny and threats! Let us prove it!

  Yours For Life
,

  J.

  VII

  THEY had reached Marseille on Sunday, after midnight. The first flush of their enthusiasm had waned. They had slept, doubled up, on the wooden seats of an ill-lighted carriage, and the noise of turntables and the sudden halt had waked them with a start. They had stepped onto the platform, blinking their eyes, dazed and apprehensive. The glamour had departed.

  The first thing was to find somewhere to sleep. Opposite the station was a white globe of light inscribed “Hotel”; at the uninviting entrance the proprietor was on the watch for custom. Daniel, the more confident of the two, had boldly asked for two beds for the night. Mistrustful on principle, the man put them some questions. They had their story pat. At the Paris station their father had found he had forgotten a trunk, and had missed the train. He would be arriving in the morning, without a doubt, by the first train. The hotel-keeper hemmed and hawed, eyeing the youngsters. At last he opened a register.

  “Write your names there.”

  He addressed Daniel not only because he seemed the older of the two—he looked sixteen—but even more because there was something distinguished in his looks and general demeanour that compelled a certain respect. On entering the hotel he had taken off his hat, not out of timidity but because he had a way of taking off his hat and letting his arm drop to his side—a gesture that seemed to imply: “It isn’t specially for you I’m doing this, but because I believe in observing the customs of polite society.” His dark hair came down to a neat point in the exact centre of his forehead, the skin of which was white as a young girl’s. But there was nothing girlish in the firmly moulded chin, which, though quietly determined in its poise, had no suggestion of aggressiveness. His eyes had countered, without either weakness or bravado, the hotel-keeper’s scrutiny, and he had written without hesitation in the register: “Georges and Maurice Legrand.”

  “The room will be seven francs. We always expect to be paid in advance. The night train gets in at 5:30. I’ll see you’re up in time for it.”

  They did not dare to tell him they were faint with hunger.

  The furniture of the room consisted of two beds, a chair, and a basin. As they entered, a like shyness came over them both—they would have to undress in front of each other! All desire for sleep had fled. To postpone the awkward moment, they sat down on the beds and began checking up their resources. Their joint savings came to one hundred and eighty-eight francs, which they shared equally between them. Jacques, on emptying his pockets, produced a little Corsican dagger, an ocarina, a twenty-five-centime edition of Dante, and, last of all, a rather sticky slab of chocolate, half of which he gave to Daniel. Then they sat on, wondering what next to do. To gain time, Daniel unlaced his shoes; Jacques followed his example. A vague feeling of apprehension made them feel still more embarrassed. At last Daniel made a move.

  “I’ll blow out the candle,” he said.

  When he had done so, they hastily undressed and climbed into bed, without speaking.

  Next morning, before five o’clock, someone started banging loudly on their door. Wraithlike in the pale light of the breaking day, they slipped into their clothes. The proprietor had made some coffee for them, but they refused it for fear of having to talk to him. Hungry and shivering, they visited the station bar.

  By noon they had made a thorough exploration of Marseille. With freedom and the broad daylight, their daring had come back to them. Jacques invested in a note-book in which to record his impressions; now and then he stopped to jot down a phrase, the light of inspiration in his eye. They bought some bread and sausages and, going to the harbour, settled down on a coil of rope in front of stolid, stationary liners and dancing yachts and smacks.

  A sailor told them to get up; he needed the cable they were sitting on—

  Jacques risked a question. Where were those boats going?

  “That depends. Which of em?”

  “That big one.”

  “Her? She’s off to Madagascar.”

  “Really? Shall we see her sail?”

  “No, she ain’t sailing till Thursday next. But if you want to see a liner going out, you’d best come back here this afternoon. The La Fayette there is sailing for Tunis at five.”

  At last they had the information they wanted.

  Daniel, however, pointed out that Tunis was not Algeria.

  “Anyhow it’s Africa,” Jacques said, biting off a mouthful of bread. Squatting against a heap of tarpaulins, with his shock of coarse red hair standing up, like a tuft of autumn grass, from his low forehead; with his angular head and protruding ears, his scraggy neck and queer-shaped little nose that kept on wrinkling, he brought to mind a squirrel nibbling beechnuts.

  Daniel had stopped eating. He turned to Jacques.

  “I say! Supposing we wrote to them from here, before we—!”

  The glance the younger boy flashed at him cut him short.

  “Are you mad?” he spluttered, his mouth half full of bread. “Just for them to have us arrested the moment we land?”

  He scowled furiously at his friend. In the unprepossessing face, which a plentiful crop of freckles did nothing to improve, the blue, harsh, deep-set, imperious eyes had a curiously vivid sheen. Their expression changed so constantly as to make them seem inscrutable. Now earnest, and a moment later gay and mocking; now soft and almost coaxing, they would suddenly go hostile, almost cruel. And then, unexpectedly, they would grow dim with tears; though oftenest they were shrewd and ardent, seemingly incapable of gentleness.

  On the brink of a retort Daniel checked himself. His face expressed a meek submission to Jacques’s outburst and, as if to excuse his last remark, he smiled. He had a special way of smiling: the small, pursed mouth would suddenly open on the left, showing his teeth, in a quaint, twisted grin that lent a charming air of gaiety to the pensive face.

  On such occasions it seemed odd that the tall, mature-minded youngster did not rebel against the ascendancy of his childish friend. His education and experience, the liberty he had enjoyed, gave him an uncontestable advantage over Jacques. Not to mention that at the lycée where they had met Daniel had proved a good pupil, Jacques a slow-coach. Daniel’s nimble wits were always ahead of any demand that was made on them; Jacques, on the other hand, was a poor worker, or rather did not work at all. It was not that his intelligence was at fault. The trouble was that it was directed towards matters that had no connexion with his studies. Some demon of caprice was always prompting him to do the most ridiculous things. He had never been able to resist temptation and seemed quite irresponsible, seemed to follow only the promptings of that inner voice. But the oddest thing was that, though he was at the bottom of his class in most subjects, his fellow-pupils and even the masters could not help feeling a certain interest in him. Among the other youngsters, whose personalities were kept in somnolent abeyance by habit and discipline, among the sedulous masters, whose natural gifts seemed to have gone stale on them, this dunce with the unpromising face but given to outbursts of sudden candour and caprice, who seemed to live in a world of daydreams created by and for himself alone, who launched without a second thought into the most preposterous adventures—this odd little creature, while he thoroughly dismayed them, compelled their tacit admiration.

  Daniel had been among the first to feel the attraction of Jacques’s mind, less developed than his own but so fertile, so lavish of surprises, and so remarkably instructive. Moreover, he too had in him a strain of waywardness, a like inclination towards independence and revolt. As for Jacques, a day-boarder in a Catholic school, the offspring of a family in which religious exercises bulked so largely—it had been for the sheer excitement of another evasion from the narrow life at home that he had gone out of his way to attract the Protestant boy’s attention; for even then Jacques had guessed that Daniel would reveal to him a world far different from his own. But in a few weeks their their comradeship had blazed up into an all-absorbing passion, and in it both had found a welcome relief from the moral solitude from w
hich the two, unconsciously, had been ‘suffering so long. It was a chaste, almost a mystical love, in which the two young souls fused their common yearnings towards the future, and shared all the extravagant and contradictory feelings that can obsess the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy—from a passion for silkworms or secret codes to the most intimate heart-searchings, even to that feverish desire for Life which seemed to intensify with every day they lived through.

  Daniel’s silent smile had calmed Jacques, and now he was munching away again at his bread. The lower part of his face was rather gross: he had the characteristic Thibault jaw, and an over-large mouth, with chapped, lips. But, though ugly, the mouth was expressive and suggested a strong-willed, sensual nature.

  He looked up at his friend. “You’ll see, I know the ropes!” he boasted. “Life’s easy in Tunis. Anybody who applies is taken on for the rice-fields. You can chew betel—it’s delicious. You earn wages right away, and you get all the grub you want—dates and tangerines and so on … and, of course, lots of travelling.”

  “We’ll write to them from there,” Daniel suggested.

  “Perhaps,” Jacques corrected, with a toss of his red poll. “Once we’ve found our feet and they realize we can get on without them.”

  They fell silent. Daniel had finished his meal and was gazing at the big black hulls, the busy scene on the sunlit wharves, and the luminous horizon glimpsed through a forest of masts. He was struggling against himself, trying to fix his mind on what he saw, so as not to think about his mother.