The Age of Reason

by Jean-Paul Sartre

  ‘Look here, Ivich, we’ve got time to turn round. In any case, you’re not ploughed yet.’

  Ivich shrugged her shoulders, and Mathieu went on briskly: ‘But even if you were, you wouldn’t be done for. You might, for instance, go home for two months, and I’ll have a look round, I’m sure to find something.’

  He spoke with an air of genial conviction, but he had no hope: even if he got her a job, she would get herself sacked at the end of a week.

  ‘Two months at Laon,’ said Ivich angrily. ‘It’s quite clear you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s... it’s intolerable.’

  ‘But you would have spent your vacations there, in any case.’

  ‘Yes, but what sort of welcome will they give me now?’

  She fell silent. He looked at her without saying a word: she wore her usual sallow morning face, the face of all her mornings. The night seemed to have glided over her. ‘Nothing leaves a mark on her,’ he thought He could not help saying: ‘You haven’t put up your hair.’

  ‘As you see,’ said Ivich, curtly.

  ‘You promised last evening that you would,’ said he, rather irritably.

  ‘I was tight,’ she said: and she added forcibly, as though to impress herself upon him: ‘I was completely tight.’

  ‘You didn’t look so very tight when you promised.’

  ‘Well, well,’ she said, impatiently, ‘and what then? People make very odd promises.’

  Mathieu did not answer. He had a sense of being plied with a succession of urgent questions: How to find four thousand francs before the evening? How to get Ivich to Paris next year? What attitude to adopt towards Marcelle now? He hadn’t the time to compose his mind, to return to the queries that had formed the basis of his thoughts since the previous day: Who am I? What have I done with my life? As he turned his head to shake off this fresh anxiety he saw in the distance the tall, hesitant silhouette of Boris, who appeared to be looking for them outside.

  ‘There’s Boris,’ he said with vexation. And, seized with an unpleasant suspicion, he said, ‘Did you tell him to come?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Ivich, utterly taken aback. ‘I was going to meet him at twelve o’clock, because... because he was spending the night with Lola. And look at his face!’

  Boris had caught sight of them. He came towards them. His eyes were wide and staring, and his complexion livid. He smiled.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Mathieu.

  Boris lifted two fingers towards his temple in his usual salutation, but could not make the gesture. He dropped his two hands on the table and began to sway to and fro on his heels without uttering a word. He was still smiling.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Ivich. ‘You look like Frankenstein.’

  ‘Lola is dead,’ said Boris.

  He was staring stupidly into vacancy. Mathieu sat for a moment or two, dumbfounded, then a sense of shocked amazement came upon him.

  ‘What on earth...’

  He looked at Boris: it was plainly no use to question him then and there. He gripped him by the arm, and forced him to sit down beside Ivich. Boris repeated mechanically: ‘Lola is dead.’

  Ivich gazed wide-eyed at her brother. She had edged away from him, as though she feared his contact. ‘Did she kill herself?’ she asked.

  Boris did not answer, and his hands began to tremble.

  ‘Tell us,’ repeated Ivich nervously. ‘Did she kill herself? Did she kill herself?’

  Boris’s smile widened in unnerving fashion, his lips twitched. Ivich eyed him fixedly, tugging at her curls. ‘She doesn’t realize anything,’ thought Mathieu with vexation.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You will tell us later on. Don’t talk.’

  Boris began to laugh. He said: ‘If you... if you...’

  Mathieu smacked his face with a sharp, noiseless flip of the fingers. Boris stopped laughing, eyed him, muttered something, then subsided and stood quiet, his mouth agape, and still with a stupid air. All three were silent, there was death among them, anonymous and sacred. It was not an event, it was an enveloping, yeasty substance through which Mathieu saw his cup of tea, the marble-topped table, and Ivich’s delicate, malicious face.

  ‘And for you, sir?’ asked the waiter. He was standing by their table, looking ironically at Boris.

  ‘Bring a cognac quick,’ and he added with a casual air, ‘my friend is in a hurry.’

  The waiter departed, and soon returned with a bottle and a glass: Mathieu felt limp and exhausted, he was only just beginning to feel the fatigues of the night.

  ‘Drink that up,’ he said to Boris.

  Boris drank obediently: he put down the glass, and said, as though to himself: ‘It’s a bad show.’

  ‘Dear old boy,’ said Ivich, going up to him. ‘Dear old boy.’

  She smiled affectionately, took hold of his hair, and shook his head.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here — how hot your hands are,’ gasped Boris with relief.

  ‘Now tell us all about it,’ said Ivich. ‘Are you sure she’s dead?’

  ‘She took that drug last night,’ said Boris painfully. ‘We’d had a row.’

  ‘So she poisoned herself?’ said Ivich briskly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Boris.

  Mathieu looked at Ivich with amazement: she was affectionately stroking her brother’s hand, but her upper lip was oddly curled over her small teeth. Boris went on speaking in an undertone. He did not seem to be addressing them: ‘We went up to her room, and she took some of the stuff. She had taken the first dose in her dressing-room, while we were having an argument.’

  ‘In point of fact that must have been the second time,’ said Mathieu. ‘I fancy she took some while you were dancing with Ivich.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Boris wearily. ‘Then that makes three times. She never used to take as much as that. We went to bed without saying a word. She tossed about in bed, and I couldn’t sleep. And then suddenly she became quiet and I got to sleep.’

  He drained his glass, and continued: ‘This morning I woke up feeling stifled. It was her arm, which was lying on the sheet across me. I said to her: “Take your arm away, you’re stifling me.” She did not move. I thought she wanted to make up our quarrel, so I took her arm — and it was cold. I said to her: "What’s the matter?" She did not answer. So then I shoved her arm away, and she nearly fell down between the bed and the wall: I got out of bed, took her wrist, and tried to pull her straight. Her eyes were open. I saw her eyes,’ he said, with a kind of anger, ‘and I’ll never be able to forget them.’

  ‘My poor old boy,’ said Ivich.

  Mathieu tried to feel sorry for Boris, but could not succeed. Boris disconcerted him even more than Ivich did. He looked almost as if he was angry with Lola for having died.

  ‘I picked up my clothes and dressed,’ Boris went on in a monotonous voice. ‘I didn’t want to be found in her room. They didn’t see me go out, there was no one in the office. I took a taxi and came along here.’

  ‘Are you sorry?’ asked Ivich gently. She was leaning towards him, but not with much sympathy: she had the air of someone asking for information. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘Are you sorry?’

  ‘I...’ said Boris: he looked at her, and said abruptly. ‘It’s so repulsive.’

  The waiter passed, Boris hailed him: ‘Another brandy, please.’

  ‘In a hurry again?’ smiled the waiter.

  ‘Bring it at once,’ said Mathieu curtly.

  Boris inspired him with a faint disgust. There was nothing left of the lad’s dry, angular charm. His latest face was too like Ivich’s. Mathieu began to think of Lola’s body, prostrate on the bed in a hotel bedroom. Men in bowler hats would enter that room, they would look at that sumptuous body with combined concupiscence and professional interest, they would pull down the bed-clothes and lift the night-gown in search of injuries, reflecting that the profession of police-inspector is not without its compensations. He shuddered.

  ‘Is she all alone
there?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I expect she’ll be discovered about twelve o’clock,’ said Boris, with an anxious look. ‘The maid always wakes her up about that time.’

  ‘In two hours then,’ said Ivich.

  She had resumed her airs of elder sister. She was stroking her brother’s hair with an expression of pity and of exultation. Boris appeared to respond to her caresses and then suddenly exclaimed: ‘God blast my eyes!’

  Ivich started. Boris often used slang, but he never swore.

  ‘What have you done?’ she asked, apprehensively.

  ‘My letters,’ said Boris.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All my letters — what a ghastly fool I am, I’ve left them in her room.’

  Mathieu did not understand: ‘Letters you wrote to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why worry?’

  ‘Well... the doctor will come, and it will be known that she died of poison.’

  ‘Did you mention the drug in your letters?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Boris dismally. Mathieu had the impression that he was playing a part ‘Did you ever take it yourself?’ he asked. He was rather vexed because Boris had never told him.

  ‘I... well, it did so happen. Once or twice, from curiosity. And I mentioned a fellow who sold it, a fellow from the Boule-Blanche, I bought some from him for Lola on one occasion. I wouldn’t like him to get into trouble on my account.’

  ‘Boris, you’re crazy,’ said Ivich. ‘How could you have written such things?’

  Boris raised his head: ‘I expect you have lapses sometimes!’

  ‘But perhaps they won’t be found?’ said Mathieu.

  ‘It’s the first thing they’ll find. The best that can happen is that I shall be called as a witness.’

  ‘Oh dear — how father will blow up,’ said Ivich.

  ‘He’s quite equal to fetching me back to Laon and sticking me into a bank.’

  ‘You’ll be able to keep me company,’ said Ivich darkly.

  Mathieu looked at them with pity: ‘This is what they’re really like!’ Ivich had shed her victorious air: clutched in each other’s arms, pallid and stricken, they looked like two little old women. Silence fell, and then Mathieu noticed that Boris was looking at him sidelong, the set of his lips suggested that he had some scheme in mind, some pitifully futile scheme. ‘He’s up to something,’ thought Mathieu with annoyance.

  ‘You say that the servant comes to wake her up at twelve o’clock?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. She knocks until Lola answers.’

  ‘Well, it’s half past ten. You’ve got time to go back quietly and get your letters. Take a taxi if you like, but you could do it in a bus.’

  Boris averted his eyes. ‘I can’t go back.’

  ‘So that’s how it is,’ thought Mathieu. ‘Don’t you feel up to it?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  Mathieu noticed that Ivich was looking at him. ‘Where are your letters?’ he asked.

  ‘In a small black suitcase under the window. There’s a valise on the suitcase, you’ve only got to push it off. You’ll see — there are a pile of letters. Mine are tied up with yellow ribbon.’ He paused, and then added nonchalantly: ‘There’s also some cash: in small notes.’

  Small notes. Mathieu whistled softly, as he thought: ‘The lad has got his wits about him, he has thought of everything, even of the money I need.’

  ‘Is the suitcase locked?’

  ‘Yes, the key is in Lola’s bag, on the night-table. You will find a bunch of keys, and then a small flat key. That’s the one.’

  ‘What’s the number of the room?’

  ‘21, third floor, second room on the left.’

  ‘Right,’ said Mathieu. ‘I’ll go.’

  He got up. Ivich was still looking at him, Boris wore an air of deliverance, he flung his hair back with a resumption of the familiar charm, and said with a watery smile: ‘If you’re stopped, just say you’re going to see Bolivar, the Negro from the Kamtchatka, I know him. He lives on the third floor too.’

  ‘You will both wait for me here,’ said Mathieu. He had unconsciously assumed a tone of command: and he added more gently, ‘I shall be back in an hour.’

  ‘We’ll wait for you,’ said Boris. And he added with an air of admiration and exaggerated gratitude: ‘You’re a grand fellow, Mathieu.’

  Mathieu walked out on to the Boulevard Montparnasse, he was glad to be alone. Behind him, Boris and Ivich would soon he whispering together, reconstituting their unbreatheable and precious world. But he did not care. All around him, and in full force, there were his anxieties of the day before, his love for Ivich, Marcelle’s pregnancy, money, and then, in the centre, a blind spot — death. He gasped several times, passing his hands over his face and rubbing his cheeks. ‘Poor Lola,’ he thought, ‘I quite liked her.’ But it was not for him to regret her: this death was unhallowed because it had received no sanction, and it was not for him to sanction it. It had plunged like a stone into a little crazy soul, and was making circles there. On that small soul alone would fall the crushing responsibility of facing and redeeming it. If only Boris had displayed a gleam of grief... But he had felt nothing but disgust. Lola’s death would remain for ever on the margin of the world, despised, like a deed of disrepute. ‘She died like a dog.’ What an awful thought.

  ‘Taxi!’ cried Mathieu.

  When he had sat down in the cab, he felt calmer. He had even a sense of quiet superiority as though he had suddenly achieved forgiveness for no longer being Ivich’s age, or rather as if youth had suddenly lost its value. ‘They depend on me,’ he said to himself with acid pride. It was better that the taxi should not stop outside the hotel.

  ‘The corner of the Rue Navarin and the Rue des Martyrs.’

  Mathieu watched the procession of the tall, gloomy buildings in the Boulevard Raspail. Again he said to himself: ‘They depend on me.’ He felt solid and even a trifle weighty. Then the windows of the cab darkened as it swung into the narrow gulley of the Rue du Bac, and, suddenly, Mathieu realized that Lola was dead, that he was going to enter her room, see her large open eyes, and her white body. ‘I shan’t look at her,’ he added. She was dead. Her consciousness was destroyed. But not her life. Abandoned by the soft affectionate creature that had for so long inhabited it, that derelict life had merely stopped, it floated, filled with unechoed cries and ineffectual hopes, with sombre splendours, antiquated faces and perfumes, it floated at the outer edge of the world, between parentheses, unforgettable and self-subsistent, more indestructible than a mineral, and nothing could prevent it from having been, it had just undergone its ultimate metamorphosis: its future was determined. ‘A life,’ thought Mathieu, ‘is formed from the future just as bodies are compounded from the void.’ He bent his head: he thought of his own life. The future had made way into his heart, where everything was in process and suspense. The far-off days of childhood, the day when he had said: ‘I will be free’: the day when he had said — ‘I will be famous’: appeared to him even now with their individual future, like a small, circled individual sky above them all, and that future was himself, himself just as he was at present, weary and a little over-ripe, they had claims upon him across the passage of time past, they maintained their insistencies, and he was often visited by attacks of devastating remorse, because his casual, cynical present was the original future of those past days. It was he whom they had awaited for twenty years, it was he, this tired man, who was pestered by a remorseless child to realize his hopes; on him it depended whether these childish pledges should remain for ever childish, or whether they should become the first announcements of a destiny. His past was in continual process of retouching by the present: every day belied yet further those old dreams of fame, and every day had a fresh future: from one period of waiting to the next, future to future, Mathieu’s life was gliding — towards what?

  Towards nothing. He thought of Lola: she was dead, and her life, like Mathieu’s, had been no more than a t
ime of waiting. In some long past summer there had surely been a little girl with russet curls who had sworn to be a great singer, and about 1923 a young singer eager to appear first on the concert bill. And her love for Boris, the great love of an ageing woman, which had caused her so much suffering, had potentially existed since the first day. Even yesterday, on his now obscure and unsteady course, he awaited his sense of the future, even yesterday she thought that she would live, and that Boris would love her one day: the fullest, the most loaded moments, the nights of love that had seemed the most eternal, were but periods of waiting.

  There had been nothing to wait for: death had moved backwards into all those periods of waiting and brought them to a halt, they remained motionless and mute, aimless and absurd. There had been nothing to wait for: no one would ever know whether Lola would have made Boris love her, the question was now meaningless. Lola was dead — gestures, caresses, prayers, all were now in vain: nothing remained but periods of waiting, each waiting for the next, nothing but a life devitalized, blurred, and sinking back upon itself. ‘If I died today,’ thought Mathieu abruptly, ‘no one would ever know whether I was a wash-out, or whether I still had a chance of self-salvation.’

  The taxi stopped, and Mathieu got out. ‘Wait for me,’ he said to the driver. He crossed the street at an angle, pushed open the hotel door, and entered a dark and heavily scented hall. Over a glass door on his left there was an enamelled rectangle bearing the legend: ‘Management’. Mathieu glanced through the door: the room seemed to be empty, nothing was audible but the ticking of a clock. The ordinary clientele — singers, dancers, jazz-band Negroes, came in late and got up late; the place was still asleep. ‘I mustn’t be in too much of a hurry,’ thought Mathieu. His heart began to throb, and his legs felt limp. He stopped on the third floor landing and looked about him. The key was in the door. ‘Suppose there were someone inside?’ He listened for a moment and knocked. No one answered. On the fourth floor someone pulled a plug, Mathieu heard the rush of water, followed by a little fluted trickle. He opened the door and went in.

  The room was dark, the moist odour of sleep still hung about it. Mathieu surveyed the semi-darkness, he was eager to read death in Lola’s features, as though it had been a human emotion. The bed was on the right at the far end of the room. Mathieu saw Lola, an all-white figure, looking at him. ‘Lola!’ he said in a low voice. Lola did not answer: she had a marvellously expressive but impenetrable face: her breasts were bare, one of her lovely arms lay stiff across the bed — the other was under the bed-clothes. ‘Lola!’ repeated Mathieu, advancing towards the bed. He could not take his eyes off that proud bosom — he longed to touch it. He stood for a few instants beside the bed, hesitant, uneasy, his body poisoned by a sour desire, then he turned and hurriedly picked up Lola’s bag from the night-table. The flat key was in the bag: Mathieu took it and walked to the window. A grey day was filtering through the curtains, the room was filled with a motionless presence: Mathieu knelt down beside the suitcase, the inexorable presence was there, it weighed upon his back, like watching eyes. He inserted the key in the lock. He lifted the lid, slipped both hands into the trunk, and a mass of paper crackled under his fingers. The paper was banknotes — a quantity of them. Thousand-franc notes. Under a pile of receipts and notes, Lola had hidden a packet of letters tied with yellow ribbon. Mathieu raised the packet to the light, examined the handwriting and whispered to himself, ‘These are they,’ and put the packet into his pocket. But he could not go away, he remained kneeling, his eyes fixed on the bank-notes. After a moment or two, he rummaged nervously among the papers, sorting them by touch with eyes averted. ‘I’ve got the money,’ he thought. Behind him lay that long, white woman with the astonished face, whose arms seemed still able to reach out, and her red nails still to scratch. He got up, and brushed his knees with the flat of his right hand. In his left hand was a bundle of banknotes. And he thought, ‘Now we’re all right,’ dubiously eyeing the notes. ‘Now we’re all right...’ Despite himself, he stood on the alert, he listened to Lola’s silent body, and felt clamped to the floor. ‘Very well,’ he murmured with resignation. Fingers opened and the bank-notes fluttered down into the suitcase. Mathieu closed the lid, turned the key, put the key in his pocket, and padded out of the room.