All this, which occupies two pages of a book, was gone into in elaborate detail for two hours and ten minutes, with passionate sincerity and seriousness. He also made known the conditions, all sine qua non, he would lay down for any marriage, no matter who with: separate maintenance; a quiet ceremony in some remote spot, with only the witnesses present; no religious ceremony, so that they should be spared the grotesque formalities of annulment in Rome; no children; and three months' conjugal holiday per year, during which he could go away wherever he liked and the couple would be strangers to each other, for, he added, 'a home ought not to be a place one stays in but a place one goes back to.' The rejection of a single one of these conditions would entail the immediate abandonment of the whole scheme.
Solange seemed rather stunned. She said she would think it over, and might perhaps agree. She said 'perhaps' in a bird-like voice, a thin, high-pitched voice, as women say it when they are about to yield. She would discuss it with her mother.
'What exactly are you afraid of?'
'Becoming too attached to you.'
'And then my leaving you?'
'Yes.'
'Well, then you'll suffer! Frankly, I think you're being rather cowardly. And how would marriage put your mind at rest, since I shall never marry anyone unless I find a means of getting out of it whenever I want to? A sensible man going off to war thinks out ways of getting himself evacuated when he has had enough. In marriage too one must foresee how to get oneself evacuated.'
'You're not much of a one for taking risks....'
'You can say that to me, of all people! That's a good one! I take risks in order to get things I want. But to take a risk for something I don't want.
She was staring at the ground, but at these words she lifted her face towards him (as though in reproach?). Touching her lightly on the cheek with the tip of his gloves, which he was holding in his hand, he turned her face away, as though he did not want her to look at him at that moment.
'I want to lend you some books: Tolstoy's journal, and his wife's. You'll see what would happen to us if we committed that act of madness.'
'What a lot of notes there are in the margins!'
'They're the notes made by the various girls I've lent these books to. You'll find at least five or six different hand-writings. For these volumes are a veritable breviary for any young lady who wants to marry me.'
He turned over the pages of one of them, and read two or three hand-written observations.
'Look, here are some intelligent notes. In pencil - so it's impossible to recognize the writing. It's rather moving, this message from someone I can't identify, someone who loved me, and of whom these notes make me think: "Perhaps, after all, I might have been able to marry her without much damage." ... '
Solange's eyes were glued to the margins, and Costals was struck by the hardness of her expression. So we're jealous, are we? Ridiculous!
'Are you satisfied with our conversation?'
A silence, then:
'Yes.'
'So, for the time being, we carry on as before?'
A silence, then:
'Yes....'
'And you'll come to my flat the day after tomorrow at six?'
A silence, then:
'Yes.'
'My little darling, I can see you're unhappy. From now on you'll have to settle down with that unhappiness, while I, who am the cause of it, do my best to soothe it and gradually cure you of it.'
When he kissed her hand on leaving her, he felt that it was as cold as ice.
Costals' Diary
3 August - Looked at in cold blood, this marriage seems to me absurd and impossible, which it undoubtedly is. But in moments of exaltation I see it as:
1. An ordeal worthy of me. It is a great thing to make a success of something one despises, because one has to overcome not only the obstacle but oneself too. It always takes courage to challenge life. Not that I'm afraid of life, damn it! I've overcome adolescence and all its horrible miasmas, I've overcome war, I've overcome long-distance expeditions, I've overcome solitude, pleasure, success, and all the various dangers which surround the private life of a man who is ready for anything. There is only one monster before which I've always flinched: marriage. And now it's up to me to overthrow the Hippogriff! Or rather to turn it into a saddle-horse. I want to astonish myself, to prove to myself that I can be just as daring, just as free and easy in marriage as in celibacy. Of course I should have to behave like a braggart flexing his biceps: 'We shall see what we shall see,' followed by a roll of drums. Such an attitude is farcical, seen from the outside. But is it my fault if I'm obliged to whip myself up into a frenzy in order to face what terrifies me so? Even to the extent of calling to the rescue, for example, the Roman knights whose order, under Augustus, comprised more bachelors than married men? Those who braved the enemy most valiantly dreaded finding themselves alone with a missus. I'm no exception. 2. An experience necessary to my knowledge of life, and hence to my work. A means of renewing the human substance of my art, fertilizing a new patch of earth, opening a new water-course. An unknown land to be annexed, or at least to fly over proudly. That's it, fly over, glide over, as I glided over the war, as I have glided over pain, as I glide over fatherhood - barely wetting the tips of my fingers. To go through marriage as one goes through the midsummer fires. Will there be crises? So much the better. A writer will always pay cash down for a crisis, no matter what.
And then, it would be amusing to learn what duty is.
4 August - She came. She gave me back Tolstoy's diary, and his wife's, without a word. Aurel's saying: 'There are women to whom one lends a marvellous book and who return it to you without a word as though they were handing you the sugar-tongs.' If Dante were to reappear and give a public recital of an unpublished canto of the Divine Comedy, there would be women, intellectual women at that, who could think of nothing else to say but that his trousers were not very well creased. To all my questions she replied with feeble variations on the theme of: 'Why do you think what happened in Tolstoy's case will happen in yours? There's no reason to believe it wouldn't work....'
Everything is made more difficult by the fact that these people are totally lacking in wit.
In just a few days, she has managed to mess up my Tolstoy, sticking the cover together with adhesive paper. She must be rather slovenly.
Nothing on earth can persuade me that I need her presence.
There is absolutely no reason why I should marry her.
I don't love her. I should like to find more reasons for loving her, but I can't. I don't love her, and yet I'm prepared to commit this folly for her sake.
The fear I used to have as a child when I was taken out in a boat. The impression of someone embarking.
I feel drawn towards the story of the Tolstoy marriage as one is drawn towards an abyss. The story used to haunt me even before I had the slightest thought of marriage. Détériora sequor. I see where evil lies and I head for it.
I marry you not to make myself happy but to make you happy.
If one talks about it enough, it will happen. The feeling that a machine has been set in motion, and henceforth it will be impossible to stop it.
5 August - I am going into this adventure as I went into the war, and perhaps as I go into everything else: obsessed, from the moment of entering it, with how I shall be able to get out.
Worse still, thinking of the leap of triumph I shall give when I get out - in fact conceiving it as a preparation for this.
And then, for ever after, this wrong vis-à-vis Solange, not only to have gone into the marriage as into something one will escape from, but to have considered it as a sort of foil intended to make my subsequent life more deliriously happy.
6 August - She comes, but informs me that she is unwell. Women, always ill, always unhealthy, never absolutely wholesome. I inquire when her indisposition will be over: tomorrow. But when I ask her if we can meet the day after tomorrow, she says she cannot. The following day she can't
either. Three days! How unloving she is! A brief good-bye. A limp handshake. Her coldness frightens me. What has happened? Have I offended her in some way, either morally or physically?
This has happened. When she first broached the question of marriage (in her letter), I resisted. Now that she's cold, the idea keeps running through my head, and I see myself demanding this marriage which four days ago I rejected. I who thought I was master of my own will now see myself submitting because of her. At the moment of writing, I do not feel inclined to lose her. And yet she is so cold, so capable of running away (like a little gazelle), I can sense how certain she is to make me suffer.
You have given me everything, happiness and suffering. You have been mingled with all the things of this summer, like rain mingled with the branches of a tree.
You have disillusioned me with solitude. I can hardly believe in it any more.
Baudelaire: 'I can understand how one might desert a cause in order to know what it will feel like serving another. It might be pleasant to be alternately victim and executioner.' Pleasant perhaps to be the victim, after having been so often the executioner.
I am always going from one extreme to the other.
10 August - I told her flatly that I had come closer to the idea of marriage, and that in the meantime she had moved further away from me. 'No, I haven't. On the contrary, I think I'm becoming more and more attached to you.' - 'Why were you so cold the other day?' - 'But I wasn't cold!' When I insist that she was, she goes on protesting she was not, with a look of anguish in her eyes, as though imploring me to believe her, which immediately makes me feel that I'm in the wrong.
On leaving her, I am convinced of her sincerity. Convinced that everything is moving towards it. But a moment after leaving her I ask myself: 'Why she rather than another? Why she, when there are so many others more this and more that than she?'
Even if I were presented with the Queen of Sheba's daughter, fourteen years and three days old, on a golden platter, I would think of the unhappiness it would cause you, and I could not do it.
11 August - Here is a girl for whom I feel affection, esteem, and physical attraction. And the prospect of marrying her is like a waking nightmare, as bad as a declaration of war.
Will she get on with Brunet? She doesn't like children. She doesn't like small boys ('Their ugly little mugs. ...'). She doesn't even like young men ('They're so stupid!...'). She won't like him. Not to mention the silent reproaches: 'How could you have brought him up like this?' (To be censured by Mademoiselle Dandillot! ... ) Perhaps she will want to exert her authority over him. That I shall never allow. I did my damnedest, God knows at what cost, to keep him away from his mother, and now to think that he might have to reckon with a step-mother! Someone coming between him and me! Fifteen years' work destroyed!
As for him, I know he'll say at once (before he knows anything about my plans): 'Couldn't you fix me up with her? No? How mean you are!' With anyone else but her, yes, it might have been a good idea to allow him to take the plunge with his step-mother. But S. is absolutely the wrong person for that: much too stupid. He'll hang around her the whole time. He'll know I sleep with her. She'll be the object of his repressed desires, the harbour of his solitary voyages. He'll be tossed about and will suffer because of her. And I don't want him to suffer through anyone - woe to anyone who lays a finger on him! - and above all, above all, not through her.
I ought to arrange a meeting between them right away. But I know so well what will come of it: one more reason for not marrying her. And what I'm looking for is a reason for marrying her.
Another thing: what if I give her a child? The very thought of it nearly drives me mad. If it's a girl I shall be certain to desire her eventually: a lot of agitation, complication, responsibility, in spite of my education [Costals is referring to the tuppence-coloured picture books (Images d'Epinal) which were the earliest reading-matter for French children at the beginning of this century. They depicted kings enamoured of their daughters, cats in love with princesses, giants addicted to little boys, etc. It is not surprising that Costals retained from all this a tendency towards sexual confusion (Author's note).] - the whole machinery of trouble grinding into action, as it does whenever a man has anything to do with a woman. And then, desired or not, a girl commits and ties one much more than a boy; one can't leave her to get along by herself: an Everest of worry and time-wasting. If it's a boy, I shall love him, and I don't want to give to another son what I've already given to the one I have. There are words that cannot be uttered twice, even inwardly. I can, at a pinch, repeat the same words to a hundred or a hundred and fifty women and mean it every time, because women only affect the surface of my life - and even so, I've suffered often enough from this sort of reiteration. But to repeat everything to a second Brunet ... No, not that. 'Chacun en a sa part et tous l'ont tout entier.' [Each has its share, and all have it in full. (Translator's note).] Perhaps mothers can really divide their maternal love without weakening it; but I'm not a mother. And besides, all have it in full - I'm sure that's a hoax. They're boasting once again.
Moreover, I have already taken the insane risk of creating a human being, and this human being, in my opinion, is a success. I love him, I think he's fond of me, I have never had any fault to find with him, he enjoys my company and I enjoy his; that sort of miracle doesn't happen twice.
There are powerful reasons why a woman should marry. For a man there are none: he does it out of gregariousness. (And it is therefore natural enough for the law to give men a better position in marriage than women.) 'But then, why do men marry?' I once asked the Abbé Mugnier. His answer was: 'Out of a taste for disaster.' Yes, it really is a love of risk, of danger, the dark and unhealthy attraction of trouble, which drives the male to bring this hornets' nest about his ears. If he jibs in the slightest, people accuse him of 'cowardice' - cowardice in this case being synonymous with that form of intelligence known as the instinct of self-preservation.
Truly it is an urge towards tragedy that makes me contemplate marrying her....
But no! I am seeking excuses in order to disguise from myself the only motive that inspires me, and that is charity.
13 August - When you are waiting for a woman you very much desire, when she is an hour and a half late and you have given her up, and then she rings the door-bell, your first impulse is not one of joy but of annoyance. Your imagination had gone off in another direction, and had got used to it, and this sudden reversal is disconcerting at first.
I don't know whether I was awaiting S. very passionately, but when, half an hour after the appointed time, she has still not arrived, I hope something may have happened - some revulsion on the part of her mother? - which will prevent her from ever coming again. Here she is. I go over the same old arguments again: 'By not marrying you I shall be safeguarding our love. Marriage is the end of love - as has been known ever since Methuselah. I should grow tired of you. You would get in my way. You would see me at my worst. Good-bye to rapture. Whereas in a love affair there's none of all that, or very little. What difference would marriage make to you? Children? You know in any case that I won't let you have any. Material interests in common? Well, honestly, do you need that? Being together all the time? But that's precisely what would undermine our love. In a love affair, each of us retains his freedom. Love is not bound by a code. Loving you is not a conjugal 'duty'. Seeing you is not an obligation but a pleasure. And the secrecy in which our relationship is wrapped makes it all the warmer - that too has been known ever since Methuselah ... '
I tell her all this, but what's the use? Her mind is made up. Girls entangle you in the spider's web of marriage. Whores wear you down with their demands for money. And respectable women give you a dose of c ...
14 August - On waking up this morning it seems to me as though all the reasons 'against' have sunk to the bottom like lees in a liquid; I can find nothing but reasons 'for'. Decide to marry her. Then, halfway through the day (four o'clock), a sudden decision not to. Is
this the beginning of a stable attitude? Await her arrival with boredom.
(Later) The smell of her eyelids. Her skin, as soft as flour. During our love-making, that succession of deaths and resurrections, she is like a string being plucked and then allowed to slacken. Lay beside her for a long time, filled with tenderness, and loving her. Her hair, which always comes undone at the same time - ten minutes past midnight - as though to remind us that it will soon be time for her to leave. Then, when she goes to the bathroom, I am on the point of telling her not to give herself a douche. If I get her with child, well, that will settle the matter.
The unforgettable look in her eyes as she leaves - standing upright in front of me like a little soldier. 'You cannot possibly be false with a look like that.' 'I am not false.'
I asked her what she would do if I told her categorically that I should never marry her. At first she did not reply. Then, after struggling a little, something the gist of which seemed to be that she hadn't considered such a possibility. Her confidence irritates me a little. Nevertheless, determined to marry her, Costals thought about the marriage only for a few moments each day - on waking - and then dismissed it from his mind, as though laying down a too heavy burden, postponing a decision one way or the other. Having a horror of action that amounted to a philosophy, he acted only when pushed to the limit. It was also a matter of principle with him to put off painful decisions, not out of weakness of character but because he wanted to allow for the possibility that the circumstances might change and he would no longer have to decide. Moreover he knew that apprehension makes people vulnerable to whatever it is they apprehend. This policy had always stood him in good stead.
The Hippogriff Page 3