The Hippogriff

by Henri de Montherlant

  Two days after he had noted in his diary: 'Nevertheless, determined to marry her,' he suddenly thought of writing a long letter to Mme Dandillot explaining the reasons why he would not marry her daughter. This corrective measure seemed to him appropriate; he had come to feel a certain sympathy for this woman in the cruel suspense from which she must be suffering because of him. Moreover, he wondered whether she might not take him at his word. With what impatience he would await her reply acknowledging that 'under the circumstances, perhaps … ' Or simply a reply in which he might detect a certain insolence, which would allow him to break it off there and then.

  Costals wrote this letter with much gravity and a touch of complacency. An excellent way of spending the feast of the Assumption.

  to Madame Ch. Dandillot

  Paris

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  15 August 1927

  Dear Madame,

  I am writing to you from an empty flat in a deserted building, looking out on an avenue in which there is not a car, not a passer-by, not a sound; I had almost said not a cat, but in fact there is one, and very nice he is, with his tail as straight as a ramrod. I feel that if you are in Paris today, and Solange too - at a time when the ordeal you have just been through makes a rest and a change of scene more than usually necessary for both of you - it is partly my fault. And many other things are also my fault. It is for this reason that I feel moved to speak to you at some length, with deepened sympathy; to explain myself to you; and to ask you also to understand and forgive me.

  If I write you this letter instead of coming to see you, it is not only because, as a writer, the form of expression that betrays me least is writing, so that with this letter you will have a very precise testimony to my feelings. It is because I feel sufficiently secure, as far as my conscience is concerned, to want you to possess, against whatever contingency may arise, this document signed by my hand.

  Do not be surprised if the feelings I am about to describe sometimes seem strange to you. I am indeed strange. Far from priding myself on it, I have always sought to smooth the sharp edges of my nature, to emphasize whatever brings me closer to my fellow-creatures rather than what separates me from them, just as I seek to pass unnoticed in my private life. As a novelist, God knows the efforts I sometimes have to make to imagine the feelings of the ordinary run of humanity, feelings of which I have little spontaneous experience. However, I have never suffered from this singularity of mine until this moment, when I find myself suffering from it for the first time.

  This marriage must not take place.

  I can see what would happen as though it had already occurred, as though I were remembering it. I can see it because I know myself, because I have a long and subtle experience of myself and of my relations with other people, because I have always had a premonition of how I would react in any given circumstances and how, for instance, if I tried to go against my nature, nothing but disaster could come of it. It is as though it were not so much my soul as my constitution which rejects certain things to which it is ill-adapted. (When I went to Indo-China, I knew in advance that I should fall ill there because of my reluctance to go; and indeed I did fall ill. I could give you a dozen other examples of the same kind. . . .) The satisfaction of duty done? As far as I am concerned, it would be more suitable to talk of the satisfaction of duty left undone.

  This is what would happen if I married Solange. From the very beginning, the moral obligations which her tenderness and devotion would create for me would destroy whatever pleasure I might derive from that tenderness and whatever comfort I might derive from that devotion. I should be anxious about what she thought and what she felt. I should be afraid all the time that I was not giving her enough. I should be afraid of the harm I might do to her and that she might do to me. I should have to reckon with her, and an artist ought not to have to reckon with anything except his work. She would blunt some of my strength, and rob me of my concentration. I should have no right to complain, and yet she would be a nuisance to me, and a source of weakness. I should feel that she was giving herself entirely to me, and I should be unable to give myself entirely to her. I should be unhappy, whereas in my solitude I have never been anything but happy. As for her, living with a man who was pining away, how could she herself be happy?

  The outcome? Divorce. But divorce from someone with whom one has no fault to find? How could I reject a young creature who is all sweetness, affection and good will?'Go away! You've done nothing wrong. Your only crime is existing, and loving me. But your presence weighs me down, and your love imprisons me. Take your things away, I'm giving you your notice. You can sort things out with your mother.' No, that I shall never say. Why pretend that circumstances could arise in which I might say it and she might accept it? To do so would be to build on sand - deliberately.

  What then? We would remain stuck to each other, gnawing away at each other, like the two damned souls in Dante's Inferno - an infernal tête-à-tête until the bitter end.

  Another reason, a minor one in the eyes of the world, but not in mine. I am a volatile creature: I like people, I like possessing them, I have them in my blood. It is inevitable that a time will come when I shall desire other women. What then? Secrecy, constant lies, squalid deceptions with someone you love and who loves you? I shut my eyes and see that girl and imagine myself 'double-crossing' her. No, that too is out of the question. What remains? Collusion? With certain women, perhaps: not with her. But the fact remains that I shall want other women. Not after months or weeks of marriage. Not after a few days of marriage. The day after. The very day. 'But you must fight against it ...' I do not fight against what I desire.

  This marriage must not take place.

  The future also must remain open to us.

  Two solutions. The commonplace solution, the lazy solution: never to see each other again. If you should choose that, I shall leave for Morocco, and you will be rid of me forever.

  But in that case Solange must know the tenderness of the affection I feel for her, must know that she will always remain for me a memory undimmed by any clouds other than those I myself created, must know that this tenderness has never been stronger than at the moment when I conceive of cutting myself off from her, and that it is precisely the strength and constancy of this affection which compels me to bring about this rupture, since without them I should have no scruples about giving her less than she gives me, or lying to her, or divorcing her.

  The alternative solution is less bourgeois. But you yourself have shown me, Madame, by being prepared to accept a marriage as bizarre as that which we have contemplated, that you have no hesitation in leaving the beaten track when your daughter's happiness is at stake. This solution is that Solange and I simply continue as before, but without the slightest intention of marriage.

  Let us not talk about 'social conventions'. What is at stake? Once more, your daughter's happiness. One does not talk in terms of social conventions when one's daughter's happiness is at stake. Let us be realistic. Your daughter finds pleasure in contact with me, and I in contact with her. Must we forgo this pleasure on the pretext that we are not going to marry? Personally, such an attitude seems to me worthy of the Ice Age. Is there no middle way between estrangement and marriage, those idiotic solutions? Whatever is human is made up of all sorts of complexities and nuances. So, the status quo, with a new arrangement in the practical sphere to guard against gossip: she will come to me, but we shall no longer meet out, in Paris at least; and I shall never again mention her name in public. Morally and materially I shall give her everything, as in marriage; but outside marriage. In fact I shall be giving her much more than if we were married. For the feeling I have for her, which, when I see marriage ahead of me, advances painfully since it is aiming towards castas- trophe and knows that it must decay and eventually be shattered, leaps forward and expands freely as soon as the prospect of marriage is dispelled and no more obstacles stand in its way.

  I remain, etc....
<
br />   Costals

  Next day, at a quarter past eleven, the telephone rang, and the somewhat raucous voice of Mme Dandillot asked if Costals was there. 'No, I'm not here,' Costals was on the point of answering: symbolic words, for indeed he never was (morally or intellectually) where people expected him to be. 'Speaking,' he said in a weak voice, but silently he exclaimed: 'Hurray! She's going to blow me up.'

  'My dear sir, I was extremely touched by your letter, which was so honest and straightforward. But the matter is too important for us to go into in writing. Will you come and have tea with me this afternoon at five o'clock? We shall be alone.' 'Hum, five o'clock, I'm engaged,' said Costals: his first impulse being always to dodge - it was second nature with him. Then he changed his mind and accepted: just as well to get it over. He hung up, and at the same time hung up the idea of marriage, as one hangs a coat on a peg. Since they would be chewing it over for two hours that evening, he could well give it a rest in the meantime.

  Every death is an occasion for renewal: out of the corpse spring pungent flowers. M. Dandillot's death, coinciding with these marriage plans, meant that everything in the Dandillot household for the past three weeks had tended towards the future. The dead man's room had been disinfected, all the paraphernalia of disease cleared away, as though no one would ever fall ill again between those walls, the windows everywhere thrown wide open, after being kept shut against noise for weeks. And, Solange having repeated some remarks of Costals' on the insane obsession of the French - much derided by foreigners - for cluttering their interiors with bric-à-brac, no small quantity of junk had been disposed of.

  Mme Dandillot's soul had undergone a similar airing - a desire to slough off the old skin. If she had weighed heavily on her husband, he too had weighed heavily on her. The thought that her daughter was in love, then the certainty that this beloved child spent every other night in the arms of a man, had reawakened and rejuvenated Mme Dandillot, who was then in her fifty-second year, a difficult age for a woman. The vague yearnings that possessed her were not in the least directed towards men; they represented no more than a feeling that as soon as her mourning was over she would do some of the things she had never done, would 'get about a bit', travel, in fact would become what people call 'emancipated' - in other words look after her own happiness for a change.

  Meanwhile, in the middle of August, the two women were still in Paris. Mme Dandillot might have had to stay there in any case, because of the lawyers she had to see about her husband's estate. Solange, however, could have gone to stay with friends at Etretat. But apart from the fact that it would have been difficult if not impossible for Costals to see her there without giving rise to gossip, the latter had refused to leave Paris. 'It's the only time my friends and relations are not here, and I can have some peace and quiet.' He did not much miss the beauties of nature. The older he grew, the less susceptible he was to nature and the more susceptible he was to people, or to himself. 'I don't object to a tree here and there, but I don't feel the need for a whole eyeful. As for the sea with its idiotic surface, crinkled like an elephant's behind, I don't want to hear of it at any price. I have more interesting things inside myself.'

  In these circumstances, Mme Dandillot had been touched by the writer's letter. Its somewhat brutal frankness had shaken her, but without annoying her - on the contrary. The words 'with deepened sympathy' had not escaped her. Strange as it may seem, Costals' arguments had glided over her without making the slightest impression. And she awaited their conversation with a feeling of great serenity.

  Costals had a hang-dog look about him as he rang the bell. However much he indulged himself in the avoidance of boring duties (he almost never did anything that cost him any effort), whenever he was forced into it the slightest thing crushed him, took on catastrophic proportions in his mind.

  They began by beating about the bush in a state of mutual embarrassment. In the extravagant desire to gratify him which she shared with Solange, Mme Dandillot, who had understood from a remark of her daughter's that he was infatuated with Italy, observed incidentally that he was 'rather Italian looking', which was pure fantasy. Finally the tone changed, and at once things livened up as our hero leapt out of his trench without even a glance over his shoulder.

  He repeated all the arguments he had gone over so often with Solange since the day at Bagatelle. Mme Dandillot listened with affectionate sympathy, almost with amusement. No, no, dear reader, set your mind at rest! Mme Dandillot is not going to fall in love with Costals. But after weeks and weeks spent looking after a dying man, then visiting one lawyer after another, it gave her an agreeable feeling to see a lively young man in this renovated flat; in this drawing-room where she had so often been snubbed by her son, had so often felt herself despised by her husband, socially and intellectually her superior (and class distinctions exist even within families), she enjoyed being spoken to by a distinguished celebrity in this tone of respectful inexperience, enjoyed hearing him talk such charming nonsense on a subject which she flattered herself she knew so much about.

  And which she did indeed know about. She was well aware of what a normal marriage amounts to (there are admirable exceptions, of course): the classic music-hall duet, Nénette and Rintintin. 'What did I feel when I got married?' M. Dandillot had once replied - to someone who was not even a friend. 'Nothing. But a woman who brings you four hundred thousand francs is worth catching. I didn't love her, but I told myself that it might come with habit.' It had not come. After the first three weeks of marriage Rintintin had never again kissed Nénette on the mouth. From the outset he had made her feel his superiority. 'He loves me!' she used to think in the early days when he told her she was an idiot. Soon she began to take his remarks - 'You're off your head!' or 'What? You must be mad!' or 'How boring you are!' - at their face value. She hoped that the birth of Gaston would bring them together. Nothing of the kind. Rintintin refused at first to kiss the newly hatched infant (might not the latter's odious character as a child and as a young man have arisen from this sort of parental malediction? Mme Dandillot believed so), and could not bring himself to do so until a week later, with repugnance and dread, and blushing profusely. He did not like his son, although he was devoted to the boys in his sports clubs - perhaps because with his son this formidable egotist felt that his responsibility was engaged and that he had duties towards him, whereas with other people's sons.... Besides, it was not them he liked but his theories, which they were supposed to illustrate. Nénette buried herself in her household chores and hobbies, absorbed in the running of a big house with a garden, in the country. Truth to tell, she had little need of her husband's love (and even less, dear God, of the drudgery of sex, happily less and less frequent. Only when he told her that such and such a woman he had met was ravishing, or that he had been accosted by a street-walker in the rue Saint- Lazare, did she feel a faint gust of passion for him). All she wanted was to be 'understood'. Normally, when a woman complains of not being 'understood', it is because she is not loved at all, or because the man she loves does not return her love in due proportion. For Mme Dandillot, being 'understood' was more modest: it meant that M. Dandillot should give credit where it was due, that he should not leave her with all the burdens and responsibilities (the children, the house) while retaining the right to complain (everything tiresome that occurred was Nénette's fault - he treated her worse than the maid, which was logical enough since she could not hand in her notice), that he should take his nose out of his newspaper when she spoke to him, and that he should take an interest in something else besides the pentathlon, or 'natural' man, or whether it would rain on Sunday, in which case his crosscountry race was done for.

  When Solange - unwanted - was born, Rintintin, this time, did not go to see Nénette for two days, and left her crying alone in her bed: he was punishing her for his own clumsiness. There was no longer any question of a new child bringing them together. 'Anyhow,' she thought, 'I shall no longer be alone. If those spiteful beasts' (her husband and
her son) 'make me suffer, I shall have one consolation at least.' And Solange was indeed in every respect a consolation. Besides which, as he approached his fifties, Rintintin began to realize that he had wasted his life, and grew embittered, and his wife, sensing this, took a leaf out of his book. It was her turn to make wounding remarks, to create scenes, which always had the same finale: she would break them off brusquely by going up to bed (at two o'clock in the afternoon), and did not reappear. She was making up for twenty-five years of restraint when she was beastly to him. At certain moments of crisis she would go so far as to burn a newspaper that M. Dandillot had touched, or wash her hands with soap and water after he had shaken hands with her, or hesitate before kissing Gaston because he had just kissed his father. When he died, she would have liked to shed a few tears, but she could not manage it.

  Such was Mme Dandillot's personal experience of marriage, at a time when she desired the union of her daughter with Costals to the point of submitting to almost any humiliation to ensure that it took place. Costals' intellectual superiority over Solange, his egotism, his eccentricities, the gap in age, their different attitudes to life, Solange's quasi-frigidity: all these circumstances were very similar to those which had clouded her own marriage. But it never occurred to her that anything but happiness could come of it. She was sincere in the apologia for marriage she was about to make to Costals, as sincere as one of those sublime fathers who say of their sons, if the headmaster of the boarding-school informs them of some 'distressing' episode: 'I'd prefer him to be dead than to think he had such habits as that!' when they themselves at school were notorious little monsters. The irresponsibility of young people who marry is excusable. But what are we to think of the irresponsibility of those who encourage them to marry and who know, or should know, better? It is as though the urge to marry were as much a basic human instinct as the urge to copulate.