Mme Dandillot interrupted Costals' reasoning from time to time. She was full of arguments which carried little weight, and did not even conceive of those - numerous enough, after all - which might have shaken him. Costals spoke of the exigencies of his work, without false modesty, like a man who knows he has the upper hand.
'What work of art could be purer than a simple human heartbeat?' said Mme Dandillot. 'Besides, that solitude of yours is no life at all. Marry, and at least you'll have warmth and good food and light and noise around you, and of course a few anxieties - life can't exist without them, but at least it will be life.'
'Noise!' thought Costals. 'So that's what they want. Their frightful inner poverty demands "noise" and not solitude: otherwise they would become conscious of their emptiness. They think I'm unhappy because I'm alone. "Good cooking"! They think their abject idea of happiness is the same as mine. And they think my life is no life at all!'
Mme Dandillot must indeed have thought that Costals' life was no life at all, for she went on about it, with many a jeer at old bachelors. Yet there are bachelors and bachelors, and it is comic to hear people harping on the 'solitude' of some of them, when this 'solitude' is peopled with ravishing creatures in a way that marriage can never be; there are ways of being married in celibacy, as there are ways of being celibate in matrimony. As for the attitude which sees the old age of a Flaubert, a Baudelaire or a Nietzsche in terms of bachelordom, it had best be forgotten.
Naturally she trotted out the cliché about 'companionship', and the cliché 'Someone to look after you when you're old', and then the even hoarier one about 'doing what everyone else does'.
'Surely you're not afraid of a bit of discipline? You've always been your own master, followed your own inclinations, but some day you'll have to go the way of all flesh. If you don't marry, you'll end up hankering for hearth and home when it's too late. Seeing some nice little bank-clerk on his way home to his wife and family and a hot supper, you'll sigh: "If only I were he!"'
Costals thought of Schiller's remark (in Joan of Arc): 'The gods themselves are powerless against stupidity.' He had once quoted this in an article for an evening paper. The article had been published in extenso except for the aforesaid quotation, which had been cut. One must never speak ill of stupidity in a French newspaper.
Then this respectable bourgeoise proceeded resolutely to boost the virtues of her daughter, like a slave-trader his negress or a horse-dealer his filly.
'She's utterly straightforward.' (Costals wondered whether to be pleased or displeased that she should be utterly straightforward.) 'She's very neat and tidy; she'll keep your things in order.' ('What's the point of having servants?') 'She doesn't care about luxury. Oh no, she's not the sort who'll cost you a fortune in clothes. A motor-car? She said to me herself that she didn't want one. She's told me dozens of times that her vocation was to be subject to a man, like an oriental wife.' ('Yes, when she's dug herself in.') 'She'll help you. She's no fool, you know. She'll type your manuscripts....'
'She'll go and see your publishers for you, and as she's, ahem, pretty, she'll get you some splendid contracts,' Costals finished off for her, sourly. The friendly feelings he had had for this woman the day before were melting away like snow in the sun. And the fact that Solange could be so intimate with her relegated the girl to a remote corner of his estimation. And tomorrow Mme Dandillot would have rights over him - the right to ask him to show her his accounts, the right to know all about his life, the right to enter his house any time she liked and poke about among his things. (His eyes fell on her very unfeminine hands with their prominent veins, gnarled hands like the claws of a bird of prey.) He remembered the title of a novel that had just appeared: Strangers in My House. 'One family is already too much for me, and now I've got to have two! If one simply married an individual, well and good. But one has to marry a whole flock of strangers, the obscene tribe of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts and cousins, who also have rights over you, if only, to put it at its best, the right to waste your time. No, society is mad. The whole thing is monstrous. If I had to marry at any cost (if the law were to compel me to) I would ask for a girl from the Public Assistance. Seriously.'
Costals proceeded to talk about the 'heaviness' of women. He recalled an incident that seemed to have made a deep impression on him: one day he was alone in a canoe not far from the shore when suddenly the frail craft seemed to have become weighed down, he had to paddle furiously, it was as though the boat were paralysed by some evil spell. Then he heard a laugh: a swimmer was clinging to the stern, being dragged along behind, and this swimmer was a woman he loved … Another time, he had seen a frog coupling with a fish and holding it clasped between her legs for a whole day until the fish suffocated to death....
Costals made such a funny face - so horrified - as he told these stories that Mme Dandillot thought him 'too sweet': the language of the shop-girl seemed to come naturally to her.
'So you're as frightened of women as that?' she asked with a rather triumphant air. Costals would have liked to point out that the strongest of the strong can lose the fight because of a speck of dust in his eye, that the lion justly fears the mosquito, and that 'dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to stink', as the Scripture says. But it is not easy to say such things in drawing-rooms, even a drawing-room with a dancing faun in imitation bronze, duly fig-leaved, and a palm decked out in pink ribbon like a pug-dog; in a word, a drawing-room much like a dentist's waiting-room, the only difference being that you are waiting to be married instead of waiting to have a tooth pulled out. But this difference, our hero thought to himself, is negligible.
'Let's get down to brass tacks,' Mme Dandillot said at last.
She told him what she would agree to. What did she agree to? Everything. She agreed that the wedding should take place in the country, in total privacy except for the four witnesses. She agreed to separate maintenance: she would give Solange an annual allowance, and would settle a dowry on her only after a few years, when the marriage seemed solidly based. ('She'll have stopped paying the allowance long before that, and the whole thing will end up with solicitors' letters', thought Costals.) She agreed that there should be only a civil ceremony; they could go through a church ceremony later, when the marriage had shown signs of lasting. 'There's no point in dragging the Church into a travesty of matrimony.' At these words, Costals gave a start: they were the very words Solange had written to him. Had the letter been inspired, dictated perhaps, by Mme Dandillot (in which case Solange had lied in protesting the contrary)? Or had the daughter, like a child, simply repeated something she had overheard at home? And once again Costals was revolted by this despicable conception of Catholicism. 'The religion of Europeans is worse than no religion at all.' He could not resist pouncing on it.
'My dear sir, I hardly expected after reading your books to receive lessons in religion from you,' said Mme Dandillot, pursing her peasant's mouth. She was one of those women who make you laugh when they put on a severe look and whose laughter gives you the shivers. She did not feel in the least shocked, but judged it only proper, since religion was at stake, to look as though she was. The Church serves as a pretext for the worldly, just as Jesus Christ serves as a pretext for the Church.
It was Costals' turn to protest a bit, but he at least was sincere:
'If I prided myself on being a Catholic, I should be a proper one. And if the Pope offered me a cardinal's hat, as he did to M. de Turenne, who had no better title to it than I have, I should accept it gladly. I say it without boasting: I'm sure I'd make an excellent cardinal.'
There was a noise of a hen laying an egg - a strange thing in the avenue de Villiers. It was Mme Dandillot laughing. She put her hand in front of her mouth when she laughed, as little girls do. She did not understand that Costals had spoken seriously, and that if he had entered the Church he would have been as stout a prelate as the Borgia Alexander VI, who was a bit dubious as regards morals, but never wavered an
inch as regards dogma.
The good lady opined that, the civil ceremony completed, they could later, on the way through some out-of-the-way spot, get themselves blessed by the local curé, just like that; they could let him think they were already joined according to the rites of the Church, but that an extra benediction would be a comfort to them. Thus they would be able to announce in the Figaro that 'the couple were blessed by M. le curé of ...' etc., without lying. Costals recognized in this suggestion the true genius of the upper middle class.
He asked for a little more time to think about it. Mme Dandillot agreed with alacrity. If Costals felt he was on a slippery slope, so, too, was she: the slope of infinite complaisance. 'What a lack of pride!' he thought. But, after all, there is really no difference between people who are proud and people who are not, since the proud pocket exactly the same number of insults as the rest. There are no proud people; there are people who talk about their pride, and those who do not.
He said he wanted to think it over. In reality, he wanted to consult his lawyer on a point which he had not dared to raise with Mme Dandillot: how a man can get a divorce if his wife refuses to give him one and is guiltless? For Solange had emerged from this conversation intact. She had even survived maternal assistance. She still held firm in him.
Outside: 'Well, all this is very odd. Am I dreaming? What a business!' He felt as though he had got into a train to say good-bye to a friend, and the train had started up without warning and was now bearing him off to some unknown destination.
Women were wont to say of Maître Dubouchet that he had a disagreeable look. This is what they say of a man if he looks grave, or dignified, or just serious. Maître Dubouchet was a Pyrrhonist who took the utmost pains to look serious; such an effort is essential in the law-courts; without it, everyone would burst out laughing. Dubouchet compensated for this effort by making the most of the voluptuous pleasures of the court-room. To be able to bellow and fume and choke and mop one's brow and insult and weep and throw oneself around as though one had St Vitus's Dance, with a view to proving the innocence of an individual who has already admitted his guilt to you; to twist facts and falsify documents, to make fun of the victim, to crack jokes at the expense of witnesses - all this with the approbation, nay (here a flourishing of sleeves) nay, the enthusiastic approbation of society - is worth a few sacrifices to a man whose whole philosophy is based on the spirit of derision. Bald, glabrous, with a noble jowl and gold-rimmed spectacles, Dubouchet had the air of a thinker who does not think - a serious betrayal of Pyrrhonism, which deserves better than that. All this is nevertheless to imply that his appearance was nothing if not respectable, except of course when he was threading his way through the trams in the boulevard du Palais, dressed in black peplum and bib, not to mention his decorations. Dubouchet was unpopular, because he had a little too much money, and showed it. And anyone with money is a monster to those without it.
'The hero of my novel,' Costals was saying to him, 'is a sort of idiot who allows himself to be dragged into marriage out of charity for the young lady. After a time he sees that the marriage is obviously harmful to what he calls his opus - I forgot to tell you that my idiot was a literary idiot. He wants a divorce. But he has married an absolute nincompoop of a girl who has no desire to be unfaithful to him, has given him no cause for complaint, and refuses to divorce.'
'I'm afraid there's nothing to be done for your literary idiot if the wife is guiltless and refuses a divorce. Divorce under those circumstances is impossible. They could live apart, but they would still be married.'
'Come, come, Maître Dubouchet! You're not going to tell me there's such a thing in France as a restriction that can't be got round! My so ... my young cousin told me one day that a school-friend of his to whom he had remarked: "I wonder what parents are for?" had answered in a flash: "To be lied to, of course." The same might be said about laws: what are they for, if not for people to sharpen their wits on?'
'Of course there might be a way ... rather an improbable one, but since we're dealing with a novel.... A divorce is granted if the husband can produce in court some document which provides a strong supposition of the wife's infidelity; for example, a letter in which the wife told the husband that she had "had enough of this existence, that it cannot go on, etc." would suggest that her affections are engaged elsewhere. Your idiot could ask the girl, when they're engaged, to write such a letter, which he would keep in his possession and simply put in the post as soon as he had had enough. But is it likely that a fiancée would consent to write that sort of billet-doux? She'd have to be devilish keen to get married, and personally, I should have some qualms about the charac- ter of the young lady in question. But perhaps your heroine is like that?'
'Whichever way it is,' thought Costals, 'whether it's love or a frantic desire to see the thing through, she'll write the letter. I can't see her jibbing at an extra genuflection. What will she think? Probably what is in fact the case: that I love my destiny more than I love her. Once again I shall have put her in the position of knowing where she stands; which is to say that I shall have behaved honestly towards her.'
'Is it a parachute that opens or a parachute that fails to open?' he asked.
'In the normal course of events, it should open.'
'In that case, will you be so kind as to draft such a letter for me. And please weigh your words carefully. I want my idiot to land safe and sound in the luscious meadows of freedom regained.'
'Have you a fountain-pen? I'll dictate. "Dear friend . . ." No, don't let's put "dear friend". Let's begin ex abrupto: "If I write this to you it is because in your presence…'"
'"... I feel I scarcely exist." Perfect, you've hit the right note straight away. Leave a space and I'll fill it in: etcetera, etcetera. And then?'
'"We must face the fact that our experiment has failed. It is true that you always warned me that I should have to take second place in our life, after your work. But I had no idea how that would turn out in reality. I realize now that I mean nothing to you, and ... and ..."'
'"... and, although you try to conceal it from me, with that generosity which I have always admired in you . . ." Forgive me, I'm so used to drafting articles about myself that flattering epithets come naturally to me - it's an irresistible tic ... "you cannot help showing it, because of your natural irritability, with an unconcious cruelty which often stabs me to the heart." I've spelt unconscious wrong, because the young woman is supposed to be in the throes of passion. Besides, one of her principal endowments is not being able to spell.'
'New paragraph', said Dubouchet.
'No, in the throes of passion one doesn't make new paragraphs.'
'"I confess that I can no longer endure this life in which, in order to be a writer's wife, I must cease to be a wife at all."'
'That's too good - people would think at once that I had written it. But leave it: I'll make gibberish of it. Now what we need is for her to insult him a bit. How about this? "You have always thought that my presence would eventually be a burden to you, but I did not imagine that yours would become such a burden to me … "'
'And now the crucial sentence: "... or that I might one day contemplate a life in which the presence of someone other than you would be capable of making me happy. Do not answer this letter. My sole object in writing it is to ensure that you are not taken unawares if what you no doubt wish for were to come about."'
'Do you think that will do?' asked Costals, with the expression of an aeroplane passenger glancing at the frail form of his parachute in its bag.
'If that doesn't work, nothing will.'
'Wait,' said Costals. 'I must sprinkle it with a few womanly spangles.' He put three dots at the end of every other sentence, and an exclamation mark at the end of each of the others. He concluded the final sentence with: 'So there!' Dubouchet laughed.
'Congratulations on the "So there!" It's quite true, when a woman doesn't know how to put her meaning into words, or simply when she has nothing to say at
all, she puts "So there!" There are infinite depths in that "So there!"'
'Allow me to disagree. In my opinion, women write "So there!" when they are particularly proud of having succeeded in expressing what they think or feel. "So there!" is a shout of triumph analogous to the cluck ... cluck ... cluck ... of the hen that has just laid an egg, and at the same time a childish challenge: "That's what I think, do you hear? Full stop. That's that."'
They argued the point a bit, but both were agreed that, however one looked at it, 'So there!' was pregnant with the unfathomable mystery of the fair sex. The bewitching smile, etc., etc., of the eternal Sphinx, etc., glowed adorably, etc., etc., on the face of 'So there!'
Before parting company, they gurgled a bit longer over their superiority, real or illusory:
'So you too,' said Costals, 'refuse to believe in the unfathomable mystery of womanhood? It's funny, all men, when they talk about it in private, are of the same opinion: there isn't a grain of mystery in women. But if they have to write about women, or speak about them in public, in other words if they have to express themselves officially on the subject, they all trot out the same old dithyramb about mysterious Eve. I suspect that on these occasions, acting as social animals, they unconsciously assume the role of heralds and recruiting sergeants for the species. Obviously the species requires women to be overestimated. Where should we be if men began to see women simply for what they are? As I see it, just as man does not desire woman because he finds her beautiful, but proclaims her beautiful in order to justify his desire, in the same way he does not idealize woman because he finds her "mysterious", but proclaims her "mysterious" in order to justify his ideal, an ideal which society, far more than nature, inculcates by every possible means with a view to propagating the species!'
'For thirty years, women have been coming to see me in these chambers, and these are women at the moment of making a clean breast of things. Well, I can tell you, a perceptive man can read the mind of any woman like an open book. He can see all her feelings stirring inside her, like fish behind the glass walls of an aquarium. But however much even the most perceptive woman may hang around the male, watching him furtively, listening at doors, he remains impenetrable to her. One proof of this is the fact that however feebly drawn female characters may sometimes be in novels written by men, they are never as grotesquely feeble as male characters created by lady-novelists.'
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