The Hippogriff

by Henri de Montherlant

  They went on gurgling a bit longer, but enough is enough. Whatever the truth may be, whether or not there is a mystery about women, there is certainly a mystery about men. The mystery about men is how women can ever love them.

  A quarter of an hour later, back in his flat. A sudden shift from the sordid to the ethereal, from juridico-burlesque foxi- ness to the head of this woman thrown back in abandon and her love-tormented face.

  Afterwards:

  'I've seen my lawyer, and he said to me: "There is one way in which your hero might escape" (I pretended it had to do with the hero of a novel I'm writing) "if the experiment fails. But your heroine would have to be a girl who loved him deeply and trusted him implicitly, the kind of girl you never come across nowadays, a virgin of antiquity, a Corneille heroine. Is that what she's like in your book?" I told him that although the girl in my book was not strictly a Corneille heroine, there was nothing grand and generous that she was not prepared to do. "Well then," he said, "this is the way."'

  He explained the whole thing to her and showed her the letter. He felt a little ashamed, and as they were sitting in armchairs, he leant back in his so that she should not see his face at that moment, or perhaps so that he should not see hers. But she turned towards him with a smile:

  'I get it: it's "on appro".'

  'On appro?'

  'When something's delivered to you which you've bought in a big store, and you no longer want it, you can send it back. That's what they call "on appro" - on approval.'

  'What a sublime girl you are,' he said, touched that she should take it so calmly. I called it a parachute-letter; so now let's call it an appro-parachute. Do you love me enough, are you really Cornelian enough, to write me such a letter?'

  'Yes,' she said in her composed voice.

  'Thank you. You are a docile person, and that's how I like women to be. That's how I should like you to be always. I want you to be like a cheich to me. Cheichs are Arab scarves which can be folded in all sorts of ways and which you can do whatever you like with. The Arabs are never without them: their cheichs serve them alternately as scarves, hats, towels, ropes, veils, filters, bags, fly-whisks, belts, handkerchiefs, underpants, or pillows. I haven't brought you up to my level so that you should be anything else but me. I want you to be me, and nothing else. So that I shall never have occasion to mistrust you. So that I shall never grow tired of you.'

  The draft of the letter lay on the table. 'I ought to get her to write it at once.' But although he had dared to take the first step, he did not dare take the second, his supply of effrontery having run out for the time being. It would recharge itself, but it needed a bit of time, as when men expend their vital fluid. Moreover, he had only his own note-paper there, or the typing paper on which he wrote his manuscripts, and these would be recognized as his by the court. What was needed was either her own, or any recognizably 'feminine' - i.e. flashy - note-paper. So they talked of other things.

  He said to himself: 'Is she doing it out of love for me, or simply out of hippogriffic passion? Is she amorous or ambitious? In any case it doesn't matter; I'm not going to kill myself prospecting a human soul. If it's love, it's admirable, and it might almost make me decide to marry. If it's ambition, she's a monster, and it would be interesting to live with a monster.'

  'Things are going well for you,' he said to her on the doorstep.

  Costals' Diary

  23 August - The situation I've got myself into in the past five weeks is truly hellish: not loving her enough to take the plunge, but enough to suffer from not taking it. Yesterday, as we parted, I said to her: 'Things are going well for you.' When I woke up this morning everything was in the melting pot again. For five weeks, no peace of mind, no taste for anything. My life at once frittered away and blocked up. Every morning in a different mood, and at the mercy of the most trifling influence. If I go to the window and see a pretty face in the avenue, I cry: 'Abandon the pursuit of wenches? Oh, no, it's too frightful!' An item in a newspaper about a young peasant who in answer to the mayor's fateful question: 'Do you take this woman...?' replies 'No,' thus, the reporter adds, 'avoiding the irreparable', reminds me of the extent to which 'universal wisdom' finds that it really is something irreparable. Now I am at the no stage. A moment later, I remember something she said, or her plush rabbit, and I turn round and zoom back towards yes. This perpetual see-saw is killing me. My mood changes literally from minute to minute. One moment I'm frightened of her, of her mother, of all her family, of the whole horrible network; the next I'm puffed out like a spinnaker, thinking how happy I can make her. (I used to have mistresses to make me happy. I shall be taking a wife to make her happy. Tit for tat.) At the moment of writing, what I should like is to clear out without seeing her again, go to Morocco, spend three or four months there with my beloved Rhadidja, and on my return take Solange as my mistress, nothing more. The multiplicity and confusion of my desires and impulses, the speed with which they succeed one another, are such that I find it impossible to express them.

  Whatever the final decision, doom is upon me for a long time to come. If I marry her, this doom is an absolute certainty. If I don't, I shall have regained my freedom but will always be plagued by remorse for having made her suffer, by the thought that I might have been happier with her, by an uneasy feeling, as long as she remains unmarried, that it is still not too late …

  The train is carrying me off.... The same mixed feelings - apprehension and attraction - that I had in the train which carried me for the first time to the battlefront.

  This is the most bourgeois of dramas. If I turned it into a novel, it would be appallingly dull and prosaic, without the slightest relief. It could not be otherwise, since it is in the nature of the nuptial tie to be sordid. The crisis of adolescence, the crisis of war (should I do the decent thing?), the crisis resulting from a surfeit of pleasure, the crisis arising from my duty to my work when all I wanted was to live, simply to live - all my crises have been in a sense honourable. But this one? This one is Triplepatte. [A famous comedy by Tristan Bernard. Triplepatte is the personification of the man who cannot make up his mind (Translator's note)] Precisely, I am Triplepatte. And yet this drama too has a certain nobility: on the one hand, because it is my work that I want to safeguard, and on the other because all the trouble arises from my reluctance to hurt Solange. This does not, however, lift it above the level of the sordid. The fact of marriage corrupts everything.

  24 August - I want you to forget me and I want you not to forget me. When you are not tender, I am hurt; when you are, I think you calculating. Because you are placid I call you cold; if you were warm I should call you gushing. It is I who am the element of torment between us, and it has never "been anything else but me.

  I, whose only desire is to be like the close-cropped grass on which the cows lay their muzzles without grazing.

  One always falls ill on a Sunday, when chemists are shut and doctors on the spree. One always needs urgent legal advice in August, when Paris is empty. Horrible August of 1927! In the Jardin des Plantes - one of the disgraces of France - the bear pads to and fro without a moment's respite, and the lion stands with lacklustre eyes swaying from paw to paw. Like these beasts that confinement and monomania have turned into neurotics, Costals too, cooped up in the cage of a love he does not feel, sways from side to side. Our swaggering hero, to put it bluntly, is now a poor devil who needs advice, who needs to be given a lead. That's what the idea of marriage has done to him! But why blame the emptiness of Paris for his failure to find people who might help him? His pride alone is to blame. Even if Paris were full, his plight would be the same. Expose his ridiculous situation to a friend or relation - never! Allow himself to be seen in this state, he who has always been so much his own master - never! Out of pride, he would rather commit an act of folly, perhaps irreparable, without involving anyone else, than avoid it by taking advice from someone he trusts. This marriage is only possible in one form: instantaneous marriage. At one go, as one gulps down
a purgative.

  However, at the end of the month he weakened. He felt such a need to discuss it all with someone, anyone.... To go and say to Maître Dubouchet: 'I've got a hero for a novel who ..was no longer enough. He must say outright, to a man of experience, 'Look here, I'm contemplating getting married in such and such circumstances … What do you advise?' And then, childishly, as believers confess to a priest because of the secrecy of the confessional and also because they believe him to be a kind and helpful man, Costals told himself that he must 'confess all' to Dubouchet, who would also be bound by professional secrecy, and was accustomed by his profession to 'lend an ear' to people's troubles. He struggled with himself, decided to telephone him, was delighted to find that the barrister was out till one, which gave him two hours' respite, telephoned again at one, to be told by the maid that Monsieur had gone away on holiday and would not be back for three weeks.

  Loneliness closed round him again. At all costs he must break out of this circle! If a man of law confirmed that the parachute-letter would automatically get him a divorce, what risk would he be running? A few months of tribulation. He thought of his own solicitor, telephoned him, and made an appointment for five o'clock. Then remembered that his solicitor acted for the whole family, and if he were to hear in a few months' time that Costals had married, he would spread the story of the parachute-letter all over the place. Costals telephoned to cancel the appointment.

  Then he remembered a lawyer whom he had button-holed in connection with some literary litigation, and who did not know his family. Telephone. The lawyer was on holiday. ('Always loafing around,' grumbled Costals, who spent the whole year on holiday.) But the head clerk could see him. Appointment.

  Custom demands that the chambers of French solicitors should always be extremely dusty and ill-kept, as if thereby to guarantee the soundness of the firm and to warn one not to judge by appearances in these slum-sanctuaries. Maître S.'s chambers conformed to custom. In a wicker armchair, a relic, perhaps, of some third-rate boarding-house, where it had been worn down by the backsides of generations of governesses, Costals awaited his turn, glowing with humility.

  The head clerk in Maître S.'s chambers, fifty-eight years old (fifty-four to the ladies), was repulsive from head to foot - or let's say from head to navel, for, sitting at his desk, he was visible only thus far. His hair was outrageously dyed and curled and heavily parted in the middle, his moustaches, also dyed, were turned up in the old style. Behind an ill-fitting steel-rimmed pince-nez, his eyes oscillated continually between petty tyranny and fear. His nose was repulsive, both bulbous and snub. His mouth was repulsive, warped at the edges, shiny and wet with kissings and suckings and lickings - a mouth doomed to cancer in three years; with a cigarette butt dangling from it. His flesh bulged over his collar, which was of celluloid, cracked at the corners. His chin had such dimples, my dear! There was a tie-pin stuck in the very knot of his tie. He was wearing two waistcoats (in August). He had a peevish, shifty, sidelong look, suggesting servility with superiors, ferocity with small fry, and cheap restaurants where people stuff the two remaining nuts in their pockets because nothing must be left, and where they furtively paw the waitresses and threaten to have them kicked out if they refuse to co-operate. He had the air of a minor official in a government office - one of those government offices no self-respecting person would be seen dead in.

  Costals gave him the whole rigmarole about the hero of his novel and the parachute-letter. When he had finished, the fellow burst out laughing:

  'The letter your barrister friend dictated to you belongs to the realm of fantasy. Far from being of any use to your character, it will tell against him. It's obvious that the wife, if she doesn't want the divorce, will make a clean breast of the whole thing and explain how the letter came to be written.'

  'But wouldn't the court find it an improbable story?'

  'They wouldn't find it improbable, because your hero is a literary man,' said the head clerk, who knew who he was dealing with. 'In any case, their suspicions would be aroused. They would institute an enquiry, from which it would emerge that the wife's putative lover does not exist and that the whole thing was fabricated in advance. Then the famous letter would be pronounced invalid, and the court would refuse to grant a divorce, if only to teach this too far-sighted husband a lesson. Indeed, the latter might well be charged with contempt of court. No, sir, with all due respect to your friend, the whole thing doesn't hold water. Imaginative, I grant you - barristers are never lacking in imagination. But otherwise. ...'

  Costals was shattered. If there was no emergency exit from the marriage, there could be no question of proceeding with it. And he looked at this wretched creature, who was nevertheless the man in the know, the man on whom the yes or no of his destiny hung, the yes or no of Solange's; he looked at him, and he felt very humble in front of him, humble and sad as a Friendly Society badge.

  'But can I rely on what he says?' His doubts were justifiable, for there was no lack of errors in the head clerk's observations (it would be tedious to enumerate them). 'After having checked the barrister's statements with the solicitor's clerk, I now ought to check the solicitor's clerk with the solicitor himself. Then I should get Counsel's opinion on what the solicitor says. Oh, yes, we've got plenty of people to fall back on.' In the same way, the man who has just been told by Dr A. that he has cancer, goes on to consult Dr B., who tells him he is perfectly healthy. Then he rushes off to consult Dr C., who tells him it isn't cancer but TB. Such divergences are in all probability part of the harmony of nature: three thermometers on the walls of your room, consulted simultaneously, will never show the same temperature. 'Allah alone knows the truth.'

  Then a strange thing happened: our hero, who was always more or less intoxicated with himself, always more or less of a firebrand, stooped to an unparalleled humiliation in his need for his problem to be taken seriously and for someone to come to his rescue: he put himself entirely into the hands of this unspeakable creature.

  'Listen, monsieur, I might as well tell you the truth: the person concerned is not a character in a novel, it's me.'

  The head clerk moved his pince-nez and stared at Costals.

  'This letter business must seem to you in rather bad taste. But the young woman, I assure you, is beyond reproach. I imagine she agreed to it out of love for me; people are so strange! And the young woman's family, too, is an excellent one. The grandfather was a public prosecutor. The father was one of the founders of the Olympic Games, and a Commander of the Legion of Honour....'

  The head clerk bowed slightly, as though to say: 'Congratulations. I see we're moving in the best circles.' In spite of his distress (the word is not too strong) the old Costals, Costals the rake, had been unable to suppress a secret smile on conferring the red ribbon on M. Dandillot.

  'Mind you. I have no desire to get married,' continued the writer, to whom the very idea of marriage seemed so ridiculous that he could not help pleading extenuating circumstances, even in front of this shifty stranger. 'I'm doing it to please the young lady...'

  'Beware!' the head clerk broke in severely. 'I tell you: beware! I consider that I should be failing in my duty if I didn't put you on your guard against a marriage undertaken in such conditions.'

  'Ah, don't I know it! You've no need to tell me this marriage is sheer madness. I never stop telling the girl so. And that is precisely why the question of the efficacy of this letter is so important to me. Mark you, the young lady is prepared to make a solemn promise that she will agree to a divorce - by whatever farce we can think up - if she sees that such a life is unbearable to me.'

  'Well, of course, any girl will make such a promise, beforehand. But after! ... Aren't you aware of the female talent for constantly going back on what has been settled?'

  'Woman aren't all as bad as that,' said Costals, who disliked hearing women spoken ill of, as though he considered that his own special province.

  'And don't you know the old adage: "All's fair in marriage
"? There's no such thing as a marriage in which one of the partners hasn't been more or less unfaithful to the other. In this business the worst is possible, and without ever going beyond the bounds of perfect respectability.'

  'Insolent swine!' thought Costals. 'Did I come here to listen to this? Those horrible maxims! I came here to be encouraged to marry.' He glanced at the chief clerk's ring-finger, and saw that, like Dubouchet, he was wearing a wedding ring. 'Ah, so they're all married! They speak from experience! Besides, one has only to look at them to see marriage written all over their faces.'

  'So, no precaution is guaranteed effective. One has to set sail without a lifeboat.'

  'No precaution is guaranteed effective. But wait, it's quite simple, I'll show you the Civil Code … '

  'Oh no, not that! If I put my nose into the Civil Code I'd go completely mad. I'm well on the way already: that's quite enough.'

  'Moreover, believe me, it's always those who take most precautions who are the first to be gulled. Anyone who wants to get married should blindfold himself and dive in without a second thought.'

  'Do you mind if I make a note of the information you've given me?'

  'Not at all. Here's pen and paper.'

  Costals jotted down: 'Repulsive from head to foot. Hair heavily parted. Eyes continually shifting between petty tyranny and fear. Wet, slobbery mouth. Flesh bulging over his celluloid collar.' He would put the character into one of his novels.