by Allan Massie
Marcel Pougier spoke to me in Paris last week about a young officer in the Gestapo with whom he is infatuated. He used the word ‘infatuated’; it is his, not mine. He looked at me with the dirty face of a broken angel, and whispered about ‘irresistible cruelty, the surrender to everything in oneself one fears’ – the whisper came to me on a foul breath, stale with brandy, and his hands shook. He spoke for himself, but the eagerness with which he opened his arms to humiliation – haven’t we all experienced just that in the last years?
Yet, with Rupert, it was I who played the part of the Gestapo officer. Or of the inquisitor to whose coming the truly devout heretic looks forward with terrible adoration.
Two nights ago, as I lay with Anne, she looked at my hands, took them in her pale fingers, and said, ‘How dirty your nails are.’ There was a fleck of blood under one of them too.
And in dreams, even when I lie with Anne, I see Rupert, as I once saw him, stretched out naked on the shingle by the lakeside. It is cold, a March wind is blowing from the east, and the daffodils that fringe the wood shiver. His legs are quite white except where they are touched with a buttery sun. He is waiting for the punishment which I refuse to grant him. When he told me that he had made love to my wife, what did he want? Did I please him by offering forgiveness? Insult him? Or was that the punishment he sought? Who can bear to be forgiven? Even by God?
I write this almost automatically, as if another – The Other perhaps – possesses my pen. It is midnight. Tomorrow I have to make a speech to schoolchildren. It is my duty to tell them what France requires of them. I shall fulfil my duty. Nevertheless I have written these papers.
Which it is madness not to destroy.
Yet I know I shall not destroy them.
CHAPTER TEN
THAT PASSAGE, RETROSPECTIVE as it is, Hugh, is leaping ahead of my narrative. Yet I have thought to include it here because I am afraid that you may be revising your previously high opinion of my father, and concluding that he was indeed – as I tried to tell you when we met – a dull dog. That was disingenuous of me, but I had no wish then to find myself obliged to embark on the quest to which you have directed me. I wanted to be left alone with my brandy, my mutterings through the back streets of pacific Geneva. But now that you have forced me to it, I find myself anxious that you shouldn’t begin to be disappointed in my father.
He was disappointed in himself, of course, and Polly was disappointed in him too. As the thirties began to creak like a B-movie that has exhausted inspiration, so Lucien came to regard himself as a superfluous man. He had no sympathy with the mood of France. He lacked any political direction. And his marriage was beginning to disintegrate, far earlier than I had supposed. He was recalled from Berlin in the autumn of 1931, spent two years at the Quai d’Orsay, and then – evidence, as it seemed, of his superiors’ lack of confidence – was offered a posting in South America. He rebelled, for he had become a diplomat to play a part, as he saw it, in European affairs; he had no interest in a conventional career that would see him at the age of fifty-five Ambassador in Paraguay. Polly supported him in this; she had, for different reasons, no more wish than he to exchange Europe for the fringes of the old Spanish Empire. So he resigned from the service, or, to be more exact, requested to be placed en disponibilité.
For the next two years they seem to have lived chiefly at the Château de l’Haye. This was not at all to Polly’s taste, and she would take off for England or Paris several times a year. I suppose she was unfaithful to Lucien on these jaunts. Certainly they were growing apart from each other.
It was in these years that he came to know Maurras, who was a frequent visitor; his photograph used to stand on a table in my grandmother’s drawing room, though I didn’t recognise it myself during that visit I made while at Cambridge. Lucien was impressed by Maurras, but he could not constitute himself a whole-hearted disciple; he saw that the great man’s thinking was confined in the last decades of the nineteenth century; he understood neither Hitler nor Stalin.
As a result of his time in Germany and his continuing friendship with many Germans, especially of course Rupert, Lucien developed an obsessive interest – Hitler. He found almost everything about him repellent.
I know that that statement will be questioned. It is bound to be. Nevertheless it is true. The evidence is, I admit, widely scattered. For the moment, Hugh, I merely ask you to take my word for it.
But consider this also: my father condemned Maurras for his continued immersion in the last century, but the frame of his own mind was cast there also. He retained the idea of the gentleman. He believed that the statesman owed a duty to his social inferiors; and he recognised that Hitler being, as he put it, canaille, could have no grasp of such a concept. Lucien had no objection to authoritarian government, but his rulers were to be Platonic personages.
Letter from Hugh Challefray:
Dear Mr de Balafré: I am more grateful than I can say for what you have sent me. But I do not want the history of the twentieth century. I want to know what sort of man your father was. And the more detail you send, the more obscure he becomes. Do try harder.
Well, this is blunt and exigent, and I have nothing to say in extenuation. Except this, on a postcard.
Hugh: It seems to me the more I write, that my poor father is a pale reflection of the twentieth century. If that’s not what you want, too bad. It’s what you must take if you want to approach understanding. E. de B.
That may quieten him a moment while he struggles to see what sort of sense it makes. But I mean it. It was the history of his time which determined what Lucien became. In saying that, I am not attempting to deny free will. Or am I?
But Hugh’s objection worries me more than I pretend. I have little faith in my own judgement. How could I have?
In the autumn of 1934 Lucien established himself in Paris. He hoped this would appease Polly, on whom he depended more than he knew. Like many nervy men of fluctuating will and some imagination he felt a need for an unreflective and confident companion. Polly’s blithe indifference to everything outside the immediate sphere of her personal interests irritated him, and comforted and strengthened him at the same time. There was much to be said for a wife to whom a spaniel puppy was more important than Hitler’s latest speech. He had accepted that she and his mother were incompatible, and that she could never be happy in Provence; Polly was one of those for whom the South of France already meant the coastal strip.
Colette said to him about this time: ‘Your pretty wife is much wiser than you. She knows that the correct way of making an omelette matters much more than a theory of economics.’ He found this comforting even though Polly was – and has always been – a terrible cook. Not that she needed to cook; they had a maid of all work to do that, or they ate in restaurants. But he liked the symbolic truth and the insight of Colette’s observation. He repeated it often in conversation, and in one of his essays you will find the sentence: ‘Civilisation depends more on the quality of bread than the quality of thought,’ which seems another way of saying the same thing.
But there was more to the move to Paris than an attempt to please Polly and revive his marriage. The two years in Provence had been a bad time for Lucien himself. He thought he was happy to live there, but he found his mother oppressive, and in fact was able to tolerate her company only when his own vitality was low. And in those years he had been, as it were, lying fallow. He didn’t know in which direction his life should move, and he was disturbed by the conviction of failure. He was after all now in sight of forty, his hair had turned grey, there were lines on his face, and he had achieved nothing.
He was casting around for some means of fulfilling himself. He had no desire to return to the Quai d’Orsay and in any case the Foreign Service seemed to have been a false start. Political life did not attract him; the traditions of his family were still strong enough to make it hard for him to see himself as a deputy in the despised Assembly of the shameful Republic. To put it like that e
xaggerated his feeling. He would never have spoken in just such reactionary terms. Yet that was how he felt; social prejudices of family and caste are damnably persistent.
One day he met his old mentor Gaston Hunnot. He used to wonder later if he hadn’t in fact set out to meet him, though unable to bring himself to admit that this was his purpose. At any rate he went to the café where he used to talk with Gaston, where Gaston had introduced him to Spengler (whom by now Lucien had dismissed as a windy rhetorician), and there he found him sitting at the same table where he had held court fifteen years before, and surrounded by what might have seemed to Lucien the same little congregation of disciples if he hadn’t at once realised that their familiarity was of a different order; they weren’t the same people, they were the same age. All at once, though he had been dismayed by the thought of how little progress he had made in his own life, he found himself despising Gaston: to have lived so long and still find your audience in students – wasn’t that a sign of a failure as complete as his own?
Was Gaston pleased to see him? He couldn’t tell. Gaston fell straight away into the old tone of ironical superiority, but now that his old spell was broken, Lucien heard in this the same note of failure which he had diagnosed in his circumstances. He all at once saw Gaston as a wretchedly peripheral person: for all his intellect he remained just where he had been, in the same café chair, with the same cup of coffee in front of him. The man didn’t even look any older. When they were both young, Gaston had worn an air of maturity that made him seem older than his years; now time had slipped by him.
‘So what are you intending to do, now that you are back in Paris?’ Gaston asked. He winked at one of his coterie of admiring girls, as if promising her fun.
‘Oh,’ Lucien said, ‘I’m starting a magazine.’ He hadn’t known this was his intention. ‘Would you care to write for me?’
Gaston blew smoke out of his nostrils.
‘I hardly think,’ he said, ‘that our politics are still sympathetic. I take it there will be politics. You’re not talking of a purely’ – Lucien caught the inverted commas that enclosed the word – ‘purely literary paper.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I think that would be impossible now.’
‘Well,’ Gaston spread butter on his bread, ‘there you are,’ he said. ‘I agree with you on that point – naturally – but I am told that you have become a friend – disciple was the word employed – of Maurras. I hardly think we could discover common ground.’
‘Disciple was the wrong word. I admire Monsieur Maurras. I find much of what he has to say interesting. Nevertheless I don’t believe his politics are applicable. We have to deal in possibilities.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Which in my view rules out not only Maurras, but Marx also. And as for our incompatibility, yes, I grant you that. It’s precisely why I should wish to have contributions from you in my magazine. I seek to establish a forum for serious discussion. I’m no preacher with a message of salvation. And I remember, Gaston, how incisively you used to be able to write, though I regret to have to say that in the sort of magazines where I discover your recent writings, I find an atmosphere which does not encourage you to produce your most intelligent work.’
‘But who are you to judge intelligence? How can you hope to do so when you have no understanding of history?’
‘Oh come, there is more than one form of history, Gaston.’
‘No, this is something to which I don’t have to listen. But I have no wish to be ungenerous. I cannot write for you myself. But there is a young lady here who will, I am sure, be delighted to do so, and whom you will find more agreeable to your sentimental-romantic taste …’
And he gestured to a thin girl with a beaky nose.
‘Mathilde is a poet who finds even Surrealism – what is it you find Surrealism, my dear ..?’
The girl lit a cigarette.
‘As self-indulgent as Marxism.’
‘There you are. Isn’t that quaint? Mathilde, allow me to introduce Lucien de Balafré. Lucien: Mathilde Dournier.’
‘That was how I met him,’ Mathilde told me some twenty years later. ‘In an atmosphere of mockery.’
Do you recall Mathilde, Hugh? She was that woman who had defended my father at that appalling dinner-party given by Mrs Fernie. I had not spoken to her on that occasion, being far too embarrassed. But sometime in my dead years, being in Paris on business, I encountered her again, and, remembering her gallantry at Mrs Fernie’s table, on an impulse introduced myself, and proposed lunch.
She shied away. I persisted. I told her it would mean much to me. Her hand shook as I spoke. At last she consented.
‘But not lunch,’ she said, ‘I am never out and about in the middle of the day.’
‘Dinner then.’
‘No,’ she said again. ‘I can’t bear the idea of meeting someone for a meal. It’s something I haven’t done for too many years. But if you’d like to give me a glass of wine, then I’ll talk to you.’
She directed me to a workers’ café near Les Halles. It was a mean sort of place half-full of men in blue overalls. There were pictures of boxers – one the late Marcel Cerdan – on the smoke-stained walls. One or two of the clients eyed me when I entered. She was sitting in a corner. She wore a thick black jersey and black trousers, and her nails hadn’t been painted or cleaned for several days. They were cracked too.
‘I can’t tell you how I am regretting this,’ she said, ‘I never go out.’
‘What about that reception I met you at?’
‘That was different,’ she said, but didn’t explain why, and called the waiter and asked him to bring two gros rouges.
‘If I had known you at that dinner-party,’ she said, ‘it might have been different. But now – anyone will tell you, I’m just a drunk.’
And she knocked back her wine and at once called for another.
‘There’s no need to be nervous,’ I said: a silly remark.
She looked at me and didn’t speak. As for me, I didn’t know where to begin. The whole thing was absurd. I had no interest in my father. Perhaps I had merely been curious about this woman who disrupted a stuffy party in his defence. And now she turned out to be ‘just a drunk’.
‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ she said. ‘You must know that. There were people who said he had mistresses, even then, and some thought I was one of them. But it wasn’t like that. Our relations were those of editor and protégée. He had a real talent as an editor. You remember that dreadful Philippe Torrance, at the party where we met? Lucien made him, just as I said then. Philippe’s writings were crude, bombastic, utterly absurd in their egotism; yet Lucien saw below the surface. Oh yes, he had true genius. I myself owed so much to him, that is why I am seeing you now.’
‘I scarcely knew him myself,’ I said.
‘Perhaps nobody knew him, not really. He only allowed us to see aspects of him.’
And then, ignoring the second glass of wine for which she had called, she leapt to her feet and, knocking against one of the tables, fled from me. A laugh followed her out of the bar.
But a few weeks later, I had a letter from her – and how it found its way to my London address I don’t know. Here however it is.
Document 7: Letter from Mathilde Dournier, 11 May, 1959
I read in the newspapers yesterday about a case of torture in Algeria, and, no sooner had I done so than I found myself crouched on all fours in the toilet, vomiting like a dog. Then I lay on my bed, realised that I had no money, that there was only one bottle of wine in the apartment, and that I had exhausted my supply of morphine.
So there it is, I said to myself: in Algeria the flower of the French Army, of the officer corps, are applying electrodes to the genitals of Arab boys, and here in this mean room, for which I owe two months’ rent, I am almost entirely without the means of oblivion.
Therefore I am emitting this letter, to the son of my only love and my patron, in the hope – which is a word I have aban
doned – that somehow or other he will find it serviceable, if it should ever find him.
Ah me, it is a confession, the record of the death of talent, and, I suppose, some would say, evidence of obsession.
I do not know where to begin and I do not know if I can bring this to a conclusion. As the morphine ebbs away, I grow ever more confused and nervous.
Let me start with the colour ‘grey’, which is the colour of the city, of my dreams and of the suit which Lucien was wearing. And I am a grey woman now, whose life is measured out in café saucers. But I wasn’t then. I used to dress in red. Flaming red blouses and even skirts. He joked about that: ‘Clothes are one thing, politics another.’ That was the nearest to a joke I ever heard from him. He wasn’t a laugher. I liked that. So much of my life had been passed among folk who saw a laugh in everything, and I was tired of such falsity. Humour is the devil’s device to encourage us to tolerate the mess he has made of God’s world, and the mischief he does there. The Christian view of life without God is tragic. I insisted on that to Lucien, and he did not deny me.
But I am rambling. I intended to set this out for you in orderly fashion. So let me try again. At the beginning.
I was so tired of Gaston Hunnot. For two years I had thought him wonderful, so wonderful I all but let him enter my bed. I stopped short of that because I have never been able to bear being touched. One of the things I adored about Lucien was that he never touched me, he was as fastidious as me.
Gaston tried to corrupt me. He was like so many in France then – why do I say only ‘then’? – a corrupter by nature. How deep was his Communism? I could never decide, have never been able to. It pleased him to be a rebel, but such an established one. He knew he was certain always to have a new succession of disciples every year, a little claque of bourgeois innocents who liked the idea of making society rock. Hunnot played the Bohemian, but he lived in a pension and never failed to pay the rent. Why should he have failed? He had his salary as well as whatever he gained from his articles, many of which, I must tell you, were in fact written by the disciples, Gaston merely revising them and adding those characteristic turns of phrase which we called – admiringly – Hunnotismes. Oh, we were so proud of the Master’s Hunnotismes.