Eveline had just retreated, almost disappearing in a mist of indifference. I had a scornful smile on my lips again, addressed to Laurence, and already I saw clearly all the importance she had acquired in my eyes in the last hour. Rapidly, a series of questions and answers succeeded one another within me.
Had I thought about marrying her? No, never. But I might have thought about it. I professed the opinion that one ought only to marry a woman who has been one’s mistress, with whom one has experimented in amour. I had paid court to Laurence, haphazardly, to see what would happen. No concern of responsibility had weighed upon me, even for a second. Now, here was the event that proved me right. First of all, is the concern of responsibility not an absurd trap that tends to restrict any agreeable action? One would never do anything if one thought about the consequences of one’s actions. Then too, who can tell how things are linked together. Is not the greatest service one can render someone that of ridding them of the burden of family?
Is it even possible, I said to myself then, to feel love for someone? No, no, sensual, purely sensual. And I started tapping with my fingers on the greasy marble of the table, darting a long glance into the obscurity of the Rue Ballu...
And then, finally, her mother. It was necessary to think about heredity...
And I reconstituted what I knew about Laurence’s history.
A few years earlier, Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf had been struck by a sort of spiritual revelation. The dead had suddenly started talking to him through the intermediary of small tables, by means of raps in the walls. That had led to a complete change in his character and way of life. He had abandoned the women for whom he had always had an excessive taste, in order to devote himself entirely to his wife, a lay saint who lived in the worshipful amour of her own hearth, and a merciless hatred for everything she placed under the label “immoral.” And a notion of duty, new for him, had abruptly irrupted into his soul. It was necessary to tell the truth, to accomplish disinterested actions.
Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf confessed to his wife the existence of a natural daughter that he had had with a casual mistress he had immediately abandoned, and of whom he had not wanted to hear any further mention. He had decided that the child, who was then eight years old, would be reclaimed from her mother in order to be regenerated by good examples and contact with the moral perfection of Eveline, her half-sister. It appeared that the mother had consented without difficulty and had renounced all her rights over her daughter, doubtless thinking, like everyone else, that she would ensure her daughter’s wellbeing by assuring her of wealth.
Between the little girl “with bad instincts” and the virtuous Madame de Saint-Aygulf a struggle had been engaged—a struggle of which I only knew details by way of a few conversations with Madame Saint-Aygulf or brief confidences on Laurence’s part. In that struggle, Laurence had been vanquished and tamed. It seemed that Madame de Saint-Aygulf had seen to it with a redoubtable solicitude that the soul emerged from “the most abject depths of society” was recast and reshaped in accordance with her law.
“It’s justice that has the most action on children,” she said to me once, talking to me about that period of her life. “I’ve never made a gift to Eveline without making exactly the same gift to Laurence.”
But she did not tell me whether she had been able to do so with the same love.
Madame de Saint-Aygulf had no other religion than that of the family, but she believed in a kind of Providence that punishes the wicked and recompenses the good.
“It’s in watching those two children grow up,” she said to me on another occasion, “that I’ve seen most clearly how equitable Providence is for everyone. The moral purity of Eveline is transformed into facial beauty and bodily grace, whereas all the ugliness of original sin took possession of Laurence’s features.”
That ugliness was to be transformed, however. Contained desire magnified the eyes. Luminous teeth gave the flesh of the lips a lightness of laughter that animated the excessively wide visage over the excessively short neck. The hair grew in all directions and brightened with ruddy gleams.
“At fourteen,” said Madame Saint-Aygulf, again, “Laurence developed with her breasts a light tawny down on the arms and the perpetual mobility of her features, an expression of disquieting animality that caused me to experience the sentiment of a pollution in her presence. It was at that moment that it was necessary for me, at all costs, to triumph over the Beast.”
Madame Saint-Aygulf had thought that the irremediably bad instincts of the Beast could only be vanquished by the iron discipline of a house of special education, where manual labor was incessantly alternated with that of the mind. She had placed Laurence there, and she had remained there until her seventeenth year, only emerging therefrom because Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf had thought he discerned in certain raps struck by a table the indication of that deliverance.
It was at that moment that I saw her for the first time. The contact with brutality, the suffering and the absence of pity had taught her hypocrisy.
Madame de Saint-Aygulf said of her: “It’s necessary to beware of dormant waters.” And she added, with an anxious expression: “What might become of her later?”
But she had another source of anxiety much graver. Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf, increasingly stunned by what he did not understand, had made his house a center for all spiritualist, Rosicrucian, Gnostic and neo-Platonist groups. Seekers of the philosopher’s stone, Hindu mages, and passing fakirs had been welcome there. He had just founded, with my old friend Michel Kotzebue and myself, a new group, that of Essenes, and we were ardently laying down the foundation of a new religion.
Until then, Madame de Saint-Aygulf had endured, as a hostile and patient spectator, what she called her husband’s follies. She had thought that those follies had a normal character, since they had brought Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf back to the true God, which was the family. But she saw with alarm her daughter Eveline sharing her father’s reveries, falling into a mysticism incomprehensible for her.
At first she attempted to struggle against an enemy more redoubtable than Laurence’s bad instincts and only found allied therein what she still called the Beast. She sought belatedly to penetrate the secrets of the Essene religion in order to be able to demonstrate its absurdity to her daughter. Reading a few books, a few conversations with me and Michel Kotzebue, struck her with a dolorous surprise by informing her about the first Essenes.
Hermits who lived on the shore of the Dead Sea! So-called saints who, in certain epochs, sent Messiahs into the world to instruct it. She retained above all the fact that they practiced communism, and she attached herself to ridiculous details in order to try to laugh at it. A patch of oil on their white robe was considered by them as an opprobrium! They only ever spit while turning to the left! Doubtless crackpots of the same kind as her husband. But they were also revolutionaries. Did the world have any need for the instruction of a Messiah? Were the established rules not sufficient?
She perceived that those primitive Essenes, those ascetics whom one might have believed forever dormant on the shore of the Dead Sea, in the stony earth of the land of Moab, had conserved through the centuries a strange power over her daughter’s mind. For them alone, Eveline had amour. Did they not offer her a veneration that was not due to her parents?
Eveline sometimes forgot herself in her mother’s presence and pronounced mysterious words, such as “I’m a candidate for baptism.” And when she was told that the Essenes of the time of Jesus Christ had disappeared a long time ago, she smiled, shrugged her shoulders and made it understood that they were still present, and that they might appear at any moment to those who believed in them.
It was for some time a curious characteristic of that house, and also its charm: that possibility of seeing a grave old man in an immaterial linen robe appear behind a curtain or by the movement of a door, come to deliver some sage instruction.
Madame de Saint-Aygulf was exasperated by only having Laurence to sup
port her in her attacks. She also suffered in thinking that her invisible enemies had professed a purity far above the one she flattered herself in having. Thus, she had gone backwards. By a change of direction whose mechanism she could not grasp, she, the apostle of all the virtues, had become in her own house a coarse creature, the ally of the Beast.
She was unable to measure for long the extent of that monstrous contradiction. Hazard determined that I was a witness to the last scene of the drama, which coincided with the first of another story far more important to me: the dining room scene.
Madame Saint-Aygulf, afflicted for a long time by a malady of the heart that was treated by her husband, had had two successive crises and seemed to be at the final extremity. I had gone to obtain news of her several times, in spite of my habit of writing a letter in such circumstances in which I announced that I was leaving Paris for a while. I had thought that, in the disarray of the house, I might find an opportunity to talk more intimately with Eveline or Laurence.
It was a Friday at six o’clock in the afternoon. I had been shown in immediately. I had understood from something in the urgent attitude of the domestic, the fact that the electric light on the staircase was not lit, as usual, and the troubled quality of the already funereal atmosphere, that something serious must be happening.
Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf joined me in the drawing room. He needed to talk to someone, he said, to respire other air than that of the sick-room. I saw in his eyes that he regretted having allowed too much pleasure to show on seeing someone from outside. I understood that he was breaking his voice artificially and doing it very poorly, and I sensed his absence of real grief so strongly that I nearly told him to speak like everyone else.
“I was warned long ago by my guides; I’m going to lose my dear wife,” he said.
That was not true; the malady was unexpected for him. He did not cherish his wife at all. He had always feared her, as an angel without grace, of a hearth without joy.
He was very impressed by the fact that Madame de Saint-Aygulf was considering death without terror. He professed the simplistic idea that only those who have faith are capable of not fearing death. He had even made use of the threat of the beyond to diminish the power of the flat-haired tyrant. Well, he could not get over it. In those solemn moments, Madame de Saint-Aygulf had not ceased to dismiss as culpable nonsense the theories of the immortality of the soul that he thought it his duty to formulate anew. Thus, the annihilation that he feared so much for himself did not frighten his wife. I understood that he would have preferred to see her final hours poisoned by terror. He almost allowed his disappointment to burst forth.
He begged me to stay. He went out and then came back. He made me party to his astonishment. Madame de Saint-Aygulf had, it appeared, taken Eveline’s hand in hers, raised herself up slightly, issued in a changed voice the peremptory order to expel all the gardeners who had invaded her room, and wanted to force her child to labor the earth like peasants.
We only had an explanation of that order later.
A few days before, Eveline had described to her mother the life of the Essenes between their monasteries of stone and the shores of the Dead Sea. When they were not plunged in meditation, she had told her, they devoted themselves to the work of gardening, which they considered as the best exercise for elevating the mind. Madame de Saint-Aygulf had had a vision of sordid workmen carrying spades and rakes drawing her beloved daughter alongside the somber waters and bituminous cliffs in an accursed landscape.
A great physician called in consultation had just arrived. I tried to take my leave. Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf, desirous of keeping with him someone who was not wearing on his person the uniform of dolor that he had donned himself, said to me as he pushed me into the dining room: “Laurence will keep you company.”
Laurence was indeed sitting there, beside a large somber sideboard, reading a book that she closed when I came in. She stood up. The ennui painted on her features disappeared on seeing me. She spoke to me without giving her voice the grave tone that everyone else in the house had. I knew what a grim and justified hatred she nurtured for Madame de Saint-Aygulf, and I was secretly grateful to her for not allowing a conventional sadness to appear.
Night had fallen completely. It was the commencement of spring, and it was warm enough for the window to be open. That window overlooked one of those little Parisian gardens surrounded by walls in which there are four trees and two flower-beds. A vegetal odor emerged from the ground that we sensed at the same time. All our words had been banal. I even thought it appropriate to attenuate by the tone anything that might have been interpreted as amiable or tender. I am sure that Laurence had no hidden agenda until the moment when we approached the window together. Then, without knowing why, I put my arm around Laurence’s waist, but scarcely touching it. That gesture, strictly speaking, might have passed for a mark of the amity, slightly more affectionate than usual, that one ought to show in dolorous circumstances.
Abruptly, Laurence slid into my arms. She was against me, and I hugged her without knowing quite how it had come about, and what was personal to me in the gesture. Her lips crushed mine, melted, and I then felt materially something that was her joy, her terrible and inadmissible joy, which no one ought to know, but which took for its form of expression that kiss full of delight.
During the few months that had followed the death of Madame de Saint-Aygulf, Laurence had scarcely given the appearance of remembering the bond that that rapid embrace had created between us in the dining room, between the somber sideboard and the odorous garden. And now I was here, at the corner of the Rue Ballu and the Square Vintimille, and Laurence was perhaps embracing someone other than me with the same ardor.
It was scarcely half an hour since I had sat down and reflected when a taxi stopped some distance away. I perceived someone confusedly who descended from it. As if the arrival of the taxi were a sort of signal, a wave of discouragement passed over me. I summoned the waiter and paid for my beer. Laurence would doubtless only emerge at an advanced hour of the night. I was tired. I was sad. What was the point in waiting?
I had risen to my feet, hesitant as to what I ought to do, and in the same second, Laurence’s face glided past me, framed by the window in the door of the taxi. She was alone. She did not see me. Doubtless someone had sent the taxi to fetch her. It was going extraordinarily quickly, for I was scarcely conscious of its passage and it had already turned into the Square Vintimille and disappeared.
I was discontented with myself. I thought about the lie of certain novels in which one sees heroic policemen following other individuals for entire days without ever being in default. I went back up the Rue Ballu. All the doors were silent and mute. Deep inside, a joyful voice was beginning to formulate vaguely the thought that a passionate mistress, if she comes to see her lover at midnight, stays for longer than half an hour.
My fatigue had increased abruptly, at the same time as a desperate desire not to go home. I went back in the direction of the Rue Blanche and sat down on the terrace of the Brasserie Romano with I know not what hope of diversion. At the table next to mine a woman was writing a letter on lined paper, of the format that makes one think of anonymous letters. All the men had taken off their hats, as if for a ceremony, but it was only because of the heat. A beggar was staring at me as if he knew me.
Someone touched me lightly on the shoulder with a fingertip. I do not like such unexpected contacts and I almost bounded in my chair.
I had before me Michel Kotzebue. He extended a limp hand to me, and as was his habit, instead of looking me in the face, he examined my right shoulder as if a precious object posed there were on the point of falling off.
I was motionless. I had heard mention several times that he lived in the vicinity of the Place Blanche. Was it not the Rue Ballu?
For a long time Michel Kotzebue had worn the vulgarity of his features like a mask scarcely suitable for a sensitive and religious individual. One grew accustomed to it at len
gth. I had known him long ago in the Latin Quarter, poverty-stricken, when he arrived from Austria, his country of origin, and was preparing for examinations in theology. I had met him again fifteen years later, living in style and having become the great man of an entire milieu in which a few people even addressed him as Monseigneur. It was said that he gave himself the title of Bishop of the Essene religion. An enormous amethyst that he wore on his left hand was the evidence of it.
My presence never seemed to be agreeable to him. I thought that he did not like to rediscover a witness of a forgotten time in which he had sometimes been a joyful companion, very different from what he was today. We had addressed one another as tu in that era. He had asked me to say vous, deeming that it was more appropriate because of his title of Bishop. I had accepted, and he had been sufficiently indelicate to continue to address me as tu. He knew, however, how to talk very loudly and for a long time. He was reputed to be a charlatan and I had come to believe that he was one, but he had a faculty of losing himself in a certain sadness of an elevated order that enabled him to be considered as a superior man.
His face had not darkened, as usual, on seeing me and he sat down rather heavily on a chair before I had even said: “Would you like to have a drink with me?”
He ordered a liqueur, specifying that he wanted it in a wine-glass, and he murmured in a low voice, with a sideways glance that did not escape me: “Nothing is sadder than a failed evening.”
Failed is a word that I cannot abide. It immediately caused me to look back on myself, over the stages of my life, on my fruitless attempts to succeed in the various arts that I had, by turns, loved passionately and abandoned. I thought that he had pronounced the word deliberately. But no, he was looking to the right and left at the people around him.
Then I asked him the only important question: “You live near here, don’t you?”
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