for me in _The Counterfeiters_ can have kept on good terms with
his sister and yet not have known her children. I have always had the
greatest difficulty in tampering with real facts. Even to alter the
colour of a person’s hair seems to me a piece of cheating which must
lessen the verisimilitude of the truth. Everything hangs together and
I always feel such a subtle interdependence between all the facts
life offers me, that it seems to me impossible to change a single
one without modifying the whole. And yet I can hardly explain that
this boy’s mother is only my half-sister by a first marriage of my
father’s; that I never saw her during the whole time my parents were
alive; that we were brought into contact by business relating to
the property they left.... All this is indispensable, however, and I
don’t see what else I can invent in order to avoid being indiscreet.
I knew that my half-sister had three sons; I had met the eldest--a
medical student--but I had caught only a sight even of him, as he has
been obliged to interrupt his studies on account of a threatening of
tuberculosis and has gone to some place in the South for treatment.
The two others were never there when I went to see Pauline; the one
who was now before me was certainly the youngest. I showed no trace
of astonishment, but, taking an abrupt leave of young George after
learning that he was going home to lunch, I jumped into a taxi in order
to get to Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs before him. I expected that at this
hour of the morning Pauline would keep me to lunch--which was exactly
what happened; I had brought away a copy of my book from Perrin’s, and
made up my mind to present it to her as an excuse for my unexpected
visit.
It was the first time I had taken a meal at Pauline’s. I was wrong to
fight shy of my brother-in-law. I can hardly believe that he is a very
remarkable jurist, but when we are together he has the sense to keep
off his shop as much as I off mine, so that we get on very well.
Naturally when I got there that morning I did not breathe a word of my
recent meeting:
“It will give me an opportunity, I hope, of making my nephews’
acquaintance,” I said, when Pauline asked me to stay to lunch. “For,
you know, there are two of them I have never met.”
“Olivier will be a little late,” she said; “he has a lesson; we will
begin lunch without him. But I’ve just heard George come in, I’ll call
him.” And going to the door of the adjoining room, “George,” she said,
“come and say ‘how-do-you-do’ to your uncle.”
The boy came up and held out his hand. I kissed him ... children’s
power of dissembling fills me with amazement--he showed no surprise;
one would have supposed he did not recognize me. He simply blushed
deeply; but his mother must have thought it was from shyness. I
suspected he was embarrassed at this meeting with the morning’s
‘_tec_,’ for he left us almost immediately and went back to the
next room--the dining-room, which I understood is used by the boys as a
schoolroom between meals. He reappeared, however, shortly after, when
his father came into the room, and took advantage of the moment when
we were going into the dining-room, to come up to me and seize hold of
my hand without his parents’ seeing. At first I thought it was a sign
of good fellowship which amused me, but no! He opened my hand as I was
clasping his, slipped into it a little note which he had obviously just
written, then closed my fingers over it and gave them a tight squeeze.
Needless to say I played up to him; I hid the little note in my pocket
and it was not till after lunch that I was able to take it out. This is
what I read:
“_If you tell my parents the story of the book, I shall_” (he had
crossed out “_detest you_”) “_say that you solicited me_.”
And at the bottom of the page:
“_I come out of school every morning at 10 o’clock._”
Interrupted yesterday by a visit from X. His conversation upset me
considerably.
Have been reflecting a great deal on what X. said. He knows nothing
about my life, but I gave him a long account of the plan of my
_Counterfeiters_. His advice is always salutary, because his point
of view is different from mine. He is afraid that my work may be too
factitious, that I am in danger of letting go the real subject for the
shadow of the subject in my brain. What makes me uneasy is to feel that
life (my life) at this juncture is parting company from my work, and my
work moving away from my life. But I couldn’t say that to him. Up till
now--as is right--my tastes, my feelings, my personal experiences have
all gone to feed my writings; in my best contrived phrases I still felt
the beating of my heart. But henceforth the link is broken between what
I think and what I feel. And I wonder whether this impediment which
prevents my heart from speaking is not the real cause that is driving
my work into abstraction and artificiality. As I was reflecting on
this, the meaning of the fable of Apollo and Daphne suddenly flashed
upon me: happy, thought I, the man who can clasp in one and the same
embrace the laurel and the object of his love.
I related my meeting with George at such length that I was obliged to
stop at the moment when Olivier came on the scene. I began this tale
only to speak of him and I have managed to speak only of George. But
now that the moment has come to speak of Olivier I understand that it
was desire to defer that moment which was the cause of all my slowness.
As soon as I saw him that first day, as soon as he sat down to the
family meal, at my first look--or rather at _his_ first look--I
felt that look of his take possession of me wholly, and that my life
was no longer mine to dispose of.
Pauline presses me to go and see her oftener. She begs me urgently to
interest myself in her boys. She gives me to understand that their
father knows very little about them. The more I talk to her, the more
charming I think her. I cannot understand how I can have been so long
without seeing more of her. The children have been brought up as
Catholics; but she remembers her early Protestant training, and though
she left our father’s home at the time my mother entered it, I discover
many points of resemblance between her and me. She sends her boys to
school with Laura’s parents, with whom I myself boarded for so long.
This school (half a school and half a boarding house) was founded by
old Monsieur Azai’s (a friend of my father’s) who is still the head of
it. Though he started life as a pastor, he prides himself on keeping
his school free from any denominational tendency--in my time there were
even Turks there.
Pauline says she has good news from the sanatorium where Vincent is
staying; he has almost completely recovered. She tells me that she
writes to him about me and that she wishes I knew him better; for I
have barely seen him. She builds great hopes on her eldest son; the
family is stinting itself in order to enable him to set up for himself
shortly--that is, to have rooms of his own where he can receive his
patients. In the mean time she has managed to set aside a part of
their small apartment for him, by putting Olivier and George on the
floor below in a room that happened to be vacant. The great question is
whether the state of Vincent’s health will oblige him to give up being
house-physician.
To tell the truth I take very little interest in Vincent, and if I talk
to his mother about him, it is really to please her and so that we can
then go on to talk about Olivier at greater length. As for George, he
fights shy of me, hardly answers when I speak to him, and gives me a
look of indescribable suspicion when we happen to pass each other. He
seems unable to forgive me for not having gone to meet him outside the
_lycée_--or to forgive himself for his advances to me.
I don’t see much of Olivier either. When I visit his mother, I don’t
dare go into the room where I know he is at work; if I meet him by
chance, I am so awkward and shy that I find nothing to say to him, and
that makes me so unhappy that I prefer to call on his mother at the
times when I know he will be out.
XII
EDOUARD’S JOURNAL: LAURA’S WEDDING
_Nov. 2nd._--Long conversation with Douviers. We met at Laura’s
parents’, and he left at the same time as I and walked across the
Luxembourg Gardens with me. He is preparing a thesis on Wordsworth,
but from the few words he let fall, I feel certain that he misses
the most characteristic points of Wordsworth’s poetry; he had better
have chosen Tennyson. There is something or other inadequate about
Douviers--something abstract and simple-minded and credulous. He always
takes everything--people and things--for what they set out to be.
Perhaps because he himself never sets out to be anything but what he is.
“I know,” he said to me, “that you are Laura’s best friend. No doubt I
ought to be a little jealous of you. But I can’t be. On the contrary
everything she has told me about you has made me understand her better
herself and wish to become your friend. I asked her the other day if
you didn’t bear me too much of a grudge for marrying her. She answered
on the contrary, that you had advised her to.” (I really think he said
it just as flatly as that.) “I should like to thank you for it, and I
hope you won’t think it ridiculous, for I really do so most sincerely,”
he added, forcing a smile but with a trembling voice and tears in his
eyes.
I didn’t know what to answer him, for I felt far less moved than I
should have been, and incapable of reciprocating his effusion. He must
have thought me a little stony; but he irritated me. Nevertheless I
pressed his hand as warmly as I could when he held it out to me. These
scenes, when one of the parties offers more of his heart than the other
wants, are always painful. No doubt he thought he should capture my
sympathy. If he had been a little more perspicacious he would have felt
he was being cheated; but I saw that he was both overcome by gratitude
for his own nobility and persuaded that he had raised a response to it
in me. As for me I said nothing, and as my silence perhaps made him
feel uncomfortable: “I count,” he added, “on her being transplanted
to Cambridge, to prevent her from making comparisons which might be
disadvantageous to me.”
What did he mean by that? I did my best not to understand. Perhaps he
wanted me to protest. But that would only have sunk us deeper into
the bog. He is one of those shy people who cannot endure silences and
who think they must fill them by being exaggeratedly forthcoming--the
people who say to you afterwards, “I have always been open with you.”
The deuce they have! But the important thing is not so much to be
open oneself as to allow the other person to be so. He ought to have
realized that his openness was the very thing that prevented mine.
But if I cannot be a friend of his, at any rate I think he will make
Laura an excellent husband; for in reality what I am reproaching him
with are his qualities. We went on to talk of Cambridge, where I have
promised to pay them a visit.
What absurd need had Laura to talk to him about me?
What an admirable thing in women is their need for devotion! The man
they love is as a rule a kind of clothes-peg on which to hang their
love. How easily and sincerely Laura has effected the transposition! I
understand that she should marry Douviers; I was one of the first to
advise it. But I had the right to hope for a little grief.
Some reviews of my book to hand. The qualities which people are the
most willing to grant me are just the very ones I most detest. Was I
right to republish this old stuff? It responds to nothing that I care
for at present. But it is only at present that I see it does not. I
don’t so much think that I have actually changed, as that I am only
just beginning to be aware of myself. Up till now I did not know who I
was. Is it possible that I am always in need of another being to act
as a plate-developer? This book of mine had crystallized according to
Laura; and that is why I will not allow it to be my present portrait.
An insight, composed of sympathy, which would enable us to be in
advance of the seasons--is this denied us? What are the problems which
will exercise the minds of to-morrow? It is for them that I desire
to write. To provide food for curiosities still unformed, to satisfy
requirements not yet defined, so that the child of to-day may be
astonished to-morrow to find me in his path.
How glad I am to feel in Olivier so much curiosity, so much impatient
want of satisfaction with the past....
I sometimes think that poetry is the only thing that interests him. And
I feel as I re-read our poets through his eyes, how few there are who
have let themselves be guided by a feeling for art rather than by their
hearts or minds. The odd thing is that when Oscar Molinier showed me
some of Olivier’s verses, I advised the boy to let himself be guided by
the words rather than force them into submission. And now it seems to
me that it is I who am learning it from him.
How depressingly, tiresomely and ridiculously sensible everything that
I have hitherto written seems to be to-day!
_Nov. 5th._--The wedding ceremony is over. It took place in the
little chapel in Rue Madame, to which I have not been for a long time
past. The whole of the Vedel-Azaïs families were present.--Laura’s
grandfather, father and mother, her two sisters, her young brother,
besides quantities of uncles, aunts and cousins. The Douviers family
was represented by three aunts in deep mourning (they would have
certainly been nuns if they had been Catholics). They all three live
together, and Douviers, since his parents’ death, has lived with them.
Azaïs’s pupils sat in the gallery. The rest of the chapel was filled
with the friends of the family. From my place near the door I saw my
sister with Olivier. George, I suppose, was in the gallery with his
schoolfellows. Old La Pérouse was at the harmonium. His face has aged,
but finer, nobler than ever--though his eye had lost that admirable
fire and spirit I found so infectious in the days when he used to
give me piano lessons. Our eyes met and there was so much sadness in
the smile he gave me that I determined not to let him leave without
speaking to him. Some persons moved and left an empty place beside
Pauline. Olivier at once beckoned to me, and pushed his mother aside
so that I might sit next him; then he took my hand and held it for a
long time in his. It is the first time he has been so friendly with me.
He kept his eyes shut during the whole of the minister’s interminable
address, so that I was able to take a long look at him; he is like the
sleeping shepherd in a bas-relief in the Naples Museum, of which I have
a photograph on my writing desk. I should have thought he was asleep
himself, if it hadn’t been for the quivering of his fingers. His hand
fluttered in mine like a captured bird.
The old pastor thought it his duty to retrace the whole of the Azaïs
family history, beginning with the grandfather, with whom he had
been at school in Strasburg before the war, and who had also been a
fellow-student of his later on at the faculty of theology. I thought he
would never get to the end of a complicated sentence in which he tried
to explain that in becoming the head of a school and devoting himself
to the education of young children, his friend had, so to speak, never
left the ministry. Then the next generation had its turn. He went on
to speak with equal edification of the Douviers family, though he
didn’t seem to know much about them. The excellence of his sentiments
palliated the deficiency of his oratory and I heard several members
of the congregation blowing their noses. I should have liked to know
what Olivier was thinking; I reflected that as he had been brought up
a Catholic, the Protestant service must be new to him and that this
was probably his first visit to the chapel. The singular faculty of
_depersonalization_ which I possess and which enables me to feel
other people’s emotions as if they were my own, compelled me, as it
were, to enter into Olivier’s feelings--those that I imagined him
to be experiencing; and though he kept his eyes shut, or perhaps for
that very reason, I felt as if, like him, I were seeing for the first
time the bare walls, the abstract and chilly light which fell upon the
congregation, the relentless outline of the pulpit on the background
of the white wall, the straightness of the lines, the rigidity of the
columns which support the gallery, the whole spirit of this angular
and colourless architecture and its repellent want of grace, its
uncompromising inflexibility, its parsimony. It can only be because
I have been accustomed to it since childhood, that I have not felt
all this sooner.... I suddenly found myself thinking of my religious
awakening and my first fervours; of Laura and the Sunday school where
we used to meet and of which we were both monitors, of our zeal and
our inability, in the ardour which consumed all that was impure in us,
to distinguish the part which belonged to the other and the part that
was God’s. And then I fell to regretting that Olivier had never known
this early starvation of the senses which drives the soul so perilously
far beyond appearances--that his memories were not like mine; but to
feel him so distant from the whole thing, helped me to escape from it
myself. I passionately pressed the hand which he had left in mine,
but which just then he withdrew abruptly. He opened his eyes to look
at me, and then, with a boyish smile of roguish playfulness, which
mitigated the extraordinary gravity of his brow, he leant towards me
and whispered--while just at that moment the minister was reminding all
Christians of their duties, and lavishing advice, precepts and pious
exhortations upon the newly married couple:
“I don’t care a damn about any of it. I’m a Catholic.”
Everything about him is attractive to me--and mysterious.
At the sacristy door, I came across old La Pérouse. He said, a little
sadly but without any trace of reproach: “You’ve almost forgotten me, I
think.”
I mentioned some kind of occupation or other as an excuse for having
been so long without going to see him and promised to go the day
after to-morrow. I tried to persuade him to come back with me to the
reception, which the Azaïses were giving after the ceremony and to
which I was invited; but he said he was in too sombre a mood and was
afraid of meeting too many people to whom he ought to speak, and would
not be able to.
Pauline went away with George and left me with Olivier.
“I trust him to your care,” she said, laughing; but Olivier seemed
irritated and turned away his face.
He drew me out into the street. “I didn’t know you knew the Azaïses so
well.”
He was very much surprised when I told him that I had boarded with them
for two years.
“How could you do that rather than live independently--anywhere else?”
“It was convenient,” I answered vaguely, for I couldn’t say that at
that time Laura was filling my thoughts and that I would have put up
with the worst disagreeables for the pleasure of bearing them in her
company.
“And weren’t you suffocated in such a hole?” Then, as I didn’t answer:
“For that matter, I can’t think how I bear it myself--nor why in the
world I am there.... But I’m only a half-boarder. Even that’s too much.”
I explained to him the friendship that had existed between his
grandfather and the master of the “hole,” and that his mother’s choice
was no doubt guided by that.
“Oh well,” he went on, “I have no points of comparison; I dare say all
these cramming places are the same, and, most likely, from what people
say, the others are worse. I shouldn’t have gone there at all if I
hadn’t had to make up the time I lost when I was ill. And now, for a
long time past, I have only gone there for the sake of Armand.”
Then I learnt that this young brother of Laura’s was his schoolfellow.
I told Olivier that I hardly knew him.
“And yet he’s the most intelligent and the most interesting of the
family.”
“That’s to say the one who interests you most.”
“No, no, I assure you, he’s very unusual. If you like we’ll go and see
him in his room. I hope he won’t be afraid to speak before you.”
We had reached the pension.
The Vedel-Azaïses had substituted for the traditional wedding breakfast
a less costly tea. Pastor Vedel’s reception room and study had been
thrown open to the guests. Only a few intimate friends were allowed
into the pastoress’s minute private sitting-room; but in order to
prevent it from being overrun, the door between it and the reception
room had been locked--which made Armand answer, when people asked him
how they could get to his mother: “Through the chimney!”
The place was crowded and the heat suffocating. Except for a few
“members of the teaching body,” colleagues of Douviers’, the society
was exclusively Protestant. The odour of Puritanism is peculiar to
itself. In a meeting of Catholics or Jews, when they let themselves go
in each other’s company, the emanation is as strong, and perhaps even
more stifling; but among Catholics you find a self-appreciation, and
among Jews a self-depreciation, of which Protestants seem to me very
rarely capable. If Jews’ noses are too long, Protestants’ are bunged
up; no doubt of it. And I myself, all the time I was plunged in their
atmosphere, didn’t perceive its peculiar quality--something ineffably
alpine and paradisaical and foolish.
At one end of the room was a table set out as a buffet; Rachel, Laura’s
elder sister, and Sarah, her younger, were serving the tea with a few
of their young lady friends to help them....
As soon as Laura saw me, she drew me into her father’s study, where
a considerable number of people had already gathered. We took refuge
in the embrasure of a window, and were able to talk without being
overheard. In the days gone by, we had written our two names on the
window frame.
“Come and see. They are still there,” she said. “I don’t think anybody
has ever noticed them. How old were you then?”
Underneath our names we had written the date. I calculated:
“Twenty-eight.”
“And I was sixteen. Ten years ago.”
The moment was not very suitable for awakening these memories; I tried
to turn the conversation, while she with a kind of uneasy insistence
continually brought me back to it; then suddenly, as though she were
afraid of growing emotional, she asked me if I remembered Strouvilhou?
Strouvilhou in those days was an independent boarder who was a great
nuisance to her parents. He was supposed to be attending lectures, but
when he was asked which ones, or what examinations he was studying for,
he used to answer negligently:
“I vary.”
At first people pretended to take his insolences for jokes, in an
attempt to make them appear less cutting, and he would himself
accompany them by a loud laugh; but his laugh soon became more
sarcastic, and his witticisms more aggressive, and I could never
understand why or how the pastor could put up with such an individual
as boarder, unless it were for financial reasons, or because he
had a feeling that was half affection, half pity, for Strouvilhou,
and perhaps a vague hope that he might end by persuading--I mean
converting--him. I couldn’t understand either why Strouvilhou stayed
on at the pension, when he might so easily have gone elsewhere; for he
didn’t appear to have any sentimental reason, like me; perhaps it was
because of the evident pleasure he took in his passages with the poor
pastor, who defended himself badly and always got the worst of it.
“Do you remember one day when he asked Papa if he kept his coat on
underneath his gown, when he preached?”
“Yes, indeed. He asked him so insinuatingly that your poor father was
completely taken in. It was at table. I can remember it all as if....”
“And Papa ingenuously answered that his gown was rather thin and that
he was afraid of catching cold without his coat.”
“And then Strouvilhou’s air of deep distress! And how he had to be
pressed before he ended by saying, that of course it was of ‘very
little importance,’ but that when your father gesticulated in
preaching, the sleeves of his coat showed underneath his gown and that
it had rather an unfortunate effect on some of the congregation.”
“And after that, poor Papa preached a whole sermon with his arms glued
to his sides, so that none of his oratorical effects came off.”
“And the Sunday after that he came home with a bad cold, because he had
taken his coat off. Oh! and the discussion about the barren fig-tree
in the Gospel and about trees that don’t bear fruit.... _I’m_ not
a fruit-tree. What I bear is shade. _Monsieur le Pasteur_, I cast
you into the shade.’”
“He said that too at table.”
“Of course. He never appeared except at meals.”
“And he said it in such a spiteful way too. It was that that made
grandfather turn him out. Do you remember how he suddenly rose to his
feet, though he usually sat all the time with his nose in his plate,
and pointed to the door with his outstretched arm, and shouted: ‘Leave
the room!’”
“He looked enormous--terrifying; he was enraged. I really believe
Strouvilhou was frightened.”