My school successes filled her with pride. They were also my only joy. At that time, I had no doubt about it that we were very poor. The narrowness of our way of life, the strict economy which my mother made a law to herself, sufficed to convince me of the fact. It is true that I lacked for nothing. I realise today how far I was a spoilt child.
My mother’s farm at Hosteins provided fare cheaply for our table, and I should have been very much surprised if anybody had told me that it was very good food. Chickens fattened on barley, hares, wood-cock pâté, awakened in me no idea of luxury. I had always heard that our land was not worth very much.
As a matter of fact, when my mother inherited the property, it consisted of an untilled stretch of country where my grandfather, as a child, had himself taken cattle to graze. What I did not know was that my parents had made it their first business to develop it, and that, when I came to the age of twenty-one, I should find myself the owner of two thousand hectares of maturing timber, which was already providing pit-props.
Besides, my mother saved out of her modest income. Even while my father was still alive, by dint of “bleeding themselves white” they had bought Calèse—for forty thousand francs: that vineyard which today I wouldn’t let go for a million! We lived in the Rue Sainte Catherine, on the third floor of a house which belonged to us. (Together with some undeveloped building land, it constituted my father’s inheritance.) Twice a week a hamper arrived from the country. My mother went to the butcher’s as little as possible.
As for me, I lived in the fixed idea of the Teachers’ Training College which I proposed to enter. It was a hard job to make me “take the air” on Thursdays and Sundays. I was not in the least like those children who are always first in class and pretend that they do it without taking any trouble. I was a “swotter,” and I prided myself upon it: a swotter, and nothing else. I don’t remember ever having found the least pleasure at school in studying Virgil or Racine. All this was merely the raw material of examinations.
Out of the Humanities I isolated those subjects which were on my lecture courses—the only subjects which had any importance in my eyes—and about them I wrote what one required to write to satisfy the examiners: in other words, what had already been said and written by generations of candidates.
That was the kind of idiot I was, and such, perhaps, I should have remained, but for my haemoptysis, which terrified my mother and, two months before the Training College examination, compelled me to give up everything.
It was the price I had to pay for too studious a childhood and an unhealthy adolescence. A growing boy cannot with impunity live bent over a table, with his shoulders hunched together, until a late hour of the night, despising any kind of physical exercise.
Am I boring you? I tremble at the idea of boring you. But don’t skip a line. Be assured that I am sticking to essentials. The tragedy of our two lives hung upon these events, about which you knew nothing, or which you have forgotten.
In any case you can see, from these first few pages, that I don’t propose to spare myself. There is matter here to flatter your hatred....No, don’t protest: when you think of me, it is to nourish your enmity.
I am afraid, though, of being unjust towards the puny little boy that I was, leaning over his dictionaries. When I read other people’s memories of their childhood, when I see that Paradise on which they look back, I ask myself with a pang:
“And what about me? Why this dead level from the very beginning of my life? Perhaps I have forgotten what others remember; perhaps I knew the same enchantments.”
Alas! I can see nothing but that desperate striving for the first place, nothing but my envious rivalry with one fellow called Henoch and another called Rodrigue. My instinct led me to repulse any attraction. The prestige of my success, and even my surliness, drew certain types of characters towards me, I remember. I was a fierce child towards anybody who wanted to make friends with me. I had a horror of “sentimentality.”
If writing were my profession, I could not extract out of my schoolboy’s life a single touching page. But wait a minute...there was one thing, perhaps—next to nothing: my father, whom I barely remembered. Sometimes it happened that I persuaded myself that he was not dead, that a combination of strange circumstances had made him disappear.
When I returned home from school, I went up the Rue Sainte Catherine at a run, in the road, dodging about through the traffic, because the crowds on the pavement would have held me up. I took the stairs four at a time.
My mother was mending linen at the window. My father’s photograph hung in its usual place, to the right of the bed. I let my mother kiss me, barely returning her lass; I was already opening my books.
As the sequel to that haemoptysis which changed my fate, melancholy months went by in that cottage at Arcachon where the ruin of my health consummated the shipwreck of my university ambitions. My poor mother irritated me because to her this did not count, and she seemed to me to care little about my future.
Every day she lived in expectation of “thermometer time.” Upon my weekly weighing depended all her sorrow or all her joy. I, who was later to suffer so much from being ill without my illness interesting anybody, can recognise that I was justly punished for my hardness, my irreconcilability, as a boy only too much loved.
With the first fine weather I “came out on top,” as my mother put it. Indeed, I came to life again. I grew taller and stronger. My body, which had suffered so much from the regime under which I had distorted it, bloomed in the dry forest, full of broom and arbutus, at that time when Arcachon was only a village.
It was then, too, that I learnt from my mother that I had no occasion to worry about the future, that we had a handsome fortune which was growing year by year. There was no need for me to hurry—especially as I should probably be exempted from my military service. I had a great fluency of speech which had struck all my masters. My mother wanted me to study law, and she had no doubt that, without too much trouble, I should become a famous barrister, unless politics attracted me....
She talked and talked, telling me all her plans at once; and I listened to her, sulky, hostile, looking out of the window.
I was beginning to be “fast.” My mother watched me with fearful indulgence. Since then, while living with your people, I have observed how much importance is attached to such irregularities in a religious family. My mother, for her part, saw nothing wrong about them except in so far as they might injure my health. Once she was assured that I did not overdo things, she shut her eyes to my nocturnal excursions, so long as I was home by midnight.
No, don’t be afraid that I am going to tell you about my love affairs of that time. I know you have a horror of such things, and, besides, they were such mean little adventures!
All the same, I had to pay for them. They made me suffer. I suffered because there was so little charm about me that my youth was no good to me. Not that I was ugly, I think. My features are “regular,” and Geneviève, my living image, turned out a lovely girl. But I belonged to that race of beings of whom it is said that they have no youth: only a dreary adolescence, with no freshness about it.
I chilled people, just by the look of me. The more I realised it, the stiffer I got. I never knew how to dress myself, how to choose a tie, or how to knot it. I was never able to let myself go, or laugh, or play the fool. It was unimaginable that I should join any gang of bright young people; I belonged to the race of those whose presence spoils everything.
Besides, I was sensitive, incapable of taking the slightest joke. On the other hand, when I tried to make a joke myself, I wounded people in a way for which they never forgave me. I went straight to the sore spot, to the infirmity, about which one should keep his mouth shut.
With women, through shyness and self-consciousness, I assumed that superior, magisterial tone which they abominate. I never could admire their frocks. The more I felt that they disliked me, the more I exaggerated everything about me that made me a horror to them. My youth was
nothing but one long suicide. I hastened to displease on purpose for fear of displeasing naturally.
Rightly or wrongly, I blamed my mother for what I was. I felt that I was expiating the misfortune of having been, even since I was a child, excessively brooded over and supervised and attended. I was frightfully hard with her at that time. I reproached her with the excess of her love. I did not pardon her for what she was to prove the only person in the world to give me—for what I was never to know except through her.
Forgive me for going back on this; but it is in this thought that I find the strength to bear the loneliness to which you have condemned me. It is only fair that I should pay. Poor woman, asleep these many years, whose memory survives only in the worn-out heart of an old man like myself—how she would have suffered, if she could have foreseen how Fate would avenge her!
Yes, I was cruel. In the little dining-room of our cottage, under the hanging lamp that lit our meals, I answered her timid questions only with monosyllables; or else I lost my temper outrageously on the least pretext or for no reason at all.
She did not try to understand. She did not go into the reasons for my rages; she submitted to them as to the wrath of God. It was my illness, she used to say; I must not let my nerves get out of order. She added that she was too ignorant to understand me. “I know that an old woman like me isn’t very good company for a boy of your age.” She, whom I had always found so economical, not to say miserly, gave me more money than I asked for, encouraged me to spend it, and brought me back from Bordeaux preposterous ties which I refused to wear.
We made the acquaintance of some neighbours, whose daughter I courted—not that I was in love with her. She was spending the winter at Arcachon for the sake of her health, and my mother was obsessed with the idea of possible contagion, or of my compromising her and becoming engaged despite myself. I am quite sure today that I devoted myself to this conquest—to no purpose, for that matter—simply to hurt my mother.
We went back to Bordeaux after a year of absence. We had moved. My mother had bought a house on the boulevards, but she had said nothing about it to me in order to keep it a surprise for me. I was astonished when a footman opened the door to us.
The first floor was reserved for me. Everything seemed to be new. Secretly dazzled though I was by a display of wealth which I imagine today must have been in frightful taste, I was cruel enough to do nothing but make criticisms and worry about the money that it must have cost.
It was then that my mother triumphantly gave me an accounting—which, as a matter of fact, was not due to me, since the bulk of the fortune came from her family. Fifty thousand francs a year, without reckoning timber-felling, constituted at that time, especially in the provinces, a “pretty” fortune, of which any other fellow would have taken advantage to raise himself to the highest society in the town.
It was by no means ambition in which I was lacking; but I was unable to hide from my comrades at the Faculty of Law my unfriendly feelings towards them. They were almost all sons of leading families, educated by the Jesuits. Grammar-school boy and grandson of a shepherd as I was, I could not forgive them for the horrible feeling of envy which their manners inspired in me, although they struck me as my inferiors from the point of view of brains. To envy people one despises—there is enough in that shameful passion to poison a whole life.
I envied them and I despised them; and their contempt for me—which perhaps I imagined—increased my resentment all the more. Such was my nature that I did not think for a moment of winning them over.
I plunged deeper every day into association with their adversaries. Hatred of religion, which has so long been my dominating passion, which made you suffer so much and rendered us mortal enemies—this hatred had its birth at the Faculty of Law, in 1879 and in 1880, at the time of the vote on Article 7, the year of the famous decrees and of the expulsion of the Jesuits.
Until then I had lived indifferent to these questions. My mother never talked about them except to say: “I don’t worry; if people like ourselves are not saved, there’s no hope for anybody.” She had me baptised. My first Communion at school struck me as a boring formality, of which I retained only a confused memory. In any case, it was not followed by any other.
My ignorance of these matters was profound. Priests in the street, when I was a child, seemed to me like persons in disguise, masqueraders of some kind. I never thought about problems of this nature, and, when I finally approached them, it was from the political point of view.
I founded a study circle which met at the Cafe Voltaire, where I practised as a speaker. Shy though I was in private life, I became another man in public debate. I had followers, and I enjoyed being their leader; but fundamentally I despised them no less than the upper classes. I blamed them for exhibiting their petty motives so simple-mindedly. These motives were also my own, and they forced me to recognise the fact.
Sons of minor officials, winners of scholarships, clever and ambitious fellows but full of spleen, they flattered me without being fond of me. Once or twice I invited them to meals, which constituted occasions that they talked about long afterwards. But their manners sickened me. I got to the point where I could not refrain from gibes which wounded them mortally and gave them a grudge against me.
Nevertheless my anti-religious hatred was sincere. A certain desire for social justice tormented me too. I compelled my mother to knock down the mud huts where our farm labourers lived, badly nourished on sour wine and black bread. For the first time she tried to oppose me. “For all the gratitude they’ll show you.”
But I went no further. I suffered through my recognition of the fact that my adversaries and myself had a common passion: land, money. There were the “haves,” and there were the “have-nots.” I realised that I should always be on the side of the possessors.
My fortune was equal or superior to that of all these stuck-up fellows who, as I imagined, tinned their heads away when they saw me—though doubtless they would not have refused the offer of my hand. Besides, people were not lacking, on the Right and on the Left, who reproached me at public meetings with my two thousand hectares of timber and my vineyards.
Forgive me for lingering over all this. But, if I did not go into these details, perhaps you would not understand what our meeting meant to such a sore-head as I was, and what our love meant. I, son of peasants, whose mother had “worn the kerchief,” marry a demoiselle Fondaudège! It surpassed imagination, it was unimaginable....
Chapter III
I stopped writing because the light was getting dim, and because I heard talking underneath me. Not that all of you were making much noise—on the contrary, you were talking in low voices, and that was what disturbed me. Once, from this room, I could follow your conversations. But now you are suspicious; you whisper.
You told me the other day that I was getting hard of hearing. Not at all: I can hear the rumbling of the train on the viaduct. No, no, I’m not deaf. It is you who lower your voices and do not want me to catch what you are saying.
What are you hiding from me? Business going badly, eh? And there they all are round you, with their tongues hanging out: the son-in-law who deals in rum and the grandson-in-law who does nothing, and our son Hubert, the stockbroker....Hasn’t he got the money of the whole world at his disposal, this fellow who pays twenty per cent?
Don’t count on me. I’m not going to let the titbit go. “It would be so easy to fell the pines...” you are going to suggest to me this evening. You will remind me that Hubert’s two daughters have been living with their people-in-law since they got married, because they have no money to furnish. “We have heaps of furniture in the attic going to loss; it wouldn’t cost us anything to lend them some....”
That’s what you are going to tell me, a little later. “They’re angry with us about it. They never set foot here now. I’m deprived of my own grandchildren.” That’s what you are all discussing; that’s what you are talking about in low voices.
I read ov
er these lines which I wrote yesterday evening in a kind of delirium. How could I have let my temper carry me away like that? This is not a letter anymore; it is a diary, interrupted, begun again....
Shall I rub all that out? Make a fresh start? Impossible. Time presses. What I have written is written.
Besides, what do I want to do, if not strip myself before you utterly, compel you to see me just as I am? For the last thirty years I have been nothing more in your eyes than a machine for handing out thousand-franc notes: a machine that works badly and that you have to keep on shaking, until the time comes when you can at last open it, tear the inside out of it, grab by the handful at the treasures it contains.
Again I’m letting my temper get the better of me. It brings me back to the point where I broke off. I must go back to the origin of this rage, recall that fatal night....But first of all, remember how we met.
I was at Luchon, with my mother, in August ‘85. The Hotel Sacarron at that time was full of padded furniture, stuffed hassocks and izards. The lime-trees in the Allées d’Etigny—it is still their scent that I smell, after all these years, when the lime-trees flower. The staccato trot of donkeys, the tinkling of bells, the cracking of whips awakened me in the morning. The water of the mountains murmured in the very streets. Vendors cried croissants and milk-loaves. Guides went by on horseback, and I watched cavalcades setting out.
All the first floor was occupied by the Fondaudèges. They had King Leopold’s suite. “Must have plenty of money to spend, those people!” my mother used to say. That did not stop them always being behindhand when it was a question of paying (they had rented some extensive ground which we owned at the docks, to tranship merchandise).
Viper's Tangle Page 2
