At the time of the Villenave case, she was beginning to fail. I only realised it little by little. The interest which she took in a little black dog, that barked furiously whenever I approached, was the first sign of her decline. Every time I went to see her she talked about nothing but this animal. She ceased to listen to what I said about myself.
In any case, she could not have filled the place of the love that would have saved me, at this turning-point in my life. Her vice, which was being too fond of money, she had bequeathed to me. I had that passion in my blood. She would have bent all her efforts towards keeping me in a profession in which, as she said, I “made big money.” At a time when literature attracted me, when I was in demand by the newspapers and all the leading reviews, when during the elections the groups of the Left offered me the candidature for La Bastide (the man who accepted instead of me was elected with ease), I resisted the call of ambition because I did not want to give up “big money.”
That was your desire too, and you gave me to understand that you would never leave the provinces. A wife who loved me would have been proud of my fame. She would have taught me that the art of living consists in sacrificing a lower passion to a higher passion. The idiots of journalists, who pretend to be indignant because such-and-such an advocate profits by the fact that he is a deputy or a minister to glean some small pickings, would do better to admire the conduct of those who have succeeded in establishing an intelligent hierarchy among their passions, and preferred political fame to more profitable business.
The defect of which you could have cured me, if you had loved me, was that of putting nothing higher than immediate gain, of being incapable of letting the petty, mediocre prey of fat fees go for the shadow of power; for there is no shadow without reality; the shadow is itself a reality. Well, I had nothing but the consolation of “making big money,” like the corner grocer.
Such is what remains to me: that is what I have gained, in the course of these dreadful years, this money which you are mad enough to think that I might relinquish. Why, the very idea that you should enjoy it after my death is unbearable to me! I told you at the beginning that originally I had made such dispositions that you would not get any of it. I have given you to understand that I have forgone this revenge....
But, when I said this, I misunderstood the movement, like that of the tide, of hatred in my heart. Sometimes it ebbs, and I soften....Then it flows, and its miry waves swallow me up again.
From today, from this Easter Day, after that attempt to despoil me to the profit of your Phili, and since I have seen, as a whole, that family pack sitting in a circle before the door and watching me, I am obsessed by the vision of a sharing-up of the spoils—of a sharing-up which will set you at one another’s throats; for you will fight like dogs over my land, over my securities.
The land will be yours; but the securities no longer exist. Those which I mentioned to you, on the first page of this letter, I sold last week, at the highest possible price. Since then they have gone down every day. All ships founder, as soon as I abandon them; I never make a mistake.
My liquid millions, you shall have them too—you shall have them if I choose. There are days when I make up my mind that you shall not lay hands on a single halfpenny of them....
I hear your gang whispering as you all come upstairs. You have stopped; you are talking without fear of my being awake (it is understood that I am deaf); I can see the light of your candles under the door. I recognise Phili’s falsetto (one would think that he was still moulting), and now I hear stifled laughter, the cackling of young women. You are scolding them; you are just going to tell them: “I assure you he isn’t asleep....”
You are coming to my door; you are listening; you are looking through the key-hole—my lamp gives me away. You are going back to the pack; you must be whispering to them: “He’s still awake, he’s listening to you....”
They are stealing away on tip-toe. The steps of the staircase are creaking. Doors are shutting one by one. This Easter night, the house is full of couples.
And I—I might be the living trunk of these young branches. Most fathers are loved. But you were my enemy, and my children have gone over to the enemy.
It is with this war that I must deal now. I have no strength to write any more. But still I hate going to bed, lying down, even when the state of my heart lets me. At my age, sleep attracts the attention of death; one must not look as though he were dead. So long as I am sitting up, it seems to me as though death cannot come.
What do I fear from it? Is it physical pain, the pain of the last sigh? No; what I fear is rather that it is something which does not exist, which can only be expressed by the symbol-.
Chapter VII
SO long as our three little ones remained in the limbo of early childhood, our enmity remained masked. The atmosphere of our home weighed heavily. Your indifference towards me, your detachment from everything that concerned me, prevented you from being affected by it, or even feeling it.
As for me, I was seldom in it. I lunched alone at eleven o’clock, in time to get to the Law Courts before noon. My cases took up most of my time, and what little I might have had to spend at home—you can guess how I spent it.
Why this frightful sheer debauchery, lacking in anything which, as a rule, serves as an excuse; reduced to its mere horror, without a shadow of sentiment, without the least pretence of affection? I might easily have had those kinds of adventure which the world applauds. How could a barrister of my age avoid certain temptations? Plenty of women wanted to get beyond the advocate and intrigue the man....
But I had lost faith in the creatures, or rather in my power to attract any of them. At first sight, I detected self-interest animating those who showed themselves complaisant, who beckoned to me. The preconceived idea that they were all trying to make money out of me froze me. Why should I not admit that, to the tragic certitude that I was a man whom nobody could love, there was added the distrust of the rich man who is afraid of being duped, who suspects that he is being exploited?
As for you, I had “pensioned you off.” You knew me too well to expect a halfpenny more from me than the agreed sum. It was a good round sum, and you never exceeded it. I never felt any danger in that direction.
But other women! I was one of those fools who persuade themselves that there are, on the one hand, women who love disinterestedly, and, on the other hand, adventuresses who are only out for money. As though, in the case of most women, amorous inclination did not go hand in hand with a need to be maintained, protected, spoilt!...
At the age of sixty-eight, I realise, with a clearness which sometimes makes me want to howl, all that I repelled, not through virtue, but through distrust and cowardice. The few liaisons which I attempted came to an early end, either because my suspicious mind interpreted the most innocent requests wrongly, or as a result of those ways of mine with which you are only too familiar: those arguments over restaurant bills, or with drivers about tips.
I like to know in advance what I have to pay. I like everything to have its tariff. Dare I confess this shameful thing? What I liked about debauchery, perhaps, was that it had its fixed price.
But, in the case of a man like myself, what link could there be between the hearts desire and mere desire? Heart’s desires—I did not believe any longer that they could ever be satisfied; I strangled them at birth. I was a past-master in the art of killing all sentiment, at that precise moment when the will plays a decisive part in love, when, on the verge of passion, we still remain free to let ourselves go or restrain ourselves.
I went for the simplest thing—what could be obtained for an agreed price. I don’t like being “done”; but what I owe, I pay. You complain about my avarice. It does not prevent me from being unable to bear having debts. I pay cash for everything. My tradesmen know it and bless me for it. The idea of owing the smallest sum is unendurable to me. It was in that way that I understood “love”: paying cash down, paying cash down....How disgusting!
I saved that little governess from the reformatory—she had been prosecuted for infanticide. She gave herself to me at the beginning out of gratitude; but afterwards...Yes, I found love that year. It was my insatiability that ruined everything. It was not enough that I should maintain her in embarrassed circumstances, almost in poverty; she must be always at my disposal, never see anybody else, so that I might take her, leave her, pick her up again, as my fancy dictated during my scanty leisure.
She was my chattel. My taste for possessing, using and abusing, extends to human beings. I ought to have had slaves. Just once, I thought I had found a victim, made to the measure of my demands. I watched even over her glances....But I am forgetting my promise not to entertain you with such matters. She went off to Paris; she could not stand it any longer.
“If it was only we with whom you couldn’t get on,” you have often told me; “but everybody else as well distrusts and shuns you, Louis, you must see that for yourself....” Yes, I saw it....At the Law Courts, I was always a solitary. They elected me to the Bar Council as late as possible. After all the fools that they put before me, I lost any desire to be President.
For that matter, did I ever want to be? It would have meant being a delegate, entertaining. Those are honours that cost dearly; the game is not worth the candle. You—you wanted it because of the children. Never did you desire anything for me on my own account. “Do it for the children’s sake.”
The year that followed our marriage, your father had his first attack, and the château of Cenon was closed to us. Very quickly you adopted Calѐse. Of me, the only thing that you really accepted was my own countryside. You took root in my soil, without our roots ever being able to meet.
In this house, in this garden, your children spent all their holidays. Our little Marie died here; and, far from her death giving you a horror of it, you attach to the room in which she suffered a sacred character. It was here that you hatched your brood, that you nursed the sick, watched over cradles, had “crows to pluck” with nurses and governesses. It was between these apple-trees that lines were fixed to hang out Marie’s little dresses, all that unashamed washing of hers. It was in this drawing-room that Abbé Ardouin assembled the children round the piano and made them sing choruses which, to avert my anger, were not always canticles.
Smoking in front of the house, on summer evenings, I used to listen to their pure voices: that air of Lulli’s, Ah, these woods, these rocks, these fountains....It was a quiet happiness from which I knew myself to be excluded, a zone of purity and dreaming which was forbidden to me: tranquil love, a drowsy wave that came and died a few yards away from my rock.
I went into the drawing-room, and the voices fell silent. All conversation ceased at my approach. Geneviѐve buried herself in a book. Only Marie was not afraid of me; I called her and she came; I took her in my arms forcibly, but she nestled there readily enough. I could feel her little bird’s heart beating. As soon as I let her go, she flew out into the garden...Marie!
Very early the children were troubled about my absence from Mass and my Friday cutlet. But the struggle between the two of us, under their eyes, witnessed only a small number of violent outbursts, in which I was generally beaten. After every such defeat, a subterranean warfare continued. Calѐse was the theatre of it, for in town I was never at home. But the legal vacation coincided with the school holidays, and August and September assembled us here.
I remember that day when we collided head-on—in connection with a joke which I had made before Geneviève, who was reciting her Sacred History. I asserted my right to defend my children’s minds, and you opposed to me the duty of protecting their souls. I had been beaten once already, by consenting to Hubert being entrusted to the Jesuit Fathers, and the little girls to the nuns of the Sacred Heart. I had bowed to the prestige which the traditions of the Fondaudège family always retained in my eyes.
But I thirsted for revenge; and besides, what was of importance to me, that day, was that I had put my finger on the one subject which was capable of exasperating you, on the one that drove you to emerge from your indifference and give me your attention—even the attention of hate. I had at last found a meeting-place. At last I could force you to come to grips with me.
Hitherto irreligion had been for me merely an empty form, into which I had poured my humiliations as an enriched little peasant, despised by his middle-class comrades. Now I filled it with my disappointment in love and with an almost infinite resentment.
The dispute flared up again during lunch. I asked you what pleasure the Eternal Being could take in seeing you eat salmon-trout rather than stewed beef. You left the table. I remember how the children stared. I followed you to your room. Your eyes were dry. You spoke to me with the utmost possible calmness.
I realised, that day, that you had taken more notice of my way of life than I had thought. You had laid hands on some letters: material for obtaining a separation. “I have stayed with you because of the children. But if your presence is to be a danger to their souls, I shall not hesitate.”
No, you would not have hesitated to leave me—me and my money. Selfish as you were, there was no sacrifice which you would not have accepted in order that, in those little ones, there should remain intact the deposit of Dogma, that assembly of habits, of formulae—that stupidity.
I have not kept the insulting letter which you wrote me after the death of Marie. You had the whip hand. My position would have been dangerously shaken by a separation suit between us: at that period, and in the provinces, people did not treat the subject as a joke. Rumour already had it that I was a Freemason; my ideas put me on the borderline of society; and, but for the prestige of your family, they might have done me the greatest injury.
And above all—in case of separation, I should have had to return the Suez Canal shares of your dowry. I had grown used to regarding these securities as my own. The idea of having to surrender them was horrible to me—not to speak of the income which your father allowed us....
I pocketed my pride, and gave in to all your demands; but I decided to devote my leisure to winning over the children. I took this decision in August, 1896. Those sad, hot summers of long ago merge in my mind, and the memories that I recall here extend over about five years, 1895 to 1900.
I did not think that it would be difficult to take the children in hand again. I counted on the prestige of the father of the family, and on my brains. A boy of ten, two little girls—it would only be a game, I thought, to win them over to me.
I remember their surprise and their anxiety, the day when I suggested that they should come for a long walk with Papa. You were sitting in the courtyard, under the silver lime-tree. They questioned you with their eyes.
“Why, my dears, you needn’t ask permission from me!”
We set out. How does one talk to children? I, who am accustomed to stand up to the Public Prosecutor, or to defending counsel when I plead for the injured party, or to a whole hostile audience; I, whom the presiding judge at Assizes respects—I am intimidated by children: by children, and also by lower-class people, even those peasants whose son I am. In their presence I am unsure of my ground, tongue-tied.
The little ones were nice to me, but on their guard. You had occupied these three hearts beforehand; you held all the ways into them. It was impossible to advance there without your permission. Too scrupulous though you were to demean me in their eyes, you had not concealed the fact that they must pray a lot for “poor Papa.” Whatever I did, I had my fixed place in their scheme of things: I was poor Papa, who had to be prayed for a lot, and whose conversion had to be obtained. Everything that I might say or hint about religion only confirmed the simple image which they made of me.
&nb
sp; They lived in a miraculous world, festooned with festivals piously celebrated. You could get them to do what you liked by talking to them about the first Communion which they had just made or for which they were preparing. When they sang, in the evening, on the steps of Calèse, it was not always Lulli’s airs to which I had to listen, but also psalms. I could see the amorphous group of you in the distance, and, when there was moonlight, I could make out three little figures standing up. My steps on the gravel interrupted the singing.
Every Sunday the bustle of departure for Mass awakened me. You were always afraid of being late. The horses snorted. Somebody called the cook, who was behind time. One of the children had forgotten his prayer-book. A shrill voice cried: “What Sunday after Pentecost is it?”
On their return they came to kiss me “Good morning,” and found me still in bed. Little Marie, who had doubtless recited all the prayers she had been taught for my benefit, looked at me fixedly, in the hope, presumably, of seeing some slight improvement in my spiritual condition.
She alone did not irritate me. Whereas the two elder children were already established in the beliefs which you professed, together with that middle-class instinct for comfort which was later to make them set aside all the heroic virtues, there was in Marie, on the contrary, a touching fervour, a tenderness of heart for the servants, for the farm-labourers, for the poor. People said of her: “She would give away everything she has; money does not stick to her fingers. She’s very pretty, but she will want watching....” They also said: “Nobody can resist her, not even her father.”
She came and sat on my knee of her own accord in the evening. Once she went to sleep against my shoulder. Her curls tickled my face. I felt cramped, and I wanted to smoke; but I did not stir. When her nurse came for her, at nine o’clock, I carried her up to her room myself, and you looked at me in amazement, as though I were that wild beast that licked the feet of little martyrs. A few days afterwards, on the morning of August 14, Marie said to me (you know how children do):
Viper's Tangle Page 6
