Climates

by Andre Maurois

  My secret exaltation, which took the form of religion at the time of my first communion, found another outlet during the war. I had a nursing diploma, so I asked to be sent to a hospital in the military zone as early as August 1914. My father was on a posting a long way from France at the time, and my mother was abroad with him. My grandparents, panicked by the declaration of war, allowed me to go. The ambulance I was assigned to in Belmont had been inaugurated by Baroness Choin. The nurse who ran the hospital was called Renée Marcenat. She was quite a pretty woman, very intelligent, and proud. She saw immediately that there was a contained but very real strength in me and, despite my youth, she made me her assistant.

  There I discovered I could appeal to men. Renée Marcenat once told Madame Choin in front of me that, “Isabelle is my best nurse; she has only one fault—she’s too pretty.” This absolutely delighted me.

  A second lieutenant in the infantry whom we had treated for a minor injury asked for permission to write to me when he left the hospital. The dangers I knew he would be exposed to drove me to replying with more emotion than I would have liked. He became affectionate and, as one letter led to another, I found I was engaged. I could not believe it. It seemed unreal, but life is mad in times of war and everything happened very quickly. When they were consulted, my parents wrote to say that Jean de Cheverny was from a good family, and they approved of my plans. I myself knew nothing of Jean. He was playful and good-looking. We spent four days alone together in a hotel on the place de l’Étoile. Then my husband rejoined his regiment and I went back to the hospital. That was my entire married life. Jean was hoping to secure more leave during the winter but was killed at Verdun in February 1916. At the time I believed I loved him. When I was sent his papers and a small photograph of myself that was found on him after his death, I cried a great deal and in good faith.

  . III .

  When the armistice was announced, my father had just been appointed minister in Peking. He invited me to accompany him, but I declined. I was now too accustomed to independence to tolerate family slavery again. My income allowed me to live on my own. My parents agreed to my turning the second floor of their house into a small apartment, and I linked my life closely with Renée Marcenat’s. After the war she had joined the Pasteur Institute, where she worked in the laboratory. She was extremely useful to them and had no trouble arranging for me to be taken on alongside her.

  I had grown fond of Renée. I admired her. She acted with an authoritativeness that I envied, and yet I sensed she was vulnerable. She wanted to give the impression she had turned her back on marriage, but from the way she talked about one of her cousins, Philippe Marcenat, I thought I deduced that she wanted to marry him.

  “He’s a very secretive person,” she said, “and he seems distant if you don’t know him well, but he’s actually almost frighteningly sensitive … The war did him good by getting him away from his usual life. He’s about as suited to running a paper factory as I am to being a great actress …”

  “But why? Does he do anything else?”

  “No, but he reads a great deal, he’s very cultured … He’s a remarkable man, I assure you … You’ll like him very much.”

  I was convinced she loved him.

  There were now several men of varying ages prowling around me. Behavior had become much freer after the war. I was alone, and, in that world of doctors and young scholars frequented by Renée, I had met some men I found interesting. But I had no trouble resisting them. I could not bring myself to believe them when they said they loved me. I was obsessed by my mother’s “unfortunately, you’re ugly,” despite the refutations it had been given during my time as a nurse. I still had a deep lack of faith in myself. I thought men wanted to marry me for my fortune or saw me as a mistress for a few evenings—convenient but not demanding.

  Renée told me that Baroness Choin would like to invite me to dinner. She often went there herself on Tuesdays.

  “I’d be bored,” I said. “I so hate the social scene.”

  “No, you’ll see, she almost always has interesting people. Besides, next Tuesday my cousin Philippe will be there and if you’re bored we can always find a quiet corner for the three of us.”

  “Oh well, in that case, yes!” I said. “I’d like to meet him.”

  It was true. Renée had succeeded in making me want to meet Philippe Marcenat. When she told me the story of Philippe’s marriage, I remembered once meeting his wife and thinking her very beautiful. People said he was still in love with her, and although Renée clearly did not admire everything Odile had done, she herself said it would be impossible to find a more perfect face. “It’s just … the thing I can’t forgive her is that she behaved badly toward Philippe, while he was loyalty personified.” I had asked for a lot of details about their relationship. During the war I had even read some passages from Philippe’s letters to Renée and liked their melancholy tone.

  Madame Choin’s imposing staircase and her countless footmen were not to my liking. When I went into the salon I immediately spotted Renée standing by the fireplace beside a very tall man with his hands in his pockets. Philippe Marcenat was not handsome, but I thought he had a kind, reassuring look about him. When we were introduced, it was the first time in my life I did not feel shy in front of a stranger. As we sat down to dinner I was delighted to see I was seated next to him. After dinner an instinctive maneuver brought us together.

  “Would you like to find somewhere quiet to talk?” he asked. “Come with me, I know this house well.”

  He took me to a Chinese drawing room. The thing I still remember about that conversation was talking of our childhoods. Yes, on that first evening Philippe told me about his life in Limousin, and we were amused to find that our younger years and our families were so alike. The house at Gandumas was furnished like the rooms on the rue Ampère. Like mine, Philippe’s mother used to say, “Men don’t look at dresses.”

  “Yes,” said Philippe, “that sort of rural bourgeois heritage that so many French families share is very strong. In some ways it’s quite fine, but I just can’t keep it going, I’ve lost faith …”

  “Oh, I haven’t,” I said, laughing. “You see, there are some things I just can’t do … Even though I live alone, I just couldn’t buy flowers or candy for myself. It would feel immoral and wouldn’t give me any pleasure.”

  He looked at me in astonishment. “Is that true?” he asked. “You can’t buy flowers?”

  “I can for a dinner, for entertaining. But for me, just for the pleasure of looking at them, no, I couldn’t.”

  “But do you like them?”

  “Yes, I do quite like them … still, I manage perfectly well without them.”

  I thought I saw a sad, ironic expression in his eyes and talked about something else. And it is most likely this second part of the conversation that struck Philippe because I found this in his red notebook:

  March 23, 1919—Dinner with Aunt Cora. Spent the whole evening with Renée’s pretty friend, Madame de Cheverny, on the sofa in the Chinese drawing room. She is nothing like Odile, and yet … Perhaps it is simply because she was wearing a white dress … Gentle, shy …

  I had trouble getting her to talk. Then she became more trusting: “Something happened this morning which, how can I put this? Well, it shocked me. A woman I hardly know, not even a close friend, you know, telephoned to say, ‘Don’t make any blunders, Isabelle. I’m lunching with you today.’ How can anyone lie like that and find herself an accomplice? I thought it very low.”

  “You should be more indulgent. A lot of women have such difficult lives.”

  “They have difficult lives because they want it that way. They think that if they don’t create an air of mystery around them, they’ll be bored … It’s not true; life is not made up of pointless little intrigues. We don’t always have to rub our sensibilities up against others’ … Wouldn’t you say?”

  Renée came and sat down beside us and said, “Are we allowed to come and distur
b this flirting?” Then, because neither of us said anything, she stood up laughing and left.

  Her friend sat there thoughtfully for a moment, then went on: “Anyway, wouldn’t you say the only love worth having is where there’s complete trust between two people, pure crystal you can look through without seeing a single mark?”

  At that point she must have thought she had caused me pain, and she blushed. True, her words had rather hurt me. She then said a few kind words, so awkwardly it was touching. Then Renée came over with Doctor Maurice de Fleury. Talk about the secretions of the endocrine glands. “We have to give them out,” he said. “Doctors who don’t prescribe them are ruining their reputations.” Amusing technical information. Admired Renée’s incisive mind. Lovely farewell glance from her friend.

  It’s true. I too remember the words that hurt Philippe. I too thought about it when I arrived home that evening, and the following morning I wrote a few lines to Philippe Marcenat to say I regretted that the previous evening I had been so tactless in expressing my feelings and inclinations, because, through Renée, I had felt great friendship toward him for some time. I added that, given he was on his own, I would be very happy if he would like to come and visit me from time to time. He replied:

  Your letter, Madame, confirmed what your face had already told me. You have the tactful kindness that gives a good mind such charm. From the first moment I saw you, you spoke to me of my sadness and loneliness with a kindness that was so straightforward and so obviously spontaneous that I immediately felt a sense of trust. I do not think you could imagine how precious that will be to me.

  I invited Philippe and Renée to lunch in my rooms on the rue Ampère, then Philippe asked the two of us for lunch. I very much liked the little apartment where he entertained us. I particularly remember two wonderful Sisleys (views of the Seine in lavender blue) and an arrangement of pastel-colored flowers on the table. Conversation was easy, both amusing and serious, and it was clear that the three of us enjoyed seeing each other.

  Renée in turn invited Philippe and myself to dinner. That evening, he offered to take us to the theater the next day, and we fell into a routine of going out with him two or three times a week. I was amused to notice, during the course of these outings, that Renée was at pains to show that she and Philippe were a twosome and I was the guest. I accepted this stance but knew, although he had never told me so, that Philippe preferred to be alone with me. One evening when Renée was unwell and could not come, I went out with him. During dinner he was first to raise the subject of his marriage (and to talk very lucidly of it). I then realized that everything Renée had told me about Odile, although true, was not accurate. From what Renée said of Odile, I had pictured a very beautiful but very dangerous woman. Listening to Philippe, I saw a fragile little girl who had done her best. I very much liked Philippe that evening. I admired the terribly affectionate memories he still had of a woman who had made him suffer. For the first time it occurred to me that he might be the hero I had been waiting for.

  At the end of April he went on a long journey. He was not in very good health, was coughing a great deal, and the doctors recommended a warm climate. I received a card from Rome: Cara signora, I am writing to you beside my open window; the sky is cloudless and blue; the pillars and triumphal arches in the Forum rise up from sandy, golden mists. Everything is extraordinarily beautiful. Then a card from Tangier: First stage of a dreamlike voyage on the smooth sea colored pearl gray and violet. Tangier? It has elements of Constantinople, Asnières, and Toulon. It is dirty and noble, like all of the East. Then a telegram from Oran: Come for lunch at my apartment on Thursday, one o’clock. Respectfully—Marcenat.

  When I saw Renée at the laboratory that morning I said, “So, are we having lunch with Philippe on Thursday?”

  “What?” she said. “Is he back?”

  I showed her the telegram; her face adopted a pained expression I had never seen before. She pulled herself together immediately.

  “Oh yes!” she said. “Oh well! You’ll be lunching alone because he hasn’t invited me.”

  I felt very awkward. I gathered later from Philippe himself that the main aim of his travels had been to put an end to his intimacy with Renée. Their family had treated them as an engaged couple, and it had exasperated him. In fact, Renée slipped out of his life without a whimper. She remained our friend, sometimes a slightly bitter one. It was from her that I had learned to admire Philippe, but from that point on she welcomed—with a sadness that was sometimes almost cruel—anything that belittled him. “It’s only human,” Philippe used to say, but I was less indulgent.

  . IV .

  Through the summer, Philippe and I spent a lot of time together. He attended to his business interests but took a few hours off every day, and he went to Gandumas only once a month. He telephoned me almost every morning and we arranged to go out later: a walk in the afternoon if the weather was fine, or a dinner or a show in the evening. Philippe was a faultless friend for a woman. He seemed to anticipate my wishes and instantly satisfied them. I was given flowers, a book we had discussed, something he had admired during one of our walks. I say he had admired, because Philippe’s tastes were very different from my own, and he obeyed his. There was a mystery in this that I strove in vain to understand. If a woman walked into a restaurant where we were dining, he would pronounce a judgment on her dress, the particular nuances of her elegance, and the character that these might reveal. I noticed with a sort of terror that his impressions almost always contradicted my own spontaneous reactions. With my usual application, I tried to find rules for “Philippe thinking” or “translating into Philippe.” I could not. I did try. “But that dress there,” I would ask, “it’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  “What!” Philippe would reply, disgusted. “The salmon pink one? Oh, for heaven’s sake, no!”

  I would concede that he was right but I did not understand why.

  On the subject of books and theater, it was more or less the same. From our very first conversation I noticed that he seemed shocked because I sincerely viewed Henry Bataille as a major dramatist and Edmond Rostand a great poet. “Well, yes,” he said, “Cyrano was good fun, I was even quite taken with it when I was young and, all in all, it’s well put together, but it’s not in the same league as the greats.” I thought him unfair but did not dare defend my feelings because I was afraid of shocking him. I found the books he gave me to read (by Stendhal, Proust, and Mérimée) boring at first, but I quickly came to like them because I could see why they appealed to him. Nothing could have been easier than understanding Philippe’s taste in books: he was one of those readers who look only for themselves in what they read. I often found the margins of his books covered with notes, notes I had trouble deciphering but that helped me follow his thoughts through the author’s. I took a passionate interest in anything that revealed his character to me.

  What most amazed me was that he should take so much trouble to instruct and entertain me. I probably had many faults but no vanity at all; I thought myself stupid and not very pretty. I constantly wondered what he could possibly see in me. It was obvious he liked seeing me and wanted to please me. Yet this was not because I had been coquettish with him. In the early days, respect for Renée’s prior claim had stopped me envisaging so much as close friendship with Philippe, so he really was the one who chose me. Why? I had the pleasant but also disturbing notion that—rather like hanging a garment on a peg—he was hanging a more beautiful and more complex character onto mine. In the passage I have already cited, he said, “She is nothing like Odile, and yet … Perhaps it is simply because she was wearing a white dress …” I certainly was nothing like Odile, but we can all give mysterious, fleeting impressions, and these are not the ones with the least influence over our lives.

  We are wrong to say love is blind. The truth is that love is indifferent to faults and weaknesses it can see perfectly clearly, if it believes it has found in someone an often indefinable quality that means more t
o it than anything else. At the bottom of his heart Philippe knew, although he may not have admitted it to himself, that I was a shy, gentle, and unremarkable woman, but he needed me there. He wanted me to be prepared to leave everything in order to be with him. I was not his wife or his mistress, yet he seemed to demand utter fidelity. On several occasions, as had become my habit since the war, I went out with other male friends. I told him I had: he looked so unhappy that I decided not to again. He now telephoned every morning at nine o’clock. On the days when I had already left for the Pasteur Institute (either because he had had trouble placing the call or he had arrived a little too late at his office), he would be so agitated in the evening that I eventually gave up the laboratory so he knew he would get hold of me. He gradually annexed my life in this way.

  He took to coming to see me on the rue Ampère after lunch. When the weather was fine we would go out together. I knew Paris very well and liked showing him old mansions, churches, and museums. He found my overly precise erudition amusing. “You,” he would say, laughing, “you know the dates for all the kings of France, and the telephone numbers of every great writer.” But he enjoyed those walks. I now knew what he liked: the splash of a flower on a gray wall, a slice of the Seine glimpsed from a window on the Île Saint-Louis, a garden hidden behind a church. I would often go out alone in the mornings to explore the terrain so that I could be sure to take him somewhere just right for him that afternoon. Occasionally we went to concerts too; our tastes in music were almost the same. I found this striking because my musical tastes were not at all the result of my upbringing but of extremely strong responses I myself had felt.