“Philippe, I want to scream with happiness!” I said from time to time.
“You’re so young, oh my God!” he replied.
. VII .
At the beginning of November we went back to Paris. I had told Philippe that I would like to keep the apartment I had been using in my parents’ house.
“I can see nothing but advantages. I don’t pay any rent, the apartment’s furnished, it’s big enough for the two of us, and my parents can’t get in the way because they’re only in Paris for a few weeks a year. If at some later date they return to France and move back into rue Ampère, then it would be time to look for somewhere else.”
Philippe refused.
“You are odd sometimes, Isabelle,” he said. “I couldn’t live in that house. It’s ugly and badly decorated, and the walls and ceilings have those monstrous plaster moldings. Your parents would never let you change it. No, I can tell you, it would be a big mistake … I wouldn’t be happy at home.”
“Even with me, Philippe? … Don’t you think that what’s important in life is people, not furnishings?”
“Yes, all right, we can always say things like that and they sound right and true … But we’ll be lost if you’re still going in for superficial sentimentality … When you ask, ‘Even with me,’ I have to reply, ‘Of course not, my darling.’ Only it’s not true: I just know I wouldn’t be happy in that house.”
I gave in but then wanted to move the furniture, which was mine and had been given to me by my parents, into the new apartment Philippe had found.
“My poor Isabelle,” Philippe said. “Which pieces of your furniture are worth keeping? Perhaps a few white bathroom chairs, a kitchen table, if you like, the odd linen press. All the rest is awful.”
I was heartbroken. I knew perfectly well that none of the furniture was beautiful, but it had always been there and I did not find it offensive. Quite the opposite, I felt comfortable surrounded by it and, more important, I thought it would be madness to go and buy any more. I knew that when she came back, my mother would criticize me severely, and deep down I would agree with her.
“What do you think we should do with the furniture, then, Philippe?”
“Well, we must sell it, my darling.”
“You know we’d get nothing for it. The minute you want to get rid of something, everyone says it isn’t worth anything.”
“Of course. But it isn’t worth anything. That mock Henri II dining room furniture … Isabelle, I’m surprised you can be attached to horrors like that when you didn’t even choose them yourself.”
“Yes, perhaps I was wrong, Philippe. Do whatever you like.”
This little scene was repeated so frequently, over the most insignificant things, that I actually ended up laughing about it, but in Philippe’s red notebook I find this:
Good God, I know none of this matters at all. Isabelle is perfect in other ways: her selflessness … her wish to make everyone around her happy. She transformed my mother’s life at Gandumas … Perhaps precisely because she herself doesn’t have very pronounced tastes, she always seems preoccupied with anticipating mine and satisfying them. I can’t mention something I want to her without her coming home that evening with a parcel containing what I wanted. She spoils me the way people spoil children, the way I spoiled Odile. But it saddens me, it frightens me to find that these kindnesses seem rather to distance me from her. I’m angry with myself for this; I fight it but am powerless. What I need … what do I need? What has happened? I think what has happened is what always happens with me: I wanted Isabelle to incarnate my Amazon, my Queen, and also in some ways Odile, whom I now confuse with my Amazon in my memories. But Isabelle is not that type of woman. I have given her a role she cannot play. The worst of it is, I know all this and I’m trying to love her as she is, and I know that she’s worthy of being loved, and I’m in pain.
But why, Oh God, why? I have that rarest happiness: a great love. I’ve spent my life yearning for something out of a novel and hoping the novel would be a success; now I have it and I don’t want it. I love Isabelle and yet, with her, I feel an affectionate but invincible boredom. I now understand how much I must have bored Odile. A boredom that is absolutely not hurtful to Isabelle, as it was absolutely not hurtful to me, because it is based not on the mediocrity of the person who loves us but simply on the fact that, satisfied with a mere presence, he or she does not try and has no reason to try to fill life to the brim and make each minute live … Isabelle and I spent all of yesterday evening in the library. I was not in the mood for reading, I would have liked to go out, see new people, do something. Isabelle, quite happy, looked up over her book from time to time and smiled.
Oh, Philippe, dear, silent Philippe, why did you not say something? I already knew so clearly what you were writing in secret. No, you would not have hurt me by telling me such things; quite the opposite, you might have cured me. Perhaps if we had said everything we might have been able to meet in the middle again. I knew I was taking a risk when I said, “Every minute is precious … Getting into a car with you, trying to catch your eye during a meal, hearing your door slam …” You are right to say I had only one thing on my mind at the time: being alone with you. Looking at you, listening to you, that was enough for me. I had absolutely no desire to see new people. I was afraid of them, but if I had known that you had such a burning need, perhaps I would have behaved differently.
. VIII .
Philippe wanted me to get to know his friends. I was surprised to find there were so many of them. I do not know why I had pictured—hoped for—a more secret, more rarefied life. Every Saturday he spent the end of the afternoon with Madame de Thianges, who seemed to be his great confidante, and whose sister, Madame Antoine Quesnay, he also liked very much. It was a pleasant salon, but it frightened me a little. In spite of myself, I clung to Philippe. I could see he was slightly irritated to find I was always in the same group as him, but I could not help following him.
All the women greeted me very warmly, but I felt no urge to form friendships with them. They had a composure and confidence that I found astonishing and embarrassing. I was particularly surprised to see how intimate they were with Philippe. There was a camaraderie between them and him the likes of which I had never seen in my family. Philippe went out with Françoise Quesnay when she was alone in Paris, or Yvonne Prévost, the naval officer’s wife, or a young woman called Thérèse de Saint-Cast who wrote poetry and whom I did not care for. These outings seemed utterly innocent. Philippe and his women friends went to art exhibitions, sometimes a film in the evening or to a concert on Sunday afternoons. In the early days he always invited me to join them, and a few times I did. It was not enjoyable for me.
On these occasions Philippe would behave with an animated gaiety he had once had with me. The spectacle of his pleasure hurt me. It particularly pained me to see him taking an interest in such a variety of women. I feel I would have coped better with a single irresistible passion. It would probably have been appalling and much more dangerous for my marriage, but at least the harm would have had the same stature as my love. What was hurtful was seeing my hero attaching such importance to creatures who may well have been likable but whom I found unremarkable. One day I dared tell him so: “Philippe, darling, I want to understand you. What pleasure do you get from seeing little Yvonne Prévost? She isn’t your mistress, you’ve told me that and I believe you, but what does she mean to you, then? Do you find her intelligent? I can’t think of anyone more boring.”
“Yvonne? Oh, no! She’s not boring. You have to get her to talk about things she knows about. She’s the daughter and the wife of naval men; she knows a lot about boats and the sea. Last spring I spent a few days in the south with her and her husband. We swam and sailed; it was great fun … and she’s so jolly, she has a nice figure, she’s pleasant to look at. What more do you want?”
“For you? Well, much more … You must understand, darling, I think you’re worthy of the most remarkable women, and I
see you growing fond of little creatures who are pretty but ordinary.”
“You’re so harsh and unfair! Take Hélène and Françoise, for example: they’re both remarkable women. And anyway they’re very old friends of mine. Before the war, when I was very ill, Hélène was commendable. She came and looked after me, she may have saved me … You are strange, Isabelle! What is it you want? For me to break off ties with the entire human race and stay alone with you? But I’d be bored after a couple of days … and so would you.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t be! I’d be quite happy to shut myself away in a prison with you for the rest of my days. Only you wouldn’t bear it.”
“But nor would you, my poor Isabelle. You want that because you haven’t got it. If I made you live that life, you would loathe it.”
“Try, darling, you’ll see. Listen, it’s nearly Christmas. Let’s go away together, alone, it would make me so happy. You know I didn’t have a honeymoon.”
“Willingly, of course. Where would you like to go?”
“Oh, it couldn’t matter less to me, anywhere, so long as I’m with you.”
It was agreed that we would go and spend a few days in the mountains, and I immediately wrote to a hotel in Saint-Moritz to reserve the rooms.
Just the thought of this trip was enough to make me very happy. But Philippe was still gloomy. He wrote:
Sad feeling of irony as I realize that the relative situations of two human beings are few and far between. In this drama of love, we take turns in playing the role of the more loved and the less loved. All the lines then switch from one performer to the other, but they stay the same. I am now the one who comes home after a long day out of the house and find myself constrained to explain in detail what I have done, hour by hour. Isabelle is trying hard not to be jealous, but I know that evil too well to hesitate diagnosing it. Poor Isabelle! I feel sorry for her and can do nothing to cure her. When I think of the genuine innocence and laborious emptiness of the minutes that seem so mysterious to her, I cannot help thinking of Odile. What would I not have given in times past for Odile to have attributed such value to my every action! But alas! Surely that was what I wanted precisely because she attributed them no value at all!
The more Isabelle and I live together, the more I discover how different our tastes are. Sometimes, in the evening, I suggest we go out to try a new restaurant, go to the cinema or to the music hall. She accepts with such sadness that I feel weary of the evening before it has even started.
“You clearly don’t feel like it, so let’s not go. Let’s stay here.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” she says, relieved, “yes, I’d rather stay here.”
When we go out with friends, my wife’s lack of enthusiasm chills me to the core; I feel I am responsible for it.
“It’s odd,” I tell her, “you seem incapable of having fun for just one hour.”
“I think it’s so pointless,” she says. “It feels so much like wasting my time, when I have beautiful books sitting on my table, or work that I’m behind with at home. But if it makes you happy, I’m absolutely prepared to go out.”
“No,” I say rather irritably, “it doesn’t make me happy.”
And a few months later, I find this:
Summer evening. I managed, God knows how, to drag Isabelle out to the fair in Neuilly. All around, organs on the rides playing Negro tunes, the banging from shooting galleries, the clatter of the lottery wheel, a warm smell of waffles hanging in the air. We were carried by a slow, dense crowd. I do not know why, but I was happy; I liked the noise, the excitement; I felt there was an obscure but powerful poetry in it. I thought, “These men and women are being borne toward death so swiftly, and they spend the briefest moment throwing a hoop over the neck of a bottle, or making the clown appear by slamming down a mallet. And deep down they are most likely right: standing facing the abyss that awaits us all, Napoleon and Richelieu made no better use of their lives than that little woman and that soldier …”
I had forgotten all about Isabelle, who was holding onto my arm. All at once she said, “Let’s go home, darling. I find this horribly tiring.”
I called a taxi and, as we nosed slowly through the hostile crowd, I thought, “An evening like this would have been so charming and cheerful with Odile! She would have worn that luminous expression she had on her happy days. She would have played every kind of game and been thrilled to win a little boat made of spun glass. Poor Odile, who loved life so much and who saw so little of it, when creatures made to die, like Isabelle and myself, carry on their monotonous existences without particularly wanting to.”
Isabelle seemed to guess what I was thinking and took my hand.
“Are you unwell?” I asked. “You’re so rarely tired.”
“Oh no!” she said. “But I find fairs so boring that they tire me out more quickly than other places.”
“Do you find this boring, Isabelle? What a shame, and I like it so much!”
And then out of nowhere—perhaps because the organ on a carousel was playing a tune from before the war—something Odile had said to me a long time ago, as we walked through the same fair, came back to me. Back then she was the one resenting me for being bored. Have I changed so very much? In the same way that a house abandoned by the people who built and decorated it, then bought by new owners, keeps the same smell and even the same spirit of the first owners, I too was impregnated with Odile’s spirit and now displayed characteristics that were not entirely my own … My true tastes and my cautious Marcenat mind were things I was now far more likely to find in Isabelle, and it was strange to think that, on that evening, I criticized her for the very harshness and dislike of frivolous pleasures that had once been second nature to me and that another woman had erased from my mind.
. IX .
It was nearly time for us to leave for the mountains. The week before, at Hélène de Thianges’s salon, Philippe ran into a couple he had known in Morocco, the Villiers. I want to find a word to depict Madame Villier but cannot. Proud, possibly, but also victorious. Yes, that is more what it is: victorious. Beneath a mass of blond hair, her profile is pure, precise. She was reminiscent of a beautiful thoroughbred animal. She came over to us as soon as we arrived.
“Monsieur Marcenat and I went on a wonderful excursion in the Atlas Mountains,” she told me. “Do you remember Saïd, Marcenat? Saïd,” she added for my benefit, “was our guide, a little Arab with shining eyes.”
“He was a poet,” said Philippe. “When we took him in the car with us he sang about the speed of Europeans and of Madame Villier’s beauty.”
“Are you not taking your wife to Morocco this year?” she asked.
“No,” said Philippe, “we’re only going on a very short trip, to the mountains. Aren’t you tempted?”
“Is that a serious invitation? Because, believe it or not, my husband and I want to spend Christmas and New Year’s in the snow. Whereabouts are you going?”
“To Saint-Moritz,” said Philippe.
I was furious; I tried to catch his attention, but he did not notice. In the end I stood up and said, “We have to go, Philippe.”
“We do?” he asked. “Why?”
“I’ve arranged to see the managing agent at home.”
“On a Saturday?”
“Yes, I thought it would be more convenient for you.”
He looked at me with some surprise but said nothing and stood up.
“If you like the idea of the trip,” he said to Madame Villier, “telephone me; we’ll make some plans. It would be great fun to do this with another couple.”
When we were outside he said rather abruptly, “Why on earth arrange a meeting at six o’clock on a Saturday? What a peculiar idea! You know perfectly well it’s Hélène’s day and I like to stay late.”
“But I haven’t arranged to meet anyone, Philippe. I wanted to leave.”
“What a fabrication!” he said, astonished. “Are you unwell?”
“Of course not. I ju
st don’t want those Villiers with us on our trip. I don’t understand you, Philippe. You know that, for me, the whole pleasure of vacations is spending them alone with you, and you go and invite people you hardly know, whom you met once in Morocco.”
“Such vehemence! Such a different Isabelle! But the Villiers aren’t people I hardly know. I spent two weeks with them. I spent exquisite evenings in their garden in Marrakesh. You can’t imagine how perfect that house is: the ponds, the fountains, the four cypress trees, the smell of flowers. Solange Villier has exquisite taste. She had arranged it so well: all Moroccan-style divans and thick carpets. No, truly, I feel closer to the Villiers than friends in Paris whom we meet at dinners three times through the winter.”
“Oh, well! That’s as may be, Philippe. I could have been wrong, but leave me my trip. I was promised it, it’s mine.”
Philippe laughed and put his hand on mine. “Well, Madame, you shall have your trip.”
The following day when we were having coffee together after lunch, Madame Villier telephoned Philippe. I gathered from what he said that she had spoken to her husband, he approved of the plan, and they would both come to Switzerland with us. I noticed that Philippe did not make much of it and even discouraged the Villiers, but his last words were, “Well, then, we’d be delighted to meet up with you there.”
He hung up the receiver and looked at me, rather embarrassed.
“You heard yourself,” he said. “I did what I could.”
“Yes. But what’s happening? Are they coming? Oh, Philippe, that’s too much!”
“But what do you want me to do, darling? I really can’t be rude.”
“No, but you could think of an excuse, say we’re going somewhere else.”
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