“I would think so,” said Renée. “I work for him.”
“Isn’t he a friend of Robert Etienne, the one from Morocco, I mean the one who wrote the Prayer to the Oudaïas?”
“Yes,” said Renée.
“What about you?” asked Philippe. “Do you know Etienne?”
“Very well.”
“What sort of man is he?”
“Remarkable,” said Renée.
“Ah!” said Philippe. Then he added with some difficultly, “Yes, I too think he’s talented … But sometimes the man is inferior to the work …”
“That is not the case here,” said Renée, merciless.
I looked at her beseechingly. Philippe was silent for the whole rest of the evening.
. XXI .
I watched as Philippe’s love for Solange Villier died beside me. He never talked to me about her. On the contrary, he obviously wanted me to think nothing had changed in their relationship. Besides, he still saw her often, but much less than before, and it did not give him such unmitigated pleasure. When they went for walks, he no longer came home young and happy, but serious and sometimes almost despairing. Occasionally I thought he might confide in me. He would take my hand and say, “Isabelle, you’re the one who chose the better course.”
“Why, darling?”
“Because …”
Then he would stop, but I understood perfectly. He continued to send Solange flowers, and to treat her as someone he loved dearly. Don Quixote and Lancelot remained faithful. But the notes I find in his papers from 1923 are quite sad:
April 17—Walk with S., Montmartre. We went all the way up to the place du Tertre and sat at a café terrace. Croissants and lemonade. Solange asked for a bar of chocolate and had her snack there in the open, like a little girl. Rekindled exactly various feelings I had forgotten since the Odile-François days. Solange wants to be natural and affectionate; she’s very tender with me and very good to me. But I can see she is thinking of someone else. She has the same languor I noticed in Odile after her first escapade and, like her, avoids any explanations. The moment I try to talk about her, about us, she avoids it and comes up with a game. Today she looked at passersby and had fun guessing what their lives were like from the way they moved and how they looked. With a taxi driver who stopped by our café and sat at a table with two women he had been driving around in his car, she invented a whole novel. I try to stop loving her, but do not manage very well. I find her as attractive as ever—she looks so strong, her face so sun kissed.
“My dear,” she says, “you’re sad. What’s the matter? Don’t you think life’s fun? Just think, in every one of those funny little houses there are men and women whose lives would be fascinating to watch. And think that, all over Paris, there are hundreds of squares like this, and dozens of Parises in the world. It is amazing!”
“I don’t agree, Solange. I think life’s quite an interesting performance when you’re very young. When you get to forty like me, when you’ve seen the prompt, you know the actors’ ways, and have worked out the threads of the plot, you feel like walking out.”
“I don’t like you talking like that. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
“But I have, my poor Solange, I’ve seen the third act. I didn’t think it was very good or very cheerful. It’s always the same situation, I can see it’s going to be like that right to the end, and that’s enough for me. I don’t feel like watching the outcome.”
“You’re a bad audience,” said Solange. “You have a delightful wife, charming girlfriends …”
“Girlfriends?”
“Yes, sir, girlfriends. I know about your life.”
This is all terribly Odile. What I can barely forgive myself is that I take pleasure in this misery. There’s a mysterious satisfaction in viewing life as a mournful performance like that, a satisfaction no doubt based on pride—a Marcenat vice. What I ought to do is stop seeing Solange. Then perhaps everything would settle down, but it is impossible to see her and not love her.
April 18—Yesterday evening I had a long conversation about love with one of my friends, a man of over fifty who is said to have been one of the Don Juans of his day. What struck me as I listened to him was how little happiness he derived from all the adventures that other men envied him.
“When all is said and done,” he said, “I loved only one woman: Claire P., and even with her, my goodness, I was tired of her in the end!”
“And yet she’s so charming,” I said.
“Oh, you can’t judge her now,” he said. “She’s all mannerisms and simpering. She’s taken behavior that used to be quite natural to her and now wears it like a mask. No, I really can’t even see her anymore.”
“What about the others?”
“The others were nothing.”
I mentioned the woman who is still regarded as the one who fills his life.
“I don’t love her at all,” he said. “I just see her out of habit. She’s hurt me terribly; she was unfaithful to me many times. Now I can judge her. No, really, it’s nothing.”
Listening to him makes me wonder whether romantic love actually exists, whether I should give up on it. As in Tristan und Isolde, death alone saves love from failure, but of course death condemns it.
April 19—Trip to Gandumas. The first for three months. A few workmen came to tell me their woes: poverty, sickness. Confronted with these real problems, I blushed to think of my own imaginary ones. And yet, among the workmen too there are troubles in love.
Spent a completely sleepless night thinking about my life. I think it’s been one long mistake. To be honest, my only occupation has been pursuing an absolute happiness that I thought I would find through women, and there is no more fruitless pursuit. Absolute love does not exist any more than a perfect government, and the heart’s opportunism is the only wisdom in human affections. It is most important not to take pleasure in a particular behavior. Our feelings are all too often only the images of our feelings. I could free myself from this obsession with Solange in a flash if I agreed to look at the real Solange, the one I have had in me ever since I met her, which has always been in me, drawn by a cruel, exacting master, and that I refuse to see.
April 20—Even though Solange hardly cares for me now, the minute I try to break away, she pulls a little on the string and draws it tighter. Coquettishness or charity?
April 23—Where does the blame lie? Solange has changed like Odile. Is that because I made the same mistakes? Or because I made the same choice? Should we always hide what we feel in order to keep what we love? Do we have to be cunning, must we devise and disguise just when we want to let ourselves go? I don’t know anymore.
April 27—Every ten years we should eradicate a few ideas that experience has proved to be misguided or dangerous.
Ideas to eradicate:
A) Women can be tied down by a promise or an oath. False. “Women have no morals, the way they behave depends on what they love.”
B) There is such a thing as the perfect woman, with whom love would be a succession of undiluted pleasures for the senses, the mind, and the heart. False. “Two human beings moored next to each other are like two boats rocked by the waves; their hulls collide and creak.”
May 28—Dinner on the avenue Marceau. Aunt Cora dying among her fattened chickens and her orchids.
Hélène came over to talk to me about Solange. “Poor Marcenat!” she said. “You’ve looked so miserable the last few weeks … I understand, of course, you’re hurting.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied.
“Yes you do,” she said. “You’re still in love with her.”
I protested.
. XXII .
The red notebook reveals a Philippe who was far more lucid and in control of himself than I recognized at the time. I think his intelligence was already freer, but in his secret depths there was still an enslaved Philippe. He seemed so unhappy that, more than once, I wondered whether I should go and see Sola
nge and beg her to show him some consideration. But it felt such a ridiculous step to take that I did not dare to. Besides, I now loathed Solange. I felt that alone with her I would not be able to restrain myself. We carried on seeing her at the Thianges’, and then Philippe refused to go to Hélène’s Saturday salons (something he had never done).
“You go, so she sees we’re not angry with her. That wouldn’t be fair, Hélène’s kind. But I can’t do it anymore, I tell you. The older I get the more I despise the social scene … a corner by the fire, a book, you … that’s happiness for me now.”
I knew he meant it sincerely. I also knew that if, at that moment, he had met a pretty, frivolous young woman and she, by some invisible communication, had given him the signal he was waiting for, he would instantly and unwittingly have altered his philosophy and explained that, after a day’s work, what he really needed was to see new people and have some fun. Early in our marriage, I remember being saddened by the eternally impenetrable skulls of those we love, hiding their thoughts from us. Philippe had become transparent to me. Through a fine membrane pulsating with a network of delicate vessels, I could now make out his every thought, his every weakness, and I loved him better than ever. I remember one evening in his study looking at him for a long time without a word.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, smiling.
“I’m trying to see you as I would if I didn’t love you, and still to love you like that.”
“God, that’s complicated! And can you?”
“Love you like that? Yes, effortlessly.”
That evening he suggested we go to Gandumas earlier in the year than usual.
“There’s nothing to keep us in Paris. I can take care of my work just as well there. And the country air will be very good for Alain, and my mother won’t be so alone. I can see nothing but advantages to going.”
This trip was all I could have wished for. At Gandumas, Philippe would be entirely mine. My only fear was that he would be bored there, but in fact I noticed he immediately seemed more balanced. In Paris, even though he had lost Solange, he still had tenacious—but most likely unfounded—hopes. He still reacted instinctually when the telephone rang, a response I knew so well and of which he was not yet cured.
When we went out, because I was painfully aware of Philippe’s every quiver, I could tell he was afraid we might meet her at any moment, but he also longed for this. He knew he still cared for her terribly and that, if she wanted to, she would have him back in a flash. He knew this, but he also knew that both his dignity and fears for his happiness demanded that he should not allow himself to be taken again. At Gandumas, in a setting that had never been associated with Solange, he gradually started to forget her. After a week, he already looked better; his cheeks were fuller, his eyes brighter, he was sleeping better.
The weather was magnificent. We went for long walks together. Philippe told me he now wanted to follow his father’s example and take an interest in smallholdings. We went to la Guichardie, les Bruyères, and Resonzac every day.
Philippe spent only the mornings at the factory; every afternoon he went out with me.
“Do you know what we ought to do?” he asked. “We should take a book and read to each other in the woods.”
There were lovely shady retreats around Gandumas. Sometimes it was a mossy bank beside a wide walkway where the branches met overhead, forming the side aisle of a soft green cathedral, sometimes a fallen tree trunk, sometimes on a bench put there years before by Grandfather Marcenat. He very much liked Balzac’s Study of a Woman and his Secrets of the Princesse Cadignan, and various novellas by Mérimée such as The Double Misunderstanding or The Etruscan Vase, as well as some Kipling stories and some of the poets.
Sometimes he would look up and ask, “I’m not boring you, am I?”
“What a thought! I’ve never been more perfectly happy!”
He would look at me for a moment and then carry on. When the reading was over, we discussed the characters and their personalities, and often ended up talking about real people. One day I was the one who brought along a small book and refused to show Philippe its title.
“What is this mysterious book?” he asked once we were sitting down.
“It’s something I took from your mother’s bookshelves, and it’s played a part in your life, Philippe; at least you once wrote that it did.”
“I know what it is, it’s my Little Russian Soldiers. Oh, I’m really pleased you found it, Isabelle. Let me see.”
He leafed through it and seemed slightly amused and slightly disappointed. “ ‘They proposed to elect a queen, a young schoolgirl we all knew very well: Ania Sokoloff. She was a remarkably beautiful, slender, elegant, and able girl … Bowing our heads before the queen, we swore to obey the laws.’ ”
“Oh, but it’s charming, Philippe, and it’s so you … ‘Bowing our heads before the queen, we swore to obey the laws.’ It also has such a nice story: something the queen wants and the hero goes to great trouble to find … ‘ “My God, my God!” said the queen. “What trouble you’ve gone to! Thank you.” She was very pleased. Shaking my hand once more as I bid her adieu, she added, “If I am still your queen, I shall tell the general to reward you handsomely.” I bowed to her and withdrew, and I too was very happy …’ You’ve so completely stayed that little boy your whole life, Philippe … Only the queen has kept changing.”
Philippe, sitting beside a bush, plucked off small branches, snapped them in his fingers, and threw them into the grass.
“Yes,” he said, “the queen has kept changing. The truth is I’ve never met the queen … well, never exactly her, do you understand?”
“Who’s been the queen, Philippe?”
“Several women, my darling. Denise Aubry a bit … but a very imperfect queen. Did I tell you poor Denise Aubry died?”
“No, Philippe … She must have been very young … What did she die of?”
“I don’t know. My mother told me the other day. Hearing about it felt very strange, as if it was a trifling piece of news, the death of a woman who, for several years, was the center of the universe to me.”
“Who was the queen after Denise Aubry?”
“Odile.”
“And was she the closest to the queen of your dreams?” I asked.
“Yes, because she was so beautiful.”
“After Odile? … Hélène de Thianges for a while?”
“Perhaps for a while,” he said after a moment’s thought. Then he added, “But definitely you, Isabelle.”
“Me too, really? For a long time?”
“A very long time.”
“Then Solange,” I said.
“Well, yes, then Solange …”
“Is Solange still the queen, Philippe?”
“No,” he said quietly. “But in spite of everything, I don’t have unpleasant memories of Solange. There was something so alive, so strong about her. I felt younger with her; it was nice.”
“You should see her again, Philippe.”
“Yes, I’ll see her again when I’ve recovered more, but she won’t be the queen any longer; that’s over.”
“And what about now, Philippe, who’s the queen?”
He hesitated for a moment, then looked at me and said, “You are.”
“Me? But I was deposed long ago.”
“Yes, you may have been deposed because you were jealous and petty and unfair. But in the last three months you’ve been so brave, so straightforward, that I’ve given you your crown back. Anyway, you can’t imagine how much you’ve changed, Isabelle. You’re not the same woman anymore.”
“I know that, my darling,” I said. “Deep down, a woman in love never has a personality; she says she has one, she tries to make herself believe she has, but it’s not true. No, she tries to understand the woman that the man she loves wants to see in her and to become that woman … It’s very difficult with you, Philippe, because it’s not very clear what you want. You need faithfulness and tenderness, but
you also need coquettishness and uncertainty. What’s a woman to do? I chose faithfulness, which was closest to my own character … But I think you’re going to carry on needing someone else for a long time, someone who’s unreliable and elusive to you. The great victory I’ve won over myself is accepting this other woman, I even accept her with resignation, happily. The really important thing I’ve realized in the last year is that if we truly love we mustn’t attach too much importance to the things that the people we love do. We need them; they alone mean we can live in a particular ‘atmosphere’ (your friend Hélène calls it a ‘climate’ and that’s exactly right) that we can’t get by without. So long as we can keep them, hold on to them, good God, what does the rest matter? Life’s so short, so difficult … Philippe, do I have the strength to haggle with you over the few hours’ happiness these women might give you? No. I’ve come a long way, I’m no longer jealous, it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Philippe lay down on the grass and put his head on my knees.
“I haven’t quite reached the same stage as you,” he said. “I think it could go on hurting me, hurting a lot. The fact that life’s short isn’t a consolation for me. It’s short, yes, but compared to what? For us, it’s everything … Even so, I feel I’m gradually coming to a calmer period. Do you remember I used to talk about my life as a symphony that combined different themes: the theme of the Knight, the Cynic, and the Rival. I can still hear them all loud and clear. But I can also hear one isolated instrument in the orchestra. I don’t know what it is, but it keeps firmly yet gently repeating a quiet, soothing theme made up of just a few notes. It’s the theme of serenity; it’s rather like the theme for old age.”
“But you’re young, Philippe.”
“Oh, I know that! And that’s why it sounds so quiet. Later it will drown out the whole orchestra and I’ll miss the days when I heard all the others.”
“What makes me sad sometimes,” I told him, “is thinking how long the apprenticeship is. You tell me I’m a better person than I used to be, and I think that’s true. When I’m forty perhaps I’ll start understanding life a bit, but it will be too late … Still … Darling, do you think it’s possible for two people to be in perfect agreement, without a single cloud?”
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