“Oh, remorse! What’s the good of that?”
“No good, of course. I just said it, that’s all. Maybe it’s cleaner not to have any.”
I stayed awake a long while; so did he, it seemed to me. What was he thinking about? As for me, I was wondering whether I had been right to give way. Going from one concession to another, where should I end up?
And for the moment I am not getting anything out of it at all. It is too early, obviously. Before this affair can go bad it must be allowed to ripen. I tell myself that over and over again. And sometimes I think myself sensible, and sometimes I accuse myself of cowardice. In fact I am defenseless because I have never supposed I had any rights. I expect a lot of the people I love—too much, perhaps. I expect a lot, and I even ask for it. But I do not know how to insist.
Friday 15 October.
I had not seen Maurice so cheerful and affectionate for ages. He found two hours this afternoon to take me to the exhibition of Hittite art. No doubt he hopes to reconcile our life together with his affair. If it doesn’t last too long, that’s all right with me.
Sunday 17 October.
Yesterday he slipped out of bed before eight. I caught a whiff of his eau de Cologne. He closed the door of the bedroom and the front door gently. From the window I saw him scrupulously polishing the car, delighted. It seemed to me that he was probably humming.
Above the last autumn leaves there was a soft summer sky. (The golden rain of the acacia leaves on a pink and gray road, as we came back from Nancy.) He got into the car, he started the engine, and I looked at my place next to him: my place, where Noëllie was going to sit. He shifted the gear lever, the car moved off, and I felt my heart lose its rhythm. He drove off very fast; he disappeared. For ever. He will never come back. It will not be he who comes back.
I killed the time as well as I could. Colette, Isabelle. I saw two films: the Bergman twice straight off, it struck me so. This evening I put on some jazz, lighted a fire and knitted, watching the flames. Usually I am not afraid of being alone. Indeed, in small doses, I find it a relief—the presence of people I love overburdens my heart. I grow anxious about a wrinkle or a yawn. And so as not to be a nuisance—or absurd—I have to bottle up my anxieties, rein back my impulses. The times when I think of them from a distance are restful breaks. Last year, when Maurice was at a conference at Geneva, the days seemed short: this weekend is interminable. I threw my knitting aside, because it did not protect me: what are they doing, where are they, what are they saying to one another, what sort of looks do they exchange? I had thought I could preserve myself from jealousy: not at all. I searched through his pockets and his papers, without finding anything, of course. She must certainly have written to him when he was at Mougins: he went to fetch his letters at the post office, hiding it from me. And he has put them away somewhere at the hospital. If I asked to see them, would he show them to me?
Ask … whom? That man who is traveling with Noëllie, that man whose face, whose words, I cannot even picture to myself—do not want to picture to myself? The man I love and who loves me? Are they the same one? I can no longer tell. And I do not know whether I am making a mountain out of a molehill or what I take to be a molehill is in fact a mountain.
I sought shelter in our past. I spread out boxfuls of photographs in front of the fire. I found the one with Maurice wearing his armband: how much at one we were that day when we were looking after the wounded FFI near the Quai des Grands Augustins. Here, on the Cap Corse Road, is the gasping old motorcar his mother gave us. I remember that night when we broke down, near Corte. We sat there motionless, overawed by the solitude and the silence. I said, “We must try to put it right.” “Kiss me first,” said Maurice. We held each other tightly, for a long while, and we felt that no cold or weariness or anything on earth could touch us.
It’s odd. Does it mean something? All these pictures that rise up in my heart are more than ten years old: Europa Point, the liberation of Paris, our return from Nancy, our housewarming, that breakdown on the Corte Road. I can bring others to mind—our last summers at Mougins, Venice, my fortieth birthday. They don’t move me in the same way. Perhaps the more remote memories always seem the loveliest.
I am tired of asking myself questions and not knowing the answers. I am out of my depth. I no longer recognize the apartment. The things in it have the air of imitations of themselves. The massive table in the sitting room—it is hollow. As though both I and the house had been projected into a fourth dimension. If I were to go out it would not astonish me to find myself in a prehistoric forest, or in a city of the year 3000.
Tuesday 19 October.
Tension between us. My fault or his? I welcomed him with a fine air of naturalness: he told me about his weekend. They had been in the Sologne; it seems that Noëllie likes the Sologne. (So she possesses tastes, does she?) I started when he told me that yesterday they had dinner and slept at the Hostellerie de Forneville.
“That pretentious, expensive place?”
“It’s very pretty,” said Maurice.
“Isabelle tells me it’s the kind of picturesqueness put on for Americans—stuffed with potted plants, birds and phony antiques.”
“There are potted plants, birds and antiques, real or false. But it’s very pretty.”
I did not go on. I sensed a hardness coming into his voice. What Maurice usually likes is finding a genuine little restaurant where you eat well, or an uncrowded hotel in a beautiful, remote situation. All right, I quite see that once in a while he might do it for Noëllie; but he does not have to pretend to like the vulgarities that delight her. Unless she is acquiring an influence over him. He saw the latest Bergman with her in August, at a private showing (Noëllie goes only to private showings or galas), and he did not think much of it. She must have told him that Bergman was out of date—that’s her only criterion. She dazzles him by pretending to be completely with it—up to date in everything. I can see her now at that dinner of Diana’s last year. She gave a lecture upon these “happenings.” And then she held forth about the Rampal case, which she had just won. A truly ludicrous act. Luce Couturier looked thoroughly embarrassed, and Diana gave me a knowing wink. But the men listened, openmouthed—Maurice among them. And yet it’s not like him, to allow himself to be taken in by that kind of guff.
I ought not to go for Noëllie, but there are times when I just can’t help it. Over Bergman, I did not argue. But in the evening, at dinner, I had a stupid quarrel with Maurice because he would have it that it was quite possible to drink red wine with fish. A typical Noëllie line—to know the right way of behaving so perfectly that you don’t have to conform. So I stood up for the rule that says fish and white wine. We grew heated. Such a pity. I don’t like fish, anyhow.
Wednesday 20 October.
The night Maurice spoke to me I thought I should have an unpleasant but clear-cut situation to deal with. And now I do not know where I stand in it or what I have to fight against or whether I ought to fight or why. Are other wives so bewildered in comparable cases? Isabelle tells me again and again that time is on my side. I should like to believe her. As for Diana, so long as her husband is kind to her and her children and looks after them, she does not care in the least whether he deceives her or not. She could not possibly give me any advice. Still, I telephoned her because I wanted information about Noëllie: she knows her and dislikes her. (Noëllie made advances to Lemercier, who would have none of it: he does not like women to throw themselves at his head.) I asked her how long she had known about Maurice. She pretended to be surprised and said that Noëllie had not told her anything—they are not at all intimate. She told me that when Noëllie was twenty she married a very wealthy man. Her husband divorced her—no doubt he was tired of being cuckolded—but she got a handsome alimony; she forces him to give her splendid presents; she gets along very well with his new wife and often makes long stays at their villa at La Napoule. She has gone to bed with quantities of men—most of them useful in her career—an
d now she must be wanting a steady relationship. But she will drop Maurice if she hooks a richer or better-known man. (I should rather he took the initiative.) Her daughter is fourteen, and she is being brought up on the most pretentious lines—riding, yoga, Virginie dresses. She is at the Ecole Alsacienne with Diana’s second daughter, and she shows off unbelievably. And at the same time she complains that her mother neglects her. Diana says that Noëllie asks her clients outrageous fees, that she takes immense care of her publicity, and that she will do absolutely anything to succeed. We talked about the way she boasted last year. Foolishly enough this tearing of her to pieces eased my mind. It was like a magic spell: where you stick in the pins your rival will be maimed and disfigured, and the lover will see her hideous wounds. It seemed to me impossible that our portrait of Noëllie should not prevail with Maurice. (There is one thing that I shall tell him though—it was not she who argued the Rampal case at all.)
Thursday 21 October.
Maurice was on the defensive right away. “I can hear Diana from here! She loathes Noëllie!”
“That’s true,” I said. “But if Noëllie knows it, why does she go and see her?”
“And why does Diana go and see Noëllie? It’s a fashionable acquaintance. And now what?” he asked me with a certain challenge. “What has Diana been telling you?”
“You’ll tell me it is mere spite.”
“That’s for sure. Women who do nothing cannot bear those who work.”
(Women who do nothing: the expression stuck in my throat. It is not one of Maurice’s expressions.)
“And married women don’t like those who fling themselves at their husband’s heads,” I said.
“Oh, so that’s the way Diana tells it?” asked Maurice, looking amused.
“Noëllie claims it was the other way around, obviously. Each has his own version of the truth.…” I looked at Maurice. “And in your case which of you started the flinging?”
“I told you how it happened.”
Yes, he did tell me at the Club 46: but it was not very clear. Noëllie brought him her daughter, who was anemic; he suggested that she should spend an evening with him; she accepted; they ended up in bed. Oh, I don’t care. I went on, “If you want to know, Diana thinks Noëllie is self-seeking, on the make, and pretentious.”
“And you take her word for it?”
“At all events she tells lies.” I told him about the Rampal case, which she pretended to have argued, whereas in fact she was only Brévant’s junior.
“But she never said she was not. She looks upon it as her case insofar as she worked on it a great deal, that’s all.”
Either he was lying or he had cheated with his own memory. I am almost certain that she spoke of her address to the court. “In any case she arrogated the whole of the success to herself.”
“Listen,” he said cheerfully, “if she has all the vices that you say she has, how can you explain my spending five minutes with her?”
“I can’t explain it.”
“I am not going to make a formal defense of her. But I do assure you she’s a worthwhile woman.”
Maurice will see anything I say against Noëllie as the effect of my jealousy. It would be better to say nothing. But I really do find her profoundly disagreeable. She reminds me of my sister—the same confidence, the same glibness, the same phonily offhand elegance. It seems that men like this mixture of coquetry and hardness. When I was sixteen and she was eighteen Maryse swiped all my boyfriends. So much so that I was in a dreadful state of nerves when I introduced Maurice to her. I had a ghastly nightmare in which he fell in love with her. He was indignant. “She is so superficial! So bogus! Paste diamonds, rhinestones! You—you’re the real jewel.” Authentic: that was the word everyone was using in those days. He said I was authentic. At all events I was the one he loved, and I was not envious of my sister anymore; I was happy to be the person I was. But then how can he think a great deal of Noëllie, who is of the same kind as Maryse? He is altogether gone from me if he likes being with someone I dislike so very much—and whom he ought to dislike if he were faithful to our code. Certainly he has altered. He lets himself be taken in by false values that we used to despise. Or he is simply completely mistaken about Noëllie. I wish the scales would drop from his eyes soon. My patience is beginning to run out.
“Women who do nothing can’t stand those who work.” The remark surprised and wounded me. Maurice thinks it right that a woman should have a calling: he was very sorry that Colette chose marriage and being a housewife, and he even rather resented my not having dissuaded her. But after all he does acknowledge that there are other ways in which a woman can fulfill herself. He never thought I was doing “nothing”: on the contrary, he was astonished at the thoroughness with which I looked after the cases he told me about while at the same time I looked after the house really well and took great care of our daughters—and that without ever appearing tense or overworked. Other women always seemed to him either too idle or too busy. As for me, I had a balanced life: he even used the word harmonious. “With you, everything is harmonious.” I find it absolutely intolerable that he should adopt Noëllie’s scorn for women who “do nothing.”
Sunday 24 October
I am beginning to see through Noëllie’s little game: she is trying to reduce me to the role of the affectionate, resigned, house-loving wife who is left at home. I do like sitting by the fireside with Maurice; but it vexes me that it should always be she that he takes to concerts and to the theater. On Friday I cried out when he told me that he had been to a private viewing with her.
“But you loathe private viewings!” he replied.
“I love painting, though,” I said.
“If it had been good, I should have gone back with you.”
Easy enough to say. Noëllie lends him books—she plays at being the intellectual. All right, so I know less about modern writing and music than she does: but taken all in all I am not less cultured or less intelligent. Maurice wrote to me once that he trusted in my judgment more than anyone else’s because it was both “enlightened and naïve.” I try to say exactly what I think, what I feel; so does he; and there is nothing that seems more precious to us than this sincerity. I must not let Noëllie dazzle Maurice with her showing off. I asked Isabelle to help me to get back into the swim. Unknown to Maurice, of course: otherwise he would laugh at me.
She still urges me to go on being patient; she assures me that Maurice has not behaved very badly and that I ought still to retain my respect and liking for him. Her saying this about him did me good: I have so questioned myself about him, so distrusted him and blamed him, that in the end I was not really seeing what kind of a person he was at all. It is true that during our first years, between his consulting room at Simca and the little apartment with the children bawling in it, his life would have been grim if we had not loved one another so. After all it was for my sake, she said, that he gave up the idea of a staff appointment; he might have been tempted to hold it against me. There I just don’t agree. The war had kept him back; he was beginning to find his studies exasperating—he wanted an adult life. We had both of us been responsible for my pregnancy, and under Pétain there was no question of risking an abortion. No: any resentment would have been quite unfair. Our marriage made him as happy as it made me. Still, it was very much to his credit to have been so cheerful and so affectionate in unpleasant and indeed even wretched circumstances. Until this business I never had the shadow of a complaint to make against him.
This talk with Isabelle gave me courage: I asked Maurice to let us spend next weekend together. I should like him to rediscover a happiness and closeness that he has rather tended to forget—rediscover it with me; and I should like him to remember our past, too. I suggested going back to Nancy. He had the worried, harassed look of a fellow who knows there will be scenes elsewhere. (I’d very much like her to prove to him that sharing is not possible.) He said neither yes nor no—it depended on his patients.
; Wednesday 27 October.
He positively cannot leave Paris this weekend. In other words Noëllie is against it. I broke out in rebellion; for the first time I cried in front of him. He looked horrified. “Oh, don’t cry! I’ll try to find a locum.” In the end he promised he would manage somehow—he too wanted this weekend. That may be so or it may not. But what is quite certain is that my tears overwhelmed him.
I spent an hour in the visiting room with Marguerite. She is growing impatient. How long the days must be! The social worker is kind, but she cannot let me take her out without an authorization that does not come. By mere carelessness, no doubt, for I provide all possible guarantees as to character.
Thursday 28 October.
So we go for Saturday and Sunday. “I managed!” he told me in a triumphant voice. He was obviously proud of having stood up to Noëllie—too proud. It means that there was a ferocious struggle, and it therefore follows that she means a great deal to him. He seemed on edge all through the evening. He drank two glasses of whiskey instead of one and smoked cigarette after cigarette. He was too jolly and high-spirited by far discussing our route, and my reserve disappointed him. “You’re not pleased?”
“Of course I am.”
That was only half true. Has Noëllie taken up so much room in his life that he has to fight her so as to be able to take me away for a weekend? And have I myself reached the point of looking upon her as a rival? No. I won’t have any recriminations, schemes, false dealings, victories, defeats. I shall warn Maurice—“I shall not fight with Noëllie over you.”
Monday 1 November.
It was so like the past: I almost believed the likeness was going to bring the past to life again. We had driven through fog and then beneath a beautiful cold sun. At Bar-le-Duc and at Saint-Mihiel we looked at Ligier Richier’s sculptures again, and we were as deeply moved as we had been in the old days: it was I who showed them to him first. Since then we have traveled quite a lot; we have seen a great deal; and yet the “Décharné” astonished us all over again. In Nancy, as we stood in front of the wrought-iron railings of the Place Stanislas, I felt something piercing in my heart—a happiness that hurt, so unaccustomed had it become. In those old country-town streets I squeezed his arm under mine; or sometimes he put his around my shoulders.
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