by Paul Nizan
From the rooftops you can discern – with the feeling of exaltation and power that altitudes inspire – the entire southern half of Paris and its misty horizon, bristling with domes, steeples, clouds and chimneys. It is on these roofs that Laforgue, Rosenthal, Bloyé, Jurien and Pluvinage spoke again about Civil War, without exaggerating the importance it might have, but reckoning all the same that it would take its place as one of the thousand little undertakings thanks to which, when you come right down to it, the world is thought to change.
It was the end of June in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-eight. As these young people were living in a country quite as good as any other, but where the Prime Minister was just then explaining in a speech to the Chamber that he was not sorry to have been nicknamed by the communists Poincaré-la Guerre and Poincaré-la-Ruhr – because if he had not visited the wartime front lines with his puttees and his little chauffeur’s cap, and if he had not gone across to the other bank of the Rhine, where would France be? – and as they were not driven by the depressing need to earn their daily bread immediately, they told each other it was necessary to change the world. They did not yet know how heavy and flaccid the world is, how little it resembles a wall that can be knocked to the ground in order to put up another much finer one, how it resembles instead a headless and tailless gelatinous heap, a kind of great jelly-fish with well-concealed organs.
It cannot be said that they are entirely taken in by their speeches about transforming the world: they view the actions that their phrases entail simply as the first effects of a duty whose fulfilment will later assume forms altogether more consequential; but they feel themselves to be revolutionaries, they think the only nobility lies in the will to subvert. This is a common denominator among them, though they are probably fated to become strangers or enemies. Spinoza, Hegel, Marxism, Lenin – these are still just great pretexts, great muddled references. And since they know nothing about the life men lead between their work and their wives, their bosses and their children, their little foibles and their great misfortunes, their politics is still based only upon metaphors and shouts . . .
Perhaps Rosenthal is simply destined for literature and is only provisionally constructing political philosophies. Laforgue and Bloyé are still too close to their peasant great-grandfathers to commit themselves, without many arrière-pensées and mental reservations and serious mystical revelations. Jurien lets himself be drawn along by comrades remarkably different from himself; he has the feeling he is sowing his wild oats, as his father – a radical schoolteacher in a Jura village – puts it, and that Revolution is less dangerous to health than women: admittedly, it gives less pleasure at first and does not prevent him from having bad dreams. Pluvinage is perhaps the only one among them who adheres fully to his action; but it is an adherence that cannot but end badly, because he is basically concerned only with vengeance and believes in his destiny without any ironic reflection upon himself.
All this is terribly provisional, and they are well aware of it. It is at twenty that one is wise: one knows then that nothing commits or binds, and that no maxim is more unworthy than the notorious saying about the thoughts of youth being realized in maturity; one consents to commit oneself only because one senses the commitment will not give one’s life a definitive shape; everything is vague and free; one makes only sham marriages, like colonials looking forward to the great wedding organs of the mother country. The only freedom seen as desirable is the freedom not to choose at all: the choice of a career, a wife or a party is just a tragic lapse. One of Laforgue’s comrades had just got married at twenty; they spoke of him as of a dead man, in the past tense.
For nothing in the world would they have confessed these convictions: his wisdom does not prevent the young man from lying. Two days earlier, it had taken an hour of indolence on the grass, the temptations and the inimitably confidential tone of the night, for Rosenthal to slip into speaking out loud about demolished buildings and burned books. They treated their improvisations as lifelong decisions, for they still accompanied their actions with illusions that did not deceive them. They were not even misled about the meaning of their friendship, which was merely a rather strong complicity among adolescents too threatened not to feel the worth of collective bonds, too lonely not to strive to replace the reality of their nocturnal playmates by the images of virile comradeship. Basing the future upon the connivances of youth seemed to each of them the height of cowardice.
On the cover of the journal – whose dummy they settled upon that day, stretched out on the burning metal of the roofs with their heads buzzing from the sun – they decided to have a machine-gun engraved; it was Pluvinage who made the suggestion.
The year was ending. Rosenthal wanted everything to be ready for November. He invested the same impatience in this project that could sometimes draw him into pursuing a woman. Everything that Bernard undertook had to be accomplished at such a rapid pace that he seemed to have little time for living; to be preparing himself for a death full of regrets, memories, plans. His friends dared not resist him: such impatient individuals do sometimes play the role of leaders. Besides, it was Rosenthal who had found the funds for the journal: those twenty-five thousand francs, that skill in worldly matters, gave him the right and the means to convince young people who had not yet emerged from their studies and the confinement of the lycée, and to whose eyes money seemed absolutely magical.
III
In Rue d’Ulm it was that uncertain time when examinations are over and you have to wait for the results in a state of extreme idleness that is full of charm for naturally lazy adolescents forced for years into absurd labours.
Laforgue used to spend whole afternoons on a divan covered in a golden material now grown very dark. He would take a book and begin to read, but he would soon fall asleep. When he was too hot, he would go down to the ground floor and take a shower, or a glass of something in a bar in Rue Claude-Bernard.
One afternoon at around four, someone knocked: it was Pauline D., a young woman (no longer all that young) who from time to time used to come and see Laforgue in Rue d’Ulm, when she felt like being kissed. Laforgue had met her on a little beach in Britanny, where the young men would kiss the young women after strolls back and forth along the sea-wall, when they had stretched out on the sand and were disarmed by the darkness, the stars or the green phosphorescence of the sea which came to sputter out at their feet. Philippe always had great trouble keeping the conversation going with Pauline: he told himself he had never detested a woman as much as her, but since he did not have all that many opportunities to caress a bosom and legs, he made the best of it. He used to tell her roughly:
— You know incredible people, like the parish priest of the Madeleine and the military governor of Paris. To think you’re the niece of a police commissioner! What on earth do you come here for?
One day Pauline had taken him to a charity sale in the Hôtel des Invalides. It was spring on the streets. War invalids, sitting in their little carriages, read their newspapers in the sun. General Gouraud was parading his empty sleeve among the ladies of the Union of the Women of France; these former nurses, forewarned about the illusion amputees entertain (as much of a byword as Aristotle’s marble, or the well-worn quips of opticians), would move aside to avoid knocking against the empty sleeve, the phantom arm: did they picture the general suddenly letting himself go and releasing the scream of pain he had suppressed to the last on the fields of battle? Objects were being sold that nobody wanted to buy – it is always like that at sales, but luckily gifts are always needed for housekeepers or poor relations – cushions, mats, brushes and utensils made by blind veterans and sad as their guide-dogs, or by the yellow and black wards of the French nuns of Annam and the Somali Coast. Pauline always reminded Laforgue of wartime in the provinces, when he used to go each Thursday to the Sainte-Madeleine convent hospital to see the wounded making macramé or knitting mufflers and the sisters running abo
ut – those holy young women who had never had such a good time – and when, on Sunday evenings after he had served at the Office, tinkling the altar bells in front of the soldiers who would be dozing and thinking they were as well off there as anywhere, the convalescents used to give him cigarettes which made him throw up; returning home in a taxi with Pauline kissing him, he told himself that she was acceptable only as a childhood memory, the image of the blue-veiled nurses with their breasts so lovely beneath their square tuckers, beneath the throb of their epidemic medallions.
Pauline began talking about the Conservatory auditions and the exhibition of artworks on loan from Rome; she never had a great deal to do, she did not miss a concert, an exhibition or a big sale; she used to go one day a week to a surgery and advise young mothers about the feeding of newborn infants and the illnesses of early childhood; she did not have much money; she was not getting married.
Laforgue affected never to set foot in a picture gallery or an art dealer’s, in the Opera House or the Salle Pleyel: this was typical of him. Like his friends, he used to proclaim proudly to all and sundry that he didn’t give a fig for painting, music or the theatre, and that he preferred bars, fairs at the Belfort Lion, neighbourhood cinemas and the festivals in Avenue des Gobelins. This was a kind of challenge they threw out to people for whom the arts served as a merit, a justification or an alibi. Since he knew Spain and Italy quite well, Philippe could have spoken all the same about painting; but Pauline did not come to Rue d’Ulm to have a serious talk about pictures or music, and Laforgue considered there was no good reason to take the trouble to be polite. He sat down next to Pauline on the divan and she told him he wasn’t very chatty.
— I’m sorry Pauline, he said. And Heaven knows there’s a lot going on! Thirty degrees in the shade at Perpignan, an anti-cyclone from beyond the Sargasso Sea is moving towards the Azores. The financier Loewenstein has drowned in the Channel, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange is significantly affected. Maya is playing at the Théâtre de l’Avenue, where we shall not be going. There were forty-eight dead at Roche-la-Molière, but since they’re miners the accident is hardly of much consequence; and M. Tardieu has had an informal chat with the wounded, which was extremely helpful. In Paris . . .
— Just kiss me, said Pauline.
Philippe kissed her and found a slightly irritated pleasure in doing so, because summer perspiration made Pauline’s lips rather salty, her lipstick had an odd taste, and she was one of those impossible women who parade all their feelings, tremble when you touch their breasts and late in life will stage perfectly faked nervous breakdowns.
‘Such airs and graces!’, thought Laforgue. ‘How would I look if Bloyé came home, with this histrionic girl apparently in a trance? Perhaps I’d better go and lock the door.’
He detached himself from Pauline and went over to shoot the bolt.
— Do you by any chance have evil intentions? she asked with a little contrived laugh. I’d probably better take off my dress.
— I think so too, said Laforgue.
Pauline stood up and took off her dress, a dress the colour of dead leaves that actually made a dry little rustle like dead leaves; she was wearing a mauve slip with broad strips of ochred lace running across her bosom and her legs.
‘This woman has no taste,’ Philippe said to himself: he liked women to wear either virginal underwear or the extravagant artifices of the tarts at the Madeleine or the Opéra.
She had a rather skinny torso and shoulders, but fairly heavy legs and hips for which Philippe had a sufficient liking to forgive her her underwear. She stretched out on the divan and spread her dress over her knees; Laforgue, lying alongside that moist body, was thinking he ought to have drawn the curtain, what with all that sun they had full in their eyes and which was highlighting the freckles on Pauline’s white skin above the broad hem of her stockings; but he was beginning to purr and couldn’t face getting up. Pauline was not a woman with whom there was any question of going all the way; she used to defend herself with a stubborn presence of mind that scarcely hampered her pursuit of pleasure. She closed her eyes; the make-up disappeared from her cheeks; the movement of her belly was reminiscent of the spasmodic, dreamy throbbing of an insect’s abdomen; she was alone, absolutely enclosed within herself and the strange concentration of pleasure; her heart beat strongly throughout this intense labour; Laforgue remembered that he had not shaved that morning, and that Pauline would get red spots round her mouth and pink patches in the hollow of her shoulder – but since he was thinking about this alien being with resentment, he congratulated himself on that. These caresses, these movements, these jerky exhalations involved a mute and shifting torpor, a blind urgency, a grimness that seemed never-ending. Suddenly, however, Pauline clenched her teeth, opened her eyes again, and Laforgue was furious to see that distraught look – that anguish of the runner who has given his all – and the girl’s body grew taut, her thighs locked with incredible force upon Laforgue’s wrist, while he himself achieved a dubious pleasure.
Pauline sank back, laying one hand on her breast:
— We’re crazy, she sighed.
She stretched, closed her eyes again. Later, she raised herself on one elbow, took a mirror from her handbag and looked at herself:
— I do look a sight! she exclaimed.
— A sorry sight, said Philippe.
She was dishevelled, beads of sweat still bedewed her temples, her nostrils, the roots of her hair, after the hard begetting of pleasure. Laforgue looked at those pale lips:
‘Love doesn’t suit women,’ he said to himself.
— Wipe your mouth, said Pauline. If your friends saw all that lipstick . . .
She covered her breasts, which were set rather low, then stood up to slip on her dress. Pauline accomplished with admirable promptitude the difficult transition from the disorders of pleasure to life in society: with her clean face, her smooth hair, her ankle-length dress, nobody would have dreamed of showing her insufficient respect. She wanted to talk: idle chatter was one of the last echoes of pleasure for her. She read the titles of the books lying about everywhere; Laforgue had just finished a Greek year, the books were austere, on his table there were the Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics and Simplicius’ Commentary. Pauline sat down again on the divan. Her dress revealed the great silken beaches of her stockings; she looked at Philippe with a killing smile intended to speak volumes.
‘That’s quite enough for today,’ thought Laforgue. ‘We’re not accomplices on the strength of so little.’
— How exciting it must be, all that Greek wisdom! she exclaimed.
— As if I didn’t know! replied Laforgue.
— So much more exciting than a woman like me, isn’t that so? sighed Pauline. A woman of no importance . . .
— No comparison, said Philippe, telling himself: ‘She’s simpering, this is the limit.’ But you remind me, I was busy working when you arrived. It was one of my good days, would you believe . . .
— Which must mean, replied Pauline, that I might perhaps now relieve you of my presence.
Laforgue shrugged his shoulders slightly, but Pauline smiled: it was over, she was dressed again, she knew she could not demand of men any passionate gratitude for what she gave them.
Laforgue accompanied her to the Rue d’Ulm door, she went off in the direction of the gate and the porter’s lodge.
‘One’s really too polite,’ he thought. ‘This time I should have had that girl.’
Bloyé arrived at the foot of the portico steps, he was returning from the gardens. Laforgue said to him, rather loudly:
— Bloyé, do you see that lady? Well, she doesn’t go all the way!
Pauline turned round and cast an angry glance at them. Laforgue told himself ashamedly that the insult would not prevent her from returning, that she was not so proud – and he went back inside to wash his hands.
This is how some of their love affairs used to pass off: it will perhaps be understood why these young men generally spoke of women with a crudity full of resentment. This department of their lives was not in order.
At parties, at dances, during the holidays, they would meet girls whose lips before too long they could almost always taste, whose breasts and nerveless legs they could caress; but these brief strokes of luck never went very far, and left them irritating memories that engendered rage more than love. They thought with fury about how the girls were waiting for older men than they to marry them: how they were reserving their bodies. Philippe, when he danced with them, would sniff them with an animal mistrust; he preferred the insolent perfume of the tarts with whom he used to form easy liaisons on Boulevard Montparnasse or Boulevard Saint-Michel. Those gaudy women would permit silent relations, free from the theatricals of language and protocol; they were labourers in an absent-minded eroticism denuded of anything resembling an unlawful complicity.
Rosenthal did not breathe a word about any women he might know. Bloyé used to go once a month to a house in Boulevard de Grenelle, from which he would hear, in the furthest bedroom, the trains roaring past on the elevated track where it entered the La Motte-Picquet Métro station. Jurien was sleeping with the maid from a little bar in Rue Saint-Jacques, a red and tawny woman with a missing incisor. Pluvinage’s lady friend was a tall, mannish girl who worked in an office.
