The Conspiracy

by Paul Nizan

  Close correspondences may be established among these various domains, which are namely those of sickness, policing and death: these terrible places where the mysteries of birth, marriage and death are played out. I would add to them the incinerator plants for household waste, if I did not yield to the prejudice that still solidly maintains the prestige of the dead – and if I were not thinking above all of places where it is essentially the ruin of the soul that is accomplished. I should like to make it clear, however, that I grew up in the world dedicated to the elimination of urban waste and the registration of personal catastrophes. Men are unaware of its byways. They enter it, in fact, only by accident: to ask for a passport, or to report a death, or to see a patient – for irremediable events. As for us, we lived there. All the time. My father’s friends and colleagues lived there like us. I always tell myself that embalmers, makers of mummies, must have lived in this same way, among themselves; and that this is the destiny of those who work among impure things – of spies, policemen, the functionaries of death and dying. I felt this at fifteen, and I was quite right to believe I should not recover from it. There is nothing more shameful than death, and men are wise to hide it from themselves, like Noah’s sons their father’s nakedness. I have never met anyone except doctors who were capable of passing continually from the world of the scrap-heap to the world where existence has some pride. And even then, there are forensic doctors, medical registrars and those vile experts in mental health . . .

  One of my father’s best friends was a little old man who had the post of chief surveyor for cemeteries. I suppose he is dead now: the man I knew cannot have survived the disappearance of undertakers’ horses and the motorization of hearses. He must have been pretty crazy – indeed, you have to be crazy to get so passionately excited about the cleaning of tombs and the alignment of the dead – but in our house we used to see such bizarre individuals that no one round me ever dreamed of finding him peculiar. Another friend of my father’s was a police superintendent in charge of the Special Intelligence Branch: he was called Eugène Massart, and we used to read his name quite often in the newspapers. My parents must have been quite proud of him, because when he came to dinner there would always be a bottle of Moulin-à-Vent on the table. But I shall have occasion to speak again of Massart . . .

  My mother was one of those women who overwhelm their husband and their sons with tearful, demanding, flabby affection. She poisoned my childhood. I noticed only very belatedly how ugly she was, at the same time as I found out that she had probably become, two or three years after being widowed, the mistress of Superintendent Massart.

  My sister Cécile, who is fifteen years older than me, when she was thirty or so was a fat woman who would overrun us almost every Sunday with her husband and her two children, and who would talk in a high plaintive voice about her servant problems and about cooking recipes. My brother-in-law ran quite a large garage in the 12th, near Boulevard Diderot. He was as fat as his wife and I used to wonder how this couple, who represented so powerful a volume of muscle and blubber, so ample a circulation of lymph and blood, had been able to create offspring as thin and ill-favoured as my nephew and niece. Despite the kind of horror they inspired in me, I felt a certain pity for those nervous, slapped children; but I never think of Cécile’s large breasts without a thrill of revulsion, and have always been unable to kiss the woman without holding my breath and closing my eyes.

  We had peasant kinsfolk in the Massif Central, with whom, like many migrants to Paris, we no longer maintained any relations. My grandfather was in fact a sheep-farmer somewhere near Nasbinals. Two years ago, on my way back from the Midi, I crossed those black-and-yellow plateaux where, in autumn, contemptuous eagles can be seen perching on the stones in the grazing grounds. I love that region, but I do not know much about my Auvergne kinsfolk or my father’s arrival in Paris.

  My parents used to see a lot of a sister of my mother’s, who was called Antoinette. My aunt, who seemed old to me, although she can hardly have been more than fifty, was paralysed and almost totally blind. As in all petty-bourgeois families, her disability was spoken of only with considerable circumspection that failed to conceal a kind of sly pride. When I was with Rosenthal and you at Sainte-Anne, working on a neuro-psychiatric ward, I realized that my aunt was simply suffering from Parkinson’s disease and there was nothing to be so conceited about. As she lived on the western outskirts of Paris, at Le Vésinet – have I told you that we had a little bungalow at Neuilly? – we used to go and visit her every once in a while. My mother used to say she only had her sister left, so she must make haste to visit her, take advantage of her presence on earth, before she died. But Aunt Antoinette was taking a long time to die.

  She had the honed malice of the seriously ill. She spent her interminable final struggle against paralysis and death preying on the existence of her daughter Jeanne, who looked after her and would not leave her. She had two other daughters, who were married and lived in the provinces; they came rarely to Paris and shut their eyes to the appalling life their sister was leading. Jeanne, who five years ago was fifteen and by now must have grown very beautiful – if her mother, before dying, has not succeeded in driving her mad – was totally uneducated, since she had left school at twelve to take care of her mother and now scarcely ever left the gloomy precincts of the Le Vésinet villa. She grew up simply in the company of my aunt, who all day long would look straight ahead with her blind eyes and tell interminable stories about the days of her youth: tales full of resentment and questions of precedence and respect. As Jeanne grew into a woman, her mother became increasingly fearful lest one day, like her ‘two sisters, she fall in love with someone and go away. Little by little, with a patient, predatory skill, she inspired her with an unconquerable fear of the world. Jeanne had never come into contact with anything but works of piety: she believed in Saint Theresa of Lisieux and her miraculous rose-leaves; religious renunciation of the world seemed to her the one true happiness. I suppose my aunt – with that deep, calculating instinct of the dying who manage to hang on – thought that in this way she would shackle her at least until her death; and Jeanne used indeed to say that once her mother was no longer there she would go into a convent. I cannot really see how a girl as defenceless, frightened and ignorant as a country orphan could escape religion by any other means than what my mother calls ‘going to the bad’ – which is nothing but a passion for freedom and leisure.

  Our visits to Le Vésinet were perhaps Jeanne’s only holidays, since I would be allowed to take her for walks; and her mother used to say, raising the lids over her unmoving eyes, that it was quite right that the poor little girl, who didn’t have much fun forever closeted with a sick woman, should at least get a breath of fresh air when the opportunity came her way. We would take the bus that goes up from Rueil to the station at Saint-Germain, and would go walking along the terrace as far as the last roundabout, where there are some old and rather weird houses. I was not ashamed to go out with this little girl, who was still virtually in short skirts, because people found her beautiful and men used to turn their heads after her.

  She was too splendid for the idea of seeing her shut herself up some day in a cloister not to strike me as repugnant: I used to tell her she was, like all women, made to live. I was eighteen – it was the same year that I met you at Louis-le-Grand – how should I not have dreamed of playing the role of a tempter and a saviour? But at that time I had not known any woman: they filled me with a terrible dread. When I told myself it was necessary to save this child, I cannot have been thinking of anything but sleeping with her. She was the only woman to whom I was able to feel superior.

  On one of those Sundays at Saint-Germain, we had gone quite a long way into the forest, in order to feel totally alone there: there were far fewer cars then than now, and the woods round Paris were not invaded by revolting groups of weekend trippers – those men in shirt-sleeves and those women sitting beside them with
no shoes on, their ankles swollen by the heat and their toes cramped inside their stockings. We had sat down on a pile of dry bracken. That whole ceremonial army of trees about us hummed in the dry air. It was a time for forgetting everything, and I did forget everything – as though I had been stretched out beside a real woman who loved me, and not beside a little girl who said her rosary and wore a silver-gilt medallion from Lourdes between her breasts. I leaned towards Jeanne and I kissed her: she was half asleep, half dreaming, she scarcely put up any more resistance than a bird being choked. All my life I shall remember those moist, fumbling, cool lips. I was not much more skilled than she, but I felt as intoxicated as if I had carried off a great victory. Jeanne, with a shiver, told me we must leave and asked me whether what we had just done was very bad; but we stayed on for a long while in that warm place and she let me caress her breasts through the silk of her bodice. I did not go further, but I was still naive enough for this adventure to strike me as wonderfully sacrilegious.

  I did not go back to Le Vésinet until three weeks later. I think we must have been studying for one of our degree examinations, and I must have been working on Sundays. That day Jeanne refused to go out, so we spent the afternoon in my aunt’s little sitting-room. Shortly before we left, she signalled to me to leave the room with her and led me to the corridor where she kissed me: both of us had imagined a great deal in three weeks.

  I do not know why I am telling you this story, which ends there, since I have not been back to Le Vésinet and have not seen Jeanne for five years. My whole life is made up of such abortions. It is probably the only memory that still consoles me for my youth, even though it is slightly sordid and tainted by some humiliating details.

  It is not necessary for me to dwell much on my memories of school. I should be lying if I said that I suffered much, up to the age of seventeen, from the secret shame my family inspired in me. There was play, the occupation of children: childhood is able to put the future tragedies of the man into abeyance. Everything came to a head when I encountered the two of you at Louis-le-Grand.

  We had all just started our first preparatory year for the Ecole Normale entrance; we none of us knew one another, since we came from a dozen different lycées in Paris and the provinces; we were all the pride and joy of our schools; we all felt that stupid collective arrogance of candidates for the Grandes Ecoles. We were supposed to be seventy equals. I did not share these joys even for a fortnight.

  I still find it hard to explain to myself why my meeting with the two of you should have had such a devastating side to it. Love at first sight is a well-worn cliché, but no one has ever said anything about envy at first sight. Rosenthal and you straight away inspired in me a passionate emotion, in which a blinding compulsion to imitate you was all mixed up with the need to hate you.

  You struck me as inimitable, and had the same attraction for me that, in the Army, Parisian soldiers sometimes have for recruits from the back of beyond. You managed everything with a facility I found disconcerting. You were the type, people said, who could get into Rue d’Ulm at will. The teachers maintained an odious relationship of complicity with you. You used to produce the most brilliant philosophical dissertations. You read books that none of our schoolmates from the provinces had laid hands on, and that I barely knew of: Claudel, Rimbaud, Valéry, Proust. You were boarders – yet you looked clean, you shaved, you would reappear of a Monday talking to each other about the girls with whom you had danced on Sunday. I was concerned only with you. There was no question for me of making friends with our fellow students from schools at Bordeaux, Toulouse or Lyon: those sons of elementary schoolmasters and minor officials struck me as plodding and dull, destined for obscure careers as teachers in the provinces; one could see in advance their whole lives, which, like those of animals, would be punctuated only by illnesses, accidents, couplings and death. Yet I envied the facility with which you, nevertheless, had made friends with them: I was indignant about it on your behalf – it seemed to me you were wasting your time. I did everything to make you notice me, to make you realize that I was at a higher level than those solid but crude lads, yet I managed to extract nothing from you save an indifferent cordiality. I saw you alone as worthy of me, yet felt perpetually exasperated by you. I fought against this feeling, but it was like an external force dominating me. I had trouble knowing my own mind: I could no longer tell whether I hated you, or merely wished to be your equal. I would sometimes find myself defending you, when Brossard said you were poseurs; actually, I was defending in you the man I aspired to be. At other moments I felt longings for revenge against you take shape within me – yet there was nothing, nothing was happening, those longings for revenge were based on nothing, they had no motive, I could find no justification for them.

  I was living in an extraordinary state of bitterness, as vague as one’s first ruminations on love. I had been well brought up – the humanities are a noble education – and I felt my concealed hatred to be base. I vainly did everything to overcome my bitterness. But nothing ever liberated me from myself: neither work at the lycée – do you remember how hard I worked the year of the Ecole entrance? – nor later on (without your ever knowing anything about it) debauchery.

  In country districts, old wives’ tales are told about rickety children who cannot grow up straight: I was like them, I was stunted morally. And you, you were there, unforgivable and exceptional – like every object, like every creature. Your existence alone was enough for me to feel myself the victim of a generalized injustice that was gradually poisoning me. You never suspected the hate-filled admiration I felt for the two of you: perhaps you would have found it natural, or flattering.

  It was no use my exclaiming to myself, alone, that I was just as good as you. That I would oblige you to consider me your equal. There was always an intolerable gap between what I felt myself capable of being and the value you put on me.

  Then came the entrance competition for the Ecole Normale. You got in, as our teachers and schoolfellows had expected. I was fortieth, after the oral. I could not bear to think of myself, on a state grant, taking a degree in some provincial university; so I chose the Sorbonne, and gave up my grant and a second attempt at the Ecole. That failure separated me from the two of you. I was in despair. I did not know how to carry on that life in common with you which had given me so much pain – it never even occurred to me that I might be able to forget you. You were hateful, you tried to console me for my failure, you never saw more of me than during your first year at the Ecole. You used to tell me to come and work at Rue d’Ulm in your digs; you obtained private lessons on the side for me, to help my existence as an unassisted student and because you knew I was poor. I did not once cross your threshold without feeling sick with shame. I sometimes thought myself a monster, for seeing in your marks of friendship merely pity and casual kindness. Yet I know I was not mistaken, since my treachery two months ago at once struck you as natural; since you suspected me straight away.

  God, how hard these last years have been! Success at the Ecole would have saved me – I needed only to prove myself, failure was a deadly humiliation. Well, I told myself it was in the nature of things: that I would go and rejoin my family in some damp, dark existence of the kind one associates with insects in rotting wood; that I would be cast back into its universe. Then I began to be ashamed of my body, about which I had scarcely thought up till then: I would look at myself in the mirror with disgust; I would see myself doomed – in the domain of the body as in all others – to Heaven knows what sort of inevitable defeat; I could not forgive myself for this detestable frizzy hair, this butcher’s-boy charm attractive only to little factory girls, the awkwardness of my movements, the dark bristles that grew on my cheeks. I could no more forgive myself for being me than I could forgive you for being you.

  I envied you your gifts, your money, your families. The mockery you heaped on your fathers was merely one further ornament of style: a sign
of your bourgeois nature, like the suits you had made for yourselves in Boulevard Malesherbes, at a Scottish tailor’s. The music and painting of which you spoke seemed to me nothing but subtle means of excluding me: as you know, the world of music is utterly closed to me, I might as well be deaf; and each time you mentioned the Uffizi, the Prado or the Terme, I was sure it was only an occasion to make me feel I knew nothing of travel – Florence, Madrid, Rome . . .

  What was most unbearable of all was believing you to be happy – for I had no doubt about your happiness. Yet I would have held it against you had you bemoaned your fate: suffering, in you, would have been merely an attitude and, as it were, an additional talent or luxury. Even Rosen’s suicide, which I heard about a few days ago, I saw as the last challenge that could reach me from you: the last inimitable act one of you could propose to me . . .