by Allan Massie
In the margin of my copy I scribbled years ago, “this is me”, though I am not of course a writer, let alone “an intrinsically first-rate one”. Yet it is how I stand in relation to our times.
And how delightful, if frissonable, to find the Minotaur – a magazine of which I confess I never heard – in that list. The Monster in the Maze; what an apt description of the quest in which you have to my surprise involved me. And I am still more astounded to discover a lifting of my spirit.
But what colour of sail shall we hoist when we sail back to Athens?
E. de B.
I have numbered these documents for your convenience.’
Document 1
(This is an autobiographical fragment which I discovered in my father’s desk in our house in Provence, which, as you know, (don’t you?) is called the Château de l’Haye. It may be part of his confessions, or a rough draft; I have never discovered that manuscript in its entirety, though our Parish priest assured me Lucien had worked on it. Various pieces in this collection may have been intended for these confessions, which he was perhaps working on in December ’42–January ’43, months which he spent at the Château d l’Haye. I have noted these accordingly.)
It was only a few weeks after the outbreak of war, and an autumn day of surpassing loveliness. The huge leaves of the chestnuts in the Luxembourg Gardens were crisp, red and golden, fragile and defiant in the afternoon sunlight; and I felt that the people of Paris were like those leaves. We were caught in a moment of beauty made all the sharper by our apprehension of what was to come.
It was the first day in which I was back in uniform, and I walked with the proud step of the soldier into whom I have been again transformed. And it was also just a week since I had received a letter from Polly saying that she wanted – somehow – the divorce to which she knew I could never consent. And as I looked across the gardens I could see mist gathering, heralding the night.
I was however on my way to the Palais-Royal to drink chocolate with Colette; and to see her sitting in the window as I approached, her Russian Blue cat pressed against her shoulder, was to be reminded of the solidity of France. She had just come back from Dieppe: ‘I pass all my wars in Paris,’ she said.
I sat with her an hour among the paperweights, the bibelots, the fussy draperies in a room filled with the mingled smells of roses, pot-pourri, the violet scent she wore, and black tobacco. She called me, as she has always done, to admire the paintings and drawings, each chosen for a particular reason, rather than for their intrinsic value, but all in the most exquisite taste. And all the time the cat lay on her lap and purred, or walked over the table-tops picking its way among the knick-knacks with inevitable delicacy.
That was for me the last afternoon of peace, true peace. Maurice, Colette’s third husband, Maurice Goudeket, was absent as he generally was when I called by appointment, for he knew I did not care for him and was tactful enough to remove himself.
‘The poor cat,’ Colette said, ‘isn’t going to last much longer. See how thin she has become.’ And she ran her hand along its spine, while it lifted its tail erect in ecstasy.
She asked, as she has always done, after my mother.
‘You won’t let her down, I know, my dear,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the things I like about you, your love for your mother and your respect for her, all the more because I know she disapproves of me and would never read my writings.’
A shadow crossed her face.
‘It’s absurd,’ she said, rolling her Burgundian ‘r’, ‘to talk of being an artist, and, ultimately, I despise all those who do, but it amounts to this all the same: we write what we have to. I have written much about Sido, my mother, so much that I sometimes wonder if I have invented her, and perhaps I have, for my readers, but then, she invented me, in her way. And after all, what matters most in life is that one should have had a happy childhood. It’s something no one can ever take away. If you have lived in the earthly paradise of childhood, you can never abandon hope. I pity all those poor things who were wretched children. But you were happy, weren’t you, my dear?’
Yes, indeed.
For many years I was a little Duke, a prince for whose delight the world arranged itself. I would run to the sunlight, with the morning mist still clinging about my ankles, while all things woke for my pleasure, and life danced in the dew. Is there any happiness to be compared to the moment of waking up early, perhaps four o’clock, and seeing the first swallows dart past your window, and then slipping downstairs, your little dog at your heels, and bounding through the garden which would be silent but for the blackbirds, and which is at any rate reserved entirely for you?
All this is at the same time memory and actuality; it is gone and yet remains. I have lost the key to paradise and yet it comes back to me in sleep.
I was Maman’s favourite. Other people, even then, I suspect, thought her harsh and severe. She has never been tolerant, and her sympathies are narrow. I know that very well, from observation, and Armand, though my younger brother, her youngest child, and the one whom you might therefore suppose to have been indulged, has always been afraid of her. But in her eyes I have been perfect, and it gives me a glow even to write these words. Was it really because, as she told me, she carried me high in her womb and so my birth was difficult?
I have known Colette for almost twenty years, and I have never parted from her without feeling refreshed. I love her, though all we have in common perhaps is a reverence for the French language and a respect for the provinces. But that is real. In one of her books she wrote – I quote from memory, for my copy is in Paris – and I wonder if I shall ever handle it again – that one should understand by the word ‘province’ not merely a place or region which is distant from the capital, but a sense of social hierarchy, of the need to behave, of pride in an ancient and honoured habitation, which is closed on all sides but yet capable at any moment – and here her exact words return to me – ‘of opening on to its lofty barns, its well-filled hayloft, and its masters apt for the uses and dignity of their house’.
Precisely. Though I adore Paris and can wander for hours in its streets tracing lost splendours and eating with my eyes the many variations on life which it presents, I know that, in the long quarrel between Paris and the provinces which has lasted, in my opinion, since the days of the Frondes, though many would date it merely from the Revolution, it is the provinces which have been solidly and magnificently right. Which is why I feel a sense of comfort that the Marshal has established the government of our renascent France in Vichy. The temporary loss of Paris, with its despicable and hysterical enthusiasms, its unfailing capacity to come to the wrong conclusion, is surely a blessing in disguise.
As for Maman, so admirable in her Faith and the security of judgement which the possession of Faith gives her – and after all, this possession is worth so much more than all the knick-knacks and objets d’art in which my dear Colette delights – it is thanks to her that my life has been built on that rock of a happy childhood.
Not for nothing do we think of France as feminine; Maman and Colette are the two poles of the France which I adore and serve.
How dated is the language of patriotism. Could anyone, I wonder, write in such terms now? But Lucien, my poor father wasn’t alone in writing like this. You have only to think of de Gaulle with his ‘certain idea of France’.
I wonder if he had been one of Colette’s lovers. Being one year older than the century he would have been just twenty-one when she published Chéri, that wonderful and desolate account of an affair between a middle-aged woman and a boy. Not that Chéri, quite without intellectual interests and interested, as I remember, only in his appearance, was at all like my serious father. Nevertheless, I wonder.
There is a singular absence of his own father in the fragmentary jottings Lucien made concerning his early life. Indeed, he never seems to have been there at all. He was a regular soldier of course, and this displeased my grandmother’s family, who were the Blackest of
Blacks – by which I mean – I write for those ignorant of the language of Third Republic France – zealous clericals, Royalists also, who disapproved of the recognition of the Republic implicit in a military career. The Balafrés however were proud of their tradition of military service – they saw themselves as soldiers of France irrespective of the regime, and one of them indeed, though brought up as an émigré after the Revolution, had been so fired by the splendour of Napoleonic warfare that he had been among the numerous Royalists who had found service in the imperial army an irresistible temptation; he never returned from the Russian campaign. Accordingly, my grandfather, Etienne like myself, may never even have questioned the suitability of a military career. Anyway, like so many of his fellow officers, he saw the Army as the bastion of the real France against the Jews, Protestants, Masons and Socialists. French life has always been complicated; at least since the Revolution. He was of course convinced that Dreyfus was guilty, and, even when his innocence seemed to have been proved, continued to believe the whole thing was a Jewish/Socialist plot to discredit the Army.
Lucien easily falls into sentimentality when he writes of his childhood in ‘thyme-scented Provence’. You can see him looking back in pity and regret. Yet when he says, ‘the only question seemed to be where to be happiest’, I believe him. The sun always shines, the dew sparkles and the mistral never blows in these selective memories, which are nevertheless, I insist, sincere.
He went to school first with the Dominicans.
CHAPTER TWO
Document 2
MY MOTHER WAS determined that I should have a truly Christian education, and she regarded the State schools as nurseries of infidelity. From my present position I both understand her feelings and deplore them. It is surely precisely because so many good families have thought as she did that infidelity and Socialism have gained such ground in our schools. You may say that the teachers have been selected by an infidel and Socialistic regime, and this is undeniable; nevertheless, I cannot but think that if so many good families had not chosen to boycott the education provided by the State for children in their formative years, the influence of these teachers would somehow or other have been curtailed. Such, at any rate, is my intention now, when we are left with the legacy of those years in which the fundamental virtues attached to the idea of God, Country and Family were so scandalously neglected; even disparaged.
The Dominican Fathers who taught me were narrow, zealous and honest men. They held before us an ideal of Christian virtue and Christian stewardship which was wholly admirable in its austerity. The curriculum was severe and demanding. We learned by rote and we were discouraged, by the rod and the exercise of a short sarcasm, from any rebellious tendency to question what we were taught. In this way I achieved a mastery of Latin and the French language and a tolerable understanding of mathematics. Philosophy, other than Christian philosophy, was a closed book. And I have never regretted this: it is only when a boy has been grounded in the earthy realism of Aquinas that he may safely be allowed to gambol in the speculative meadows of more extravagant philosophers. It is only when he has accepted and understood these profound truths that he can be exposed without danger to the illuminating, and yet profoundly deceptive, imaginings of such as Plato, Hegel and Nietzsche. There are certain rocks of thought on which alone a man can safely build his house: nihil est in intellectu, nisi prius fuerit in sensu; the mind can perceive nothing that has not previously been perceived by the senses; that is the first. And the second is: quicquid recipitur, secundum modum recipientis recipitur: whatever is received is received according to the mode of being of the recipient; from which it follows that cognitum est in cognoscente per modum cognoscentis: what is known is in the mind of the knower according to his mode of knowing; and it is a recognition of this gritty reality which alone makes a man capable of accommodating uncomfortable truths and discarding illusory consolation. I could not see France as she is, torn and bleeding on account of what she had made of herself, if it were not for my schooling in the lucid realism of St Thomas. But for that I too might have fallen victim to the seductive sophistries of Marxism or the frenzy of Fascism; and, indeed, the first did for a time beguile me till I was recalled to Reason by the sublime influence of the Angelic Doctor. If I am to be remembered for anything, I hope it will be because I have managed so to alter the educational values of France that every child will learn to insist on the reality of things; and will come to understand that change is not a denial, but an affirmation, of that reality, which can ultimately only be explained as part of a greater and complete reality, which is God.
How strangely influence operates. Though I now recognise those years when I studied under the Dominican Fathers as being exactly complementary to the delights of my adored childhood and my certainty of my mother’s love, they seemed at the time barren, wretched and vile. Our life was Spartan. In winter the water in the basins in our unheated dormitories froze overnight, and worse than the physical conditions – which in retrospect appear to me to have attractive rigour – was the absence of love. I experienced a new and terrible sensation: of being unwanted and uncherished. I was alone in the midst of many. It seems to me now that those years were passed entirely without conversation.
My poor father. Did he really imagine it was possible, in the twentieth century, in the age of the Panzer divisions, the barbed wire, and the operatic delusions of Nuremburg, to base his life on mediaeval theology? Or, more extraordinary still, that he had in fact succeeded in doing so?
Of course I must admit that my eyes glaze when I attempt to read philosophy, and the Summa Theologica, on which I did once embark, made a mad whirlpool of my mind. What about you, Hugh? Can you read such stuff? Can you imagine mastering it? And if you can’t begin to, then can you still hope to make something of my, rather more complicated than perhaps you imagined, father?
CHAPTER THREE
Document 3
IT WAS MY Uncle Charles, my mother’s elder brother, who persuaded her, when I was sixteen, that I should move to school in Paris; and so I arrived at the famous Lycée Condorcet. She was loth to send me there, in the middle of the war, when there were already rumours – or had they been confirmed? – of shells falling on the boulevards.
‘But,’ said my Uncle Charles, ‘though it is not of course for precisely that reason that I recommend you to send the boy to the Lycée, yet, even if I did not already have a sufficiency of cogent motives, I think I would be swayed by the consideration that, in this moment of agony for France, this young man’ – he placed the palm of his hand, from his great height, flat on the top of my head – ‘in whom we all place such great hopes, of whom we have such lofty expectations, should acquire, by personal experience – I repeat – by personal experience, an understanding of what France today is suffering; and that cannot, I assure you, my poor sister, be acquired skulking in the Midi under the direction of some perfectly outmoded Dominicans …’
My mother was displeased to hear the friars whom she revered, and of whose worth she had indeed a far juster appreciation than my Uncle Charles could ever have, disparaged in this manner; but she had been accustomed all her life to regard my uncle with a mixture of love and reverence – he was five years older than she, possessed of a remarkable, if now forgotten and obsolete, distinction, and besides, even as he spoke so of my tutors, he laughed and stroked the point of his long waxed moustaches with his long bony parchment-skinned fingers which you could see had never been subjected to toil; and, in short, she found all this perfectly irresistible, as she had always done, and so consented to his argument – as she had always done.
You would not have thought they came from the same litter, for Uncle Charles seemed, apart from a certain swagger, to have shed the provinciality which long years of neglect and indifference have made an apparently inescapable element of the Southern character. He was indeed perfectly a Parisian, dazzling as the lights of the capital, trailing behind him the glamour of an ineffably superior and world-weary sophis
tication which made it possible for people to believe they knew him quite well and yet fail to realise that he possessed a will of iron. And ultimately, of course, it was this will which conquered my mother and caused her to consent to a proposition which she viewed with a principled disgust.
I went to lodge with Uncle Charles in his apartment in the Boulevard Malesherbes.
The introduction of Uncle Charles may have puzzled you, Hugh; indeed I confess that I had never heard of him myself.
Charles de Fasquelle (1872–1935) was born, according to the Larousse Dictionary of Biography which I have consulted, in Aix-en-Provence, and is described as ‘poet and critic’. Only one volume of verse is recorded however, Vers le Minotaure (1895) – the Minotaur again, Hugh! – and ‘his promise as a poet was never fulfilled. However, his study of Baudelaire (1899) remains one of the most fruitful explorations of the poet.’
Not much there, I’m afraid, and, however fruitful, his Baudelaire had been out of print since 1925. He was apparently a friend of Robert de Montesquiou, generally considered to have been the principal model for Proust’s Charlus; and Charles de Fasquelle himself is also said to have been one of the originals of Robert de Saint-Loup, though there are in truth so many of these that I don’t know that the identification is worth much.
