by Allan Massie
However, these identifications may suggest the world in which my father found himself plunged. Charles had himself been two years behind Proust at the Lycée Condorcet, and there are three letters to him in Proust’s published correspondence, all couched in the floribund hyperbole employed equally on objects of his adoration and those who had merely lent him a book.
I wrote to my mother to ask her about Uncle Charles: ‘The most awful pansy,’ she said, ‘of the kind who adores Cardinals. Actually, I thought he was rather sweet because he had such lovely manners – when he chose – but your father couldn’t stand him, though he always admitted that he was grateful to him for many things. But I can’t think why you should be bothering with all this, darling.’
CHAPTER FOUR
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I SHALL ALWAYS be grateful to my Uncle Charles for having insisted that I should go to the Lycée. It provided me with a depth of education which I could not have won elsewhere. In particular it furnished me with a full understanding of the varieties of French culture. My uncle supplemented this.
‘I daresay Balzac is quite out of favour with your teachers who, I am told, regard him as “old hat”. But this is nonsense. No one with the profound understanding of obsession which Balzac possessed can ever be out-of-date. Believe me, I speak as a man of the world. Obsession is the governing factor in life. No one without it achieves anything great. Do you believe that Cardinal Richelieu would have made France the first power in Europe, which is to say the world, if he had not been a man in the grip of as powerful an obsession as that which held mastery over the soul of old Grandet himself? Moreover, in Vautrin, you will find the most profound revelation of those subterranean and unconscious impulses which, disregarded, even shunned, in youth, come to dominate life, and which demand respect even when they can be seen to lead to disaster …’
And with these words a frown would come over my uncle’s face; he looked like a man who sees everything in which he has put his trust crumble before his eyes; and, as he laid his hand, almost beseechingly, on my arm, I realised that he was quite unaware of how he had exposed his true nature to me.
I was so innocent when I came to the Boulevard Malesherbes. I merely thought how charming and remarkable it was that a man of my uncle’s age should be able to attract so many friends scarcely older than myself, and I couldn’t understand it when one of my school-friends, Edouard Binet, told me, in an embarrassed and indirect manner, that while his mother was delighted that I should visit their house, she had forbidden him to call upon me at the Boulevard Malesherbes.
‘But why?’ I insisted. ‘I am sure you have had nothing but politeness and a warm welcome from my uncle.
‘Is it politics?’ I asked, for I had only recently come to realise that people of a respectable family, such as the Binets, could differ from my own relations, that, in short, not all nice people thought just the same.
He gave me the most charming smile which robbed his words of all considerations.
‘I think it is a sort of politics, but not perhaps those of which you are thinking.’
‘Well, Edouard,’ I said, ‘naturally I shall fall in with your mother’s wishes, because it would be wrong for you to disobey her, and, besides you are my best friend, the only person here indeed with whom I feel absolutely at ease, in whom I can confide everything, but I still don’t understand. The only point which really seems to divide us is the old Affair, and that after all is twenty years ago, so that it hardly seems to me to matter now that your family believed Dreyfus innocent and your father should have campaigned to that effect, while my Uncle Charles still asserts that he was guilty.’
‘Oh,’ Edouard said, ‘you are so nice, and I wish I could explain everything, but I am afraid it would spoil things if I did.’
‘I hope you haven’t dropped your friend Binet,’ Uncle Charles said to me. ‘I thought him charming. His eyes are so candid, and anyone can see that he is as virtuous as he is good-looking. I had thought he would be a pleasing influence on you.’ I assured him that we hadn’t quarrelled.
‘Then do bring him here please. I grant you, of course, that his family is not distinguished, while as a historian, his father is really absurd. Do you know he wrote an article recently in which it was quite clear that he wasn’t aware that Marshal Davout was well-born? But all the same, I am prepared to forgive the father for the sake of his delightful son.’
What was I to say to that?
When I arrived at the Boulevard Malesherbes, I thought Uncle Charles not only immensely distinguished, but universally admired by all right-thinking people. That was what my mother had led me to understand. It was painful to learn that he might be distrusted, and still more painful when some of my schoolfriends made it clear that he was a figure of fun.
‘It’s not exactly good for your reputation,’ one of them said, ‘to live in the house of a man who puts rouge on his cheeks, even if he is your uncle.’
And I hadn’t realised.
Yet, when news was brought of my father’s death, no one could have been kinder or more tender in his sympathy than my uncle, even though I now knew that he and my father had long disliked each other.
‘It’s only when there is this dislike between people,’ he said, ‘that it is possible for a true respect, untarnished by affection, to develop.’
My own response to my father’s death was a determination to become a soldier as soon as possible. Of course, in the normal course of events, I was due to be called to the colours in a few months, but I now began to look for ways to accelerate my call-up. And, in the midst of that horrible and grotesque war, when every post brought news of death, when everyone was aware of a miasma of death even in the spring air, I fell in love with the idea of uniform. That was a taste I shared with my uncle, who wore himself out in charitable work for the forces, and I shall not myself be so uncharitable as to suggest that his motives were not mixed. It seems to me that, trapped in the network of his affections and desires, he yet retained some noble element in his character which made him far more responsive to suffering, to courage, to the prospect of annihilation which forever stared young men in the face, than were most of those who despised him for what he had allowed himself to become.
Of course everything about him was equivocal; and, in moments when he could escape from the monstrous self which, avid for self-display, thrust his better and more modest nature into the shadows, he recognised this. So, just at the moment when my school-friends’ revelation of how he was generally regarded disgusted me, making me ashamed of him, the sympathy he offered me when my father died and then the case of young Marcel Pougier let me see that my mother’s estimate of her brother, however ill-founded in misapprehension, nevertheless approximated more closely to being a true judgement of his essence than the ridicule and contempt poured on him by others, who knew him better and less well, could ever be.
I was prepared to dislike Marcel from the moment he jumped up from the sofa in my uncle’s library, an eager smile of welcome on his face. He was wearing a private’s uniform, and his hair was cut ridiculously short. I had no doubt why he was there, and the dancing mockery in the look he directed at me made it clear he was in no way embarrassed by my arrival.
‘The butler told me to wait,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps he’s a valet. I don’t know about such things myself. If you’ve been given the same message, it’s rather a joke, isn’t it?’
His assumption angered me. I felt myself blushing. He giggled, but kept his eyes on my face.
‘The old boy has made a bêtise, hasn’t he? How do you come to know him? I’ve not seen you around before. Where did he find you?’
‘I’m afraid it’s you who has made a mistake,’ I said. ‘I am Monsieur de Fasquelle’s nephew, Lucien de Balafré.’
‘Oh, golly,’ he said, and the schoolboy expression dispelled my hauteur and made me smile. ‘What an ass you must think me. No wonder you’re blushing, but it’s my cheeks that should be red.’
Y
et he was still enjoying the situation.
‘It’s not possible,’ he said. ‘Why, if you put it on the stage …’
‘Well, then, we’d both have to be girls, wouldn’t we?’
‘Absolutely, and you’d be ever so stiff and proper.’
‘As I was, I’m afraid.’
At that moment, while we were both overcome by a fit of giggles – like the girls whose image I had evoked – Uncle Charles entered the room, and stopped, mouth open, the picture of a man surprised by Fate, exactly indeed like an adulterer in the sort of Palais Royal farce we had been envisaging.
Marcel lifted a plate from the table which, I now saw, was set for tea.
‘Havea chocolate éclair,’ he said. ‘There is no embarrassment that can’t be eased by a chocolate éclair, you’ve got to concentrate so hard to keep the cream off your clothes, especially if it’s a really luscious one like these, which come from the best patisserie in Paris.’
‘Don’t let’s talk of the trenches,’ he said later.
‘But I want to know. After all, I expect to be there myself very soon.’
‘Well, all I can say is, I don’t recommend them.’
We became friends during that short leave of his, and have remained friends ever since. There was a sweetness to his character such as I have rarely encountered, and in those days a gaiety that was infectious. To meet Marcel then was as enlivening as a glass of champagne. His vivacity has been dulled by experience and the struggle for success, but, with old friends at least, the sweetness has survived.
He was a dancer, he told me.
‘Well, I used to do female impersonations on the halls and sing naughty little songs. That was where Charles first came across me. He was furious, isn’t it strange? “It’s disgusting,” he said, “a nice boy like you singing such stuff. Don’t you see it’s degrading?” Well, I didn’t – do you? – but I could see he was nice. He doesn’t act like he is, but he’s really an old softie underneath. Can you imagine, he’s given my old Ma what he calls a pension, so that she doesn’t have to go out to scrub floors any more. Well, that’s hardly typical, let me tell you. Not many of his sort would do such a thing. It’s not what you’d call necessary. There’s plenty of flowers he could pick up in the market without concerning himself with their old mothers. And that’s not the end of it. He goes to see her, chats with her by the hour, makes plans for me after the war – if I survive it, that is.’ (He made a quick sign of the cross.) ‘He doesn’t have to. I think he actually likes doing it. And she thinks the world of him. “He’s a real gent,” she says, which he is of course. “You’ve got a good friend there, Marcel,” she says.’
‘But doesn’t she know?’
‘Course she does. She’s no fool, my Ma. You can’t be if you grow up on the streets of Paris, and in a poor quarter like ours you soon learn all the facts of life. No, what she says is, “There’s many worse things. Some greedy slut of a girl might have got her painted claws into you. As it is, Monsieur de Fasquelle’s a proper gent. You treat him fair and he’ll look after you.” And she’s right. Besides’ – he opened his soft brown eyes wide and held my gaze – ‘I’m fond of the old boy.’
‘Really?’
‘Really and truly. You don’t understand, do you, what someone like Charles can mean to a boy like me, with my temperament and background. But just take my word for it. Please. I am fond of him.’
And indeed it was Marcel, by then established first as an actor and then as a film director, who closed Uncle Charles’s eyes in death. He was holding his hand, too. It’s a ridiculous, sentimental picture, isn’t it? Only it happens to be true, and it was their real love for each other, enduring despite infidelities on both sides, which taught me the complexity of human nature. I owe them both therefore a debt which I can never repay.
CHAPTER FIVE
MY FATHER SPENT only two months at the front, but they were bad months, for he was wounded in the great German offensive of March 1918.
‘He never spoke of that time,’ my Uncle Armand told me, ‘but you must know it marked him forever. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the strongest elements in his character, and the most persistent traits in his outlook, were the direct consequence of his weeks in the trenches. Like so many people, he was a little deranged by the experience. For some years at least. His first response was pity. It’s not too much to say that he was consumed by pity, for the ordinary Frenchman, you understand, who had to endure such atrocities. That was what he said: “There’s no denying it, war today, modern war, is simply an atrocity, an offence against God and a surrender to whatever is infernal in our nature. When you have seen a young boy, draped over barbed wire, half of his jaw torn away, and then you realise that the screams you hear come from that ruined boy, well, I assure you, Armand, that everything we imbibed in childhood about the glory of war, the heroism of Roland and Oliver and the glamour of the Napoleonic campaigns, falls away, falls absolutely away, and, quite simply, you find yourself retching.” ’
And so, determining to have a public life – ‘because after all it is my duty, it is the duty of people like myself’ – he vowed that he would do his utmost to ensure that no war was ever again fought in Europe.
There were of course countless such young men, in France, England and Germany. They were by no means the majority. It is easy to forget this, because they were the most articulate of their generation. But of course the greatest part of those who had survived the war, many after personal experiences far more frightful than Lucien’s, went back to their work, their families, their wives, almost as if nothing had happened. Many of them, even at reunions of old comrades’ associations, were light-hearted or nostalgic when they fought their wars over again. They were proud of what they had achieved, and they accepted the horrors as being part of life. In Germany particularly, the horrors of peace often seemed to outweigh the remembered horrors of war, and it is well-known that Hitler and his first Nazi colleagues were ex-soldiers who regarded the war and the Army with a loyalty that was sentimental in its fervour.
Lucien couldn’t feel like that, but he did experience the same warmth for his own generation and the same impatience with the old men who had condemned so many to die as cattle. His position was intellectually and emotionally confused, and Armand may not be far wide of the mark when he says that he was indeed deranged.
Yet the derangement was only partial. He attended to his career, for instance. He attended the Sorbonne, studied law with distinction. It was clear that his intellectual abilities had not been impaired, and when he sat the exam for the Foreign Office, he passed out top in his year.
CHAPTER SIX
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WAS IT BECAUSE I was so unstable that in these years I knew a drive to succeed which I have now lost? I mean, a drive for personal success: to make myself known, to be somebody, precisely because, inwardly, I had become uncertain of everything? And, writing this now, looking back half a lifetime at the self I was then, whom now I find unrecognisable, I wonder how such as Hitler and Stalin are in solitude. Is Hitler as full of certainty in the dark hours of the night as on the podium? Or does he drug himself into nightly insensibility to avoid the questions that might rear out of the dark?
Then I lost my faith in the Faith, and for the moment rested in a false Faith with determined infidelity.
It is easy to blame others, and I could pin the responsibility like a badge of infamy on Gaston Hunnot who constituted himself my mentor and was accepted by me with glad, even gay, abnegation of judgement as such.
He was my senior by five years and walked with a limp occasioned by a piece of shrapnel still lodged in his right calf. It was this which first attracted me to him, but at the same time I was repelled by the bevy of thin-faced girls by whom he was so often surrounded. He had secured for himself a corner in a café which I frequented with some friends, and I was impressed when one of them told me that, though a student like ourselves, Gaston had already found himself a niche in
journalism, and even wrote for the Nouvelle Revue Française. We first met because the little dog which used to accompany him to the café insistently sniffed my trouser legs.
‘It’s all right,’ he called, ‘he doesn’t bite, you know.’
It was the scorn in his voice which made me reply with some remark about dogs generally liking me.
‘There speaks a man confident of his social position,’ he said, and I laughed because it seemed to me absurd.
From that moment we were mysteriously friends. I thought that he was irritated by the unquestioning devotion he received from the girls and half a dozen young men who had constituted themselves his court.
Gaston had been doing his military service when war broke out. He endured the retreat of August 1914, was first wounded at the Marne, returned to the front line and was wounded again at Verdun.
‘My father was killed there,’ I said.
‘And more than half a million others. Have you read this? It’s just been published.’
He pushed a book which I had never seen before across the café table; it was Spengler’s Decline of the West.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You should. It’s the book of our times. Listen to this: “Man is a beast of prey. I shall never tire of proclaiming that. All the moralisers and social uplifters who would pretend to be something better are only beasts of prey with their teeth drawn.” Do you like that? Do you agree?’
And without waiting for a reply, he opened the book at another point marked, I noticed, by a cinema ticket.
‘Or this: “A time is coming – more, it is already here – which will have no room for sensitive souls and frail ideals. The ancient barbarism which for centuries lay fettered and buried beneath the strict forms of a high culture is awakening again, now that culture is consummated and civilisation has begun: the warlike and healthy joy in a man’s own strength, which an age of rationalist thought saturated in literature despised; the unbroken instinct of race, which is resolved to live otherwise than under the oppression of dead books and bookish ideals …”’
