by Allan Massie
But I was different. I found nothing amusing in his painless Bohemianism, though I tried to persuade myself that I did. Far from it.
I knew what poverty was. I knew how the aroma of the first soup for two days could trouble the stomach. My poor widowed mother was a shop assistant. She suffered from ulcers, and we had often literally neither food nor money in the house. And then, whereas Gaston’s claque were dilettantes, I was a true poet. Poetry in those days burned me up inside. And they laughed: ‘Mathilde writes such strange stuff, as if she had read nothing after 1880.’
But Lucien, who had more taste in his little finger than all of them in their gross bourgeois bodies, knew this from the start. He read one of my poems, and said, ‘something here’, and took a batch away and then called me to the office he had taken – he sent a pneu in fact – and said to me, ‘It’s absurd no one has heard of you …’
No one had ever spoken to me like that before. No one had believed in me. His office was like him. You would never have guessed he was a rich man. The furniture was heavy and very obviously from a second-hand dealer, not the best kind of dealer either. And there were steel engravings of official ceremonies on the walls, and a framed photograph of his father in his officer’s uniform. I found that touching, none of the Hunnotistes would admit that the Army deserved honour. But my own father had been killed at the Marne, and I, who had never known him, knew, from my mother, that he should be honoured.
That first day Lucien said:
‘One thing I must tell you, nobody deserves anything which he has not earned. And something else: the love of pleasure and the capacity to nourish resentment are closely allied.’
If only he could have seen that they were united in Philippe Torrance. Torrance was another of Hunnot’s disciples. He was indeed one whom Gaston was eager to shed. There was something insidious about him which disturbed Gaston’s complacency. And so he passed him on to Lucien; and Lucien welcomed him and made his name.
Somebody once said: ‘I don’t understand why you publish that Torrance. Surely you know that he is a Communist.’
‘Oh,’ Lucien replied, ‘I’m not ignorant of that. How could I be? He shouts it from the rooftops of Paris. But it’s not his cries from the rooftops which interest me, it’s the murmurings he brings of his boyhood in Le Havre. Now they are tender and original, it’s the way he catches the shadowy yellow light of November afternoons on the quays and overhears the conversations in his father’s drapery shop.’
Everything in fact which Torrance came himself to despise …
Do you know, Monsieur, writing of your father, I hear his voice with the rolled ‘r’ and it comforts me, I almost forget that the morphine is finished.
And then I remember how Torrance betrayed him, and I pour myself a glass of red wine, and curse him. I saw him on television the other day, so pleased with himself.
One day I remember your mother came to the office. That was a surprise. Though he always talked of her in tones of respect, we had gathered that they were incompatible. Hunnot of course had made it his business to know that – he used to say that the efficacy of the Party depended on the knowledge of the private lives of its enemies, and would pronounce this with that laugh like a hyena which I so disliked. All the same we believed him, he was always very convincing.
So – but you wonder why I should have been there. The fact was that your saintly father, having learned of my circumstances, said to me:
‘But my poor girl, you can’t work at your poetry if you are exhausted by a day behind the counter’ – for, following the example of my poor mother, I had taken refuge behind a counter, since it was a clothes shop I worked in – me, with my lack of taste and absolute lack of interest in dress – where I was worked off my feet by the proprietrix, a stout, but not ill-natured, Jewess with dyed yellow hair.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you can’t do that. I know: you must become an assistant editor.’ So I spent my days correcting proofs and writing letters to our contributors soliciting copy, and I must tell you, I greatly preferred it. I was happy, for the first time in my life. I felt I was part of something which mattered.
But it was obvious that your mother didn’t belong there. Quite the reverse. I could tell from her silly little hat and the way she tugged a fur stole round her neck that she was incurably frivolous, and that she had come to make trouble for Lucien. He knew it too, though he greeted her with grave courtesy. He even introduced me as his ‘invaluable assistant’.
I could see that she had never heard of me, and this proved to me that they were incompatible. That is not conceit on my part. But I knew how he regarded my poetry – oh, it still warms me to remember how he would speak of it – and it was evident that he had never so much as mentioned my name to her. He was devoted to the magazine, he really believed that it was the first thing of importance he had ever done or made, and she flicked dust off his desk, and said,
‘Really, ducky, does everything you touch have to be so tatty?’
He wasn’t offended, for he had this amazing ability to refuse to take offence, but I am sure he was hurt. He knew, you understand, that he had married the wrong woman.
Let me tell you something which may help you to understand this remarkable man and the times in which he lived.
I have never been much interested in public affairs, believing that a poet’s real life goes on in the head. Poems are made with words, as Mallarmé told Degas, not with ideas, but there are also poets who do not write verse. Of such the two poets of modern Paris and our modern times are René Clair and Georges Simenon. That surprises you, that I should admire two such light-weight artists: you have no right to be surprised, for you know nothing about me, and preconceptions are always wrong. Torrance despised them, I must tell you that, partly because it embarrassed him that Simenon should have given his name to one of Maigret’s inspectors. But that is not the point, which is rather that the first half of the decade before the war belongs, despite everything, to Clair, and it is still, despite everything – the unemployment, the memories of 1914 – a city lit by the sun, where the evenings are mild, fragrant and full of joyous possibility. But Simenon’s Paris is not like that; it is sombre and a place where life is drawn in behind shutters. Well, Paris belonged to Clair till the mood soured after the Stavisky Affair, and then to Simenon; it was no longer a city of make-believe. And your mother, this light and frivolous Polly whom I saw only that once, plucking her fur stole so delicately around a pale and slender neck, belonged to the films of René Clair, which, though shot – naturally – in black and white – nevertheless still possess for me a rosy glow; but your poor and admirable father, taking the burden of an unforgiving future upon himself, recognising that obsession is the inescapable condition of the serious man today, why, he is of the Simenon period, which, I say, is where, despite my reverence for Clair, I belong myself.
Do you understand these divagations? Or do they seem to you the demented warbling of an old drunk and morphine addict?
Ah, but your father would not have despised my condition. He would have understood: ‘Reality,’ he observed once, ‘is painful for those of us who face the future with our eyes open. But my dear Mathilde, we must always be ready to engage the Minotaur, even in the labyrinth built for him.’
You will forgive this long letter, which is written out of love and respect, by one who reveres your father’s memory and would wish you to do so also.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Document 8:
Memorandum by Lucien de Balafré, December 31, 1936
THIS YEAR HAS been the most momentous, and the most useful, of my life. I have established my magazine L’Echo de l’Avenir as one of the most influential and most highly regarded in France. Tributes to its authority and integrity have poured in from all sides, and the attacks which have been made on it have come from disreputable quarters and have therefore only enhanced its prestige. For the first time in my life I am regarded as being of account. I must guard against vanity, I
whose previous tendency has been towards self-deprecation.
And I have found a father, who is also a hero, and one who has supplanted my adolescent tendency to look to Monsieur Maurras for advice and comfort.
I still tremble when I think of the audacity of my approach. At one of our weekly luncheon parties at which we discuss ideas for future articles in the magazine, the talk turned, naturally enough, in this year of the Popular Front, in which Hitler has also reconquered the Rhineland, towards the notion of a whole number of the magazine devoted simply and terribly to the idea of imminent crisis.
‘Which one of us,’ young Louis Deverger said, ‘is not disturbed by the sense that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are once again riding round the encampment of civilisation. It’s like a Western, we have made a corral of our wagons, and we await destruction. I tell you, thinking like this the other morning – no, thinking is the wrong word, sniffing their presence in the thin air of a cold morning – I cut myself shaving, a deep two-inch cut.’
And one after another, everyone at the table recounted a similar apprehension; even Mathilde, who has no interest in politics, confessed that she dreamed of bodies twisted round barbed wire.
‘Is it true,’ I asked, ‘that we live in fear?’
There was a silence, and the feeling of shame hung over all of us. The mood became foggy as the November afternoon. Louis crumbled his bread-roll. Even Philippe Torrance had nothing to say.
‘But in that case,’ I said, ‘our crisis is moral, not material.’
‘There is only one man,’ young Louis said, ‘who can write on this subject with the authority which France longs to hear; and that is the Marshal.’
And so I resolved to approach him.
He received me in the study of his apartment at number 8, Place de Latour-Maubourg; a Spartan room, with no fire, though the afternoon was cold, with sullen clouds hanging over the leafless trees. I felt obliged to stand to attention while I was introduced; no one else has ever had that effect on me. He listened very carefully while I explained why I had come; all the while he made notes in writing with a pencil on a thick yellow pad. Once he asked me to speak more slowly, but that was all he said while he heard me out. Once he licked the point of his pencil like a tradesman – I have seen the same gesture from a carpenter to whom I was giving instructions.
Then he asked me to sit down. His secretary, who had stood silently by, indicated a straight-backed leather chair losing some of its stuffing at the corners. The Marshal ordered the secretary to leave the room. He fixed me with his gaze. In that dim light I could not be certain of the colour of his eyes, and previously I had only seen him on parade; but their lucidity had a remarkable effect on me. I felt that he knew me utterly. I knew I was in the presence of a true father.
Then, as if he divined my thoughts, he said to me: ‘Your father was Etienne de Balafré, Major in the X Infantry, killed at Verdun, October 16. Is that correct?’
‘It is, Marshal.’
Of course I realise that this display of knowledge only means that he was well-briefed, that he had his staff do their homework. Only a fool would fail to understand that, and we all know that when Napoleon during an inspection would recognise a man as having fought with him at Marengo or Austerlitz, he was only able to do so because he had taken care to be supplied with a list of such veterans and an assurance of their exact position in the ranks. But the veteran did not realise this, and took the Emperor’s recognition as a sign of his humanity and intellect. And at this moment I felt the same about the Marshal, who said:
‘I confess I cannot escape the conviction that I stand in loco parentis to the orphans of Verdun. And now you wish me to write an article for your magazine, of which I have seen the two copies which you have been kind enough to send. I approve of them, though many of the contributions are too clever for a simple soldier like myself. But I approve the magazine’s tenor.’
He fell silent, and I respected his evident wish for silence. Then he stretched out his hand and tinkled a little brass bell.
‘We would like some coffee,’ he told the maid, and then fixed his eyes on the door closing behind her as if following the sway of her hips along the corridor. He did not speak until she had returned with the coffee and laid it on the desk before him. He stroked the corner of his moustache; the brown blotches of age marked the back of his hand.
‘I don’t write articles any more,’ he said. ‘I haven’t time at the moment. But I will talk to you, and you can write it yourself and attach my name to it. Of course I shall want to approve it before it is published. As to the style, remember mine is clear and distinctive. There must be a central theme which sustains the text from start to finish. Few paragraphs, and remember that the sentences must be properly formed; subject, verb, object. Remember too please that I deplore adjectives. They make writing furry. I don’t object to a tone of irony. I often allow myself irony, though I forbid it to my subalterns. In my view, irony works from top to bottom. It is after all an expression of superiority.’
Then he smiled. It was the first smile he had given me, like the sun emerging to light up the winter afternoon.
‘But we haven’t discussed the subject.’
‘This issue of the magazine,’ I said, ‘will be devoted to the general crisis which threatens civilisation.’
‘You refer to the danger of war?’
‘And worse, Marshal.’
‘Yes, you are correct in that. There can be worse things than war, though war, as every soldier knows, is terrible. Some of my friends tell me that Herr Hitler does not want war, because he fought as a private soldier and then a Corporal and so knows its utmost horrors. But I tell them, no, for two reasons. In the first place, the private soldier does not know the horror of responsibility. He has not ordered men, good men like your father, to necessary death. And in the second place, the Corporal always believes that the General Staff are idiots, he believes that he could correct their blunders or avoid repeating them. He does not realise that blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse. The defence of Verdun was appalling; failure to defend it would have been intolerable.’
Outside in the square the light was fading to a dusky yellow and the plane trees stood out bare as figures in no-man’s-land recorded by the war artists. The Marshal made no move to light the lamp which stood on the desk, and in the gathering gloom the features of his face became indistinct, Gothic, mediaeval.
‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘there are indeed worse things than war. Peace can be more terrible. When I say that I do not speak as one who welcomes war, merely as one who observes that in war man loses his Self, which in peace too easily rules him. The subject of France and the French nation and our problem which you must elaborate in the article, the nature of our crisis, is not material but spiritual. If France is at a low ebb, it is because we have put enjoyment of the fruits of our victory in 1918 before our duty to the country. This year, you know, I refused to take my place – the place which is mine by a right which I have earned – in the official grandstand for the parade on the Quatorze, because, as I have said publicly, the front rows will be filled with all those politicians who have for the past twenty years been denouncing the Army and the spirit of the Army, and advocating renunciation and surrender. It is time to speak out. I am not, I must tell you, altogether opposed to Blum and his Popular Front. Blum is at least demanding discipline of his supporters. I do not agree with his politics, but he is a man, he has a fist. Most of our politicians are no better than old women, and, though I honour and love women, there is no place for old women – of either sex – in the government of a nation.’
What is truly extraordinary about the Marshal is his serenity. It is the serenity of a man who has suffered much, and learned the lessons of life.
‘There are no rewards and many duties,’ he said.
The Marshal is the true moral chief of the nation. He has been close to our mi
sery. And he confronts the worst of experience with that level gaze. Are his eyes blue or grey? I don’t know. But they are candid. He incarnates the strong, calm and humane virtues of eternal France. If it were not absurd, I would say I am in love with him. No, ‘in love’ is wrong, ridiculous, a debased term. What I mean is an emotion much closer to the love of God. I am ready to put myself and my conscience entirely in his trust.
Will the day come when I have to act on that commitment?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Document 9: Copy of letter from Lucien de
Balafré to Count Rupprecht von Hülenberg
October 4, 1938
MY DEAR RUPERT: It was as ever a pleasure to hear from you, and on this occasion a relief also. I understand that you feel the need to be cautious; we live in times when each of us may be convicted out of his own mouth, so rapidly, in-comprehensibly, and unpredictably, does the wheel of Fortune, to which History itself is bound, make its revolutions.
It is a relief that there is no war. To have fought over an artificial country like Czechoslovakia would have been an absurdity, especially if we had gone to war in order to force Germans to remain under the government of Slavs in a State created by the ideologues of Versailles on the principle of national self-determination.
Nevertheless for several weeks fear of war sweetened my appreciation of my daily life, while the thought that in such a war you and I will necessarily find ourselves on opposite sides was bitter.
