She walked, simply kept walking, without feeling tired, vaguely comforted because she was alone, with no one there to whom she had to pretend, lie, smile.
She continued down the quayside. Every now and then her weary eyes closed against the sun’s intense reflection off the Seine, then she breathed in the unpleasant smell of coal that rose up from the riverbanks. Parrots squawked inside a shop; the open doors of cafés offered a bit of shade, and little gusts of cool air, tinged with the smell of sour wine, wafted out.
Struck by a memory, as sudden and elusive as a certain scent, Denise stopped. She looked intently around her. She remembered. She had come here once, with Yves. Only it had been on a winter’s evening, in the rain … Road workers in damp waterproofs were trying to warm themselves, holding out their hands over the red flames of a brazier, and they had laughed as she and Yves passed by: they walked past so serenely, holding each other close, in the rain … and the lights of the city had flickered as if the wind were about to put them out … Oh! She remembered, she remembered so well … And, as often happens, that memory led to others, like a line of children holding hands … She could picture Yves’s face in haunting detail. She could see even further and deeper than his features – the expression in his eyes, his smile, his fleeting changes of mood, his pale, insipid desire, his anger, his weariness, his rare rushes of tenderness, his whims, his silences.
And then, in amazement, she also remembered how unhappy she had been. She couldn’t understand any more. She carefully went through their entire affair in her mind. Monotony, boredom, anxiety, sadness … A wretched love, as grey and sad as an autumn’s day … Why had it now been transformed in her mind into a bitter sweetness? Like a sick man who knows he is about to die and who tries to console himself by recalling his illness, his suffering, his miserable life, she tried once more, with a desperate effort of will, to call up the terrible times, the anguish, the doubts … But those thoughts were as faint and pallid as the dead. Then, suddenly, another memory – one she did not wish to recall – rose up, so clear and vibrant that she wanted to cry out. Yves’s smile, his sweet, unexpected smile, as innocent and serious as a child’s, that all at once lit up his face, then slowly faded away, leaving a fluttering light at the corners of his mouth. She saw him so clearly, so close by, that she instinctively stretched out both arms, as if she could touch him.
‘But that was happiness!’
She had shouted it out loud. Men passing by looked at her in amazement. She felt ashamed. Her outstretched hands fell to her mouth, stifling her sobs. She stood there, coming to her senses, mortally wounded and exhausted, staring with a blank expression at the shimmering Seine. A taxi was passing; the driver saw her and slowed down. In a daze, she got in and gave her address.
The car drove on, jolting along the jagged paving stones of the old streets. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t even in pain any more. Like a little girl trying to work out a problem she doesn’t understand, all she did was say again and again: ‘So it’s over, it’s over … And I didn’t even know that was happiness … And now, it’s over …’
PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION
Irène Némirovsky’s first novel opens in a setting she knew well: Hendaye, where she spent her last holiday with her husband and daughters in August 1939, in one of those ‘houses in mock Basque style’ bathed in ‘the scent of cinnamon and orange blossom’, only steps away from a beach covered in ‘warm sand’. Could anyone have believed that, beneath this ‘August sky’, the announcement of the German–Soviet Treaty would come to shatter all her hopes of finally being granted French citizenship? And how strangely this final confession of the abandoned mistress resonates: ‘So it’s over … And I didn’t even know that was happiness …’ Is such bitterness the price of twenty years of loyalty to a country for which she is first to declare her love in this book in such a moving way, a love that extends from the heights of Montmartre to the shores of the Bidassoa river. Even the youngest character in the narrative, the mischievous little girl, is called France …
But this is a mere illusion: for we are in August 1924, and there is no storm in sight to threaten the affair between Denise Jessaint, ‘a young wife doted upon by a husband who earned a lot of money’, and Yves Harteloup, a ‘little rich boy’ who was wealthy when he was young but who cannot bring himself to sacrifice life’s luxuries in order to afford its necessities. All the elements of a love affair come together: a single man hoping to rediscover the ‘beautiful mornings of his childhood’, a ‘very pretty’ mother whose husband must go away on business, a deceptive sun that strips them bare and makes them forget their prejudices. A cold autumn rain will fall on this paradise, forcing Adam and Eve to cover themselves: he in a shabby business suit, she in ‘silver shoes’ and pearls. At the end of this on-and-off romance, exactly one year after emerging from the ‘dazzling light of the Basque country’, their love would suffocate in the ‘horrible heat’ of the Parisian summer. A match between a society woman and a man who was a member of what was already being called the ‘new poor’ could never work. If only they had known that every detail of their affair would be dissected under a microscope …
For even if The Misunderstanding appears to borrow some of the plot lines of a sentimental or melodramatic novel, this too is deceptive. Irène Némirovsky has no wish for the ‘superficial poetry of some romantic novel’ any more than Denise does. Tied into a ‘kind of forgotten innocence’, their romance becomes brutally subject to the harshest realities, confronted with the most trivial demands of everyday life. The glorious holiday by the seaside, worthy of a railway poster, is followed by a dismal post-war Paris. A young, exhausted hero crouches in the trenches of office work, while on the Avenue d’Iéna, a beautiful woman enjoys a life of leisure and is astonished to learn that her lover lives in an apartment in Pigalle with his dog …
With cruel determination, Irène Némirovsky distorts the fairy tale, brings the lovers back down to earth and constructs a ‘border crossing that was … impossible to breach’, made up of a hundred-franc note, the humiliation of a moment’s pity, the torture of a silent telephone, the deep reluctance to give up modern comforts. Utterly destroyed by a sudden change of climate, Yves’s and Denise’s love decays under the attentive eye of the novelist until the moment when they become incapable of understanding one another: ‘Can anyone really know anyone else?’
This disenchanted fable might be a variation on the theme of L’Étape by French novelist Paul Bourget, but it was in the name of social equilibrium that Bourget destroyed the fast-moving rise of his hero. Yves Harteloup, on the other hand, has dropped down the social ladder, and Irène Némirovsky is well aware of the fact that this ‘mal du siècle, but without the Romantic gloss’ is the result of the damage caused by the Great War. Yves’s education as the son of ‘a pure-bred Parisian’ made it inevitable that he would rub shoulders with the Jessaints; but having lost his fortune, his youth and his courage somewhere in Flanders, how could his class reflexes not lead to his downfall? Like ‘Lazarus risen’, had he experienced ‘the horrors of death’ only in order to follow Denise into a raucous nightclub filled with skeletons, toads and ogresses? In this luxurious cabaret, one might see the nightmare of Verdun merging with the ‘cosmopolitan circuit’. And in fifteen years, having become cynical and corrupted and resembling the veteran Bernard Jacquelain (Autumn Fires), Yves Harteloup will grow richer with a clear conscience at the expense of this ‘reprehensible and mad’ world.
A ‘trompe l’oeil’ sentimental study, The Misunderstanding addresses with astonishing acuity the psychological and social consequences of a war that Irène Némirovsky, still a teenager when it ended, would not see again until she witnessed the herds of people during the mass exodus from Paris in 1940. She wasn’t yet twenty-three years old when this novel appeared under her name in Les Œuvres libres collection, in February 1926. And after the success of David Golder, four years later, this first novel was immediately republished. The critic Frédéric L
efèvre was right to marvel that such a young novelist had ‘reflected on life enough to have a lucid and coherent vision of complex problems’ (Les Nouvelles littéraires, 11 January 1930). Reflected enough, but also lived enough: Irène Némirovsky had experienced the Russian Revolution, exile and a lost childhood in St Petersburg, and had already learned one of life’s lessons: happiness leaves a bitter taste, yet it ‘was happiness’ all the same.
Olivier Philipponnant
2010
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Published by Chatto & Windus 2012
First published in France as Le Malentendu in 1926 by Les Œuvres libres
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Translation copyright © Sandra Smith 2012
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