“Perhaps you’ve categorized me as an eccentric,” he said. “In life, I have chosen to think. Men, those animals that think, think so little that anyone who declines to observe such parsimony undoubtedly seems eccentric…”
He turned his head slightly, as if in order to address himself to empty space, and the contours of his face stood out even more clearly against the background of white hair. All things considered, he was less reminiscent of Leonardo than of Albrecht Dürer.
“In what direction does the activity of your thought tend?” I asked, distractedly, in the way that one chats with a model during a posing session.
“In all directions. In consequence of a particularly painful personal drama, however, toward the truth…” He hesitated momentarily before continuing. “My attention is specifically focused on the problem of life and death.”
“Ah! The problem of life and death…” In spite of myself, irony crept into my voice.
He must have sensed that I was not taking him seriously, and got to his feet. “Such a conversation is in contrast with the décor that surrounds us. Everything here is in the colors of Pernod and Calvados, which are not exactly those of the mind. You see, by taking an interest in anything but a tin trumpet designed for mustard, or an apparatus intended to dispense mayonnaise, one is making oneself seem a stranger to one’s century. Oh, if only this century could, in fact, make us as strange as we deserve to be!”
I parted company with him, a trifle disappointed; I had hoped for more amusement. He left me in an even worse mood than before I had met him, having shown me that I did not have a monopoly on hostility to the world. Is the hypochondria with which I am trying to flatter myself anything but the acrimony of future failure? That is what I am asking myself in my studio, in which the fire is going out, at the moment when, in order to get a better measure of the nullity of the day, I am amusing myself by writing this vain record of it…
Oh, if I could only wake up tomorrow full of enthusiasm for work, equipped with true genius—and not the old man’s kind!
Hope is decidedly tenacious within the human heart! It is the measure of its stupidity!
The run of bad luck continues. To begin with, this morning was Sunday, a day of which I have always had a horror. Then again, to begin the day, there was a letter from my mother, the first in eight months. She’s getting married again, out there in Argentina. The change of continent has not put more sense in her head. I wonder how many more she might yet rack up.
When a mother marries again, it is as if one is losing her. Here I am, an orphan. I am so stupid that I cannot rejoice in it. My father must be laughing in his coffin. I imagine that, if he could give some advice to his successor, he would have a great deal to say. Mad as he was, the last time I went to see him in the asylum, he spoke to me quite sanely about his wife. Curiously enough, he did not seem to realize that he was talking about my mother. Perhaps he no longer realized that I was his son? My mother seemed scarcely to be aware of it either; she has never seemed to understand that I might love her…
I wanted to devote my Sunday morning to physical work and bring a little order to my studio. Armande, my girl-friend, soon arrived, taking me by surprise. I had forgotten that it was the day when I was liable to be interrupted by her. Finding me in a bad mood, she talked non-stop, about her workplace, the clothing store, and her customers. Oh, what do I care about her clothing store! I made a semblance of listening, but I was thinking how ignoble the habit is that gives an individual the right to pour out her everyday thoughts in front of you: tedious, monotonous, idiotic gossip that crushes you with its worthlessness. The inside of a head that gets carried away, self-confidently, is much more annoying than a body. That’s why I like easy women and brief adventures: such a companion does not have time to paralyze me with her stupidity; she merely delivers a wedge of flesh, without commentary.
We dined in the studio. I only have two knives, one good and one poor. When Armande sets the table, she never fails to giver herself the poor knife. Stupid as I am, I always find that persistent and mute delicacy touching…but it is insufficient to make me tolerate more than two hours of her company. I offered my work as an excuse. She pretended to believe it, picked up her handbag, hat and umbrella. I know she thinks that I never do anything—and is not entirely mistaken, moreover—but, sensing the state of my nerves, she took care not to let on. The tranquility and ease with which she yielded irritated me. All too obviously, she was humoring me like an invalid.
After her departure, I tried to get down to work and make a sketch of the man of genius from memory. It didn’t happen, of course. I was suffering from a kind of residual wrath—not to mention the Sunday tedium that was oozing out of the walls…
Chancing to find Dagerlöff’s card again, I decided to pay him a visit in order to refresh my visual memory and eventually to be able to make use of him as a model. He lives in the Rue Quincampoix.
“Fifth floor, facing door,” the concierge told me, with sufficient astonishment that I gathered that visitors were few and far between.
The staircase gave off an odor that made me hold my breath. On the floor in question, I found one of the visiting cards that I had seen him order pinned to the door. The old man had added a handwritten inscription: “Please knock hard, because of the occupant’s deafness.”
I acted in conformity with the prescription, and the occupant came to open the door.
“Excuse me…” I began, raising my voice.
“I’m not deaf,” he said, immediately. “The instruction on the door simply serves to allow me to estimate, by the manner of their knock, the moral quality of my visitors…”
I pronounced a polite sentence to explain my visit.
“The best way of forgiving you,” he said, interrupting me, “is to take up my meditation at the point I had reached, dispensing with the customary banalities. Follow me.”
The room was cluttered with piles of books and miscellaneous objects. He went to sit down in an armchair positioned with its back to an old electric standard lamp, set between a table loaded with papers and an empty cage. Laid flat along the wall was a doll: an old doll with soft limbs, sad and out of place. My host stretched out his legs in front of a little cast-iron stove before rearranging an Algerian blanket, in which dust was attempting to conceal the ravages of mites, over his knees.
“What do you think about voyages? That’s where I was up to…”
I found myself paralyzed by the dread of knocking over the pile of books that rose up next to me. One of the legs of the chair on which I had sat down was showing signs of weakness. The mute presence of the doll, to my right, also disturbed me.
“Voyages?”
“Yes, in space…” he continued, widening his blue eyes, whose youthful color was not in harmony with the dilapidation of the décor. “Not the voyages of the Cook agency, but those that might be made in three-dimensional space, to the Moon, to Venus…”
“To tell the truth, I don’t think about them at all.”
“You’re right. Such voyages are pure folly. What good would it do to discover new Americas, new planets? Going to Courbevoie or Sirius is exactly the same thing, exhausting in tedium and monotony; pain and death await us there as they do here. There’s a passage in the Imitation that I could read you if it were the time for quotations… Let’s leave voyages in space to the imagination of schoolboy dreamers. Let’s pass on to voyages in time. What do you think of travels in time?”
Getting into character, I replied: “Such voyages are pure folly.”
“You said it!” he cried, wiggling his toes in pleasure within the old slippers that were caressing the stove. “Voyages in space, voyages into the past or the future, poor human dreams deprived of imagination, deprived even of common sense… As for time, we travel with it, at a speed of 24 hours a day; that’s quite sufficient to go toward death. The future can only resemble the past, and the past isn’t amusing—our forefathers died of boredom with it. Eternal hopeful voya
gers that we are, though, are there other voyages we might possibly undertake?”
I looked at the stove, the empty cage, the doll—it had a green dress—and the door to a neighboring room standing ajar, allowing a glimpse of an improbable heap of dishes in a vast sink. Mechanically, I said: “There are voyages around my room.”12
He uttered a theatrical cry of pain, and a mime of despair appeared on his face. “Stop thinking, I beg you. It would be better simply to follow me. Well, yes, there are other voyages, precisely those about which I was thinking before being interrupted by the blows you struck upon my door. Space and time are the first two categories. You understand me—you’ve been to school?”
“I’m a painter…”
“Don’t say another word!” he exclaimed, in commiseration. “I’ll reply for you. School informs us that there is, after space and time, a third category: causality. Why shouldn’t one undertake voyages in causality?”
With all the good will of which a voice might be capable, strengthened by the experience of madmen that I had acquired in looking after me poor father, I exclaimed: “Yes, of course! Why shouldn’t one undertake voyages in causality?”
“I’m burning my Charentaise slippers, damn it!” he shouted at that moment, abruptly withdrawing his leg in order to rub his reddened toe.
I couldn’t help smiling.
“Don’t be incredulous. I sense that you’re more interested than you’re trying to seem… We were talking about causality. What is causality? The connection between cause and effect. There are clouds; it will rain. I go into the water; I’m going to drown myself. The Earth rotates around the Sun, tomorrow will be similar to today. Causal links everywhere around me. The world is causal. No miracles. I enclose the world in the causal vision that I obtain from it…but don’t think that the world, the true world, gives a damn about causality. Does the snow care whether it comes from frozen water? And steam would be quite astonished if it were told about its parent, water. One could claim the inverse with as much reason. This world might have an aspect other than the causal. One might dress it in another garment entirely, and come to see it in a whole new outfit, an overcoat, a leotard, a toga—what do I know? That would be making a voyage in causality, an excursion into the ‘thing in itself,’ as the philosophers say.”13
My opinion of him was confirmed. Lunatic or not, though, he could serve me as a model equally well. The quasi-lunar radiation that his hair acquired within the rather somber room confirmed my intention. But his honeyed tone, his hammy manner, and—above all—the direct and seemingly-absorbent gaze that he directed at me, gave me the feeling that he was also weighing me up. What, then, did he want from me?
“You doubt the integrity of my faculties,” he continued. “All the same, you’re an artist. And what is it to be an artist, a poet, if not to escape the everyday appearance of the world in order to attempt to other approaches to reality? After their fashion, men of your type are attempting voyages in causality. They want to escape the prison of the familiar world, but their strength lets them down and they fall back into it. They return to their point of departure; they set forth on the railway of dreams, but the train does not leave the station; the rocket does not get off the ground, the adventure fails… The artistic experiment has failed, just as the poetic experiment has failed! Artists and poets have not found the means of escape, have not reached the limit beyond which they will escape the glue of the world. They sing of love, the joys of the flesh, life triumphant. A fatal error. Instead of letting oneself fall prey to the attraction of the world, it is necessary to experience a definite repulsion for it.”
The inspirational tone that he presumed to be adopting was annoying me. I had had enough of his speeches and of serving as his audience. I resolved to take a strong line with him.
“Everything that you say is false,” I declared. “If one were not held to the Earth by the attraction it generates, I, for one, would have taken flight for the stars a long time ago. I don’t love anything or anyone—not even myself. Human beings only inspire me with disgust, and I spit on life as we have made it. Nevertheless, as you see, I’m still here, and I’m quite simply going to take the stairs, to take my leave.”
He murmured: “Is that really certain? Is that really certain?” I had intended to squash him, but he seemed very cheerful. His blue eyes lit up, illuminating the whole room. In a fit of frankness, I asked him straight out whether he would consent to pose in my studio. He offered the excuse that he was busy.
“Where do you work, then?”
“At the Pasteur Institute.”
“A doctor?” I exclaimed, without hiding my rather impolite surprise.
“No.” And, after a pause, he said emphatically: “I’m a laboratory assistant.” He might have told me that he was a Cardinal, or the President of the Republic, without adopting a different tone.
I came out of his lair with the beginnings of a migraine, which deprived me of any scant appetite for work that I might have had. I had winkled out a great model there! With his stories, he had cut off all my inspiration! I wasted the rest of the day in the neighborhood cafés.
Met Babar, full of his customary aperitifs and projects that never lead to anything. Within two minutes, he proposed to collaborate with me on a poster, to decorate a little bistro, and to form an under-thirty group. Between projects, he dipped his trunk into his perennial glass. Such projects weary me, and if I get involved in them, they always fail. He was surrounded by jokers who gave as good as they got, discussing social influences on the composition of the palette, and telling fashionable tall stories. That sort of herd life sickens me. They’re all compressed into a mass, heaped up like lovesick toads. When one picks up one of them, he becomes ten, or twenty. They warm up their mediocrity and future failure by rubbing against one another. I told them so straight out. Babar laughed, and replied: “You have no vocation either. All true painters are optimists…”
“One can’t be an optimist when one sees mugs like yours,” I retorted, and I left.
Those poor fellows spend their time paddling in saucers. The company of their peers seems to take the place of work, talent, and everything else…
The sight of them annoys me. I don’t want to see them anymore.
CHAPTER TWO
This afternoon, a little model came to introduce herself, courtesy of Babar. He told me about it yesterday, but I forgot. The studio wasn’t very warm, and I hesitated over asking her to take her clothes off. The poor child was thin: skin and bone. Eighteen years old, though. I made a few sketches of her, but her thinness was scarcely inspiring. “My mother works in a bleaching factory,” she told me, “but she’s getting old now. The water gives her blisters on her hands.” Always these miseries of the life that you pursue…
Like all the rest, she wanted to see the drawings I had made of her. “Really? That’s how you see me? How ugly I am!”
“What about you? How do you see me?” I demanded, annoyed by her stupidity—to which I have had, nevertheless, to become accustomed.
She looked at me for a long time before replying: “You lack that little glow of life in the eyes.”
Poor mite, she can’t see the interior flame that I hide in order not to blind everyone. I can’t see it myself, but I sense it brooding there—and look out when my genius bursts forth in broad daylight! At any rate, the chit’s reflection has given me an idea for an etching: a corpse drawing a skeleton, a subject worthy of Goya.
I risked a few moves before she got dressed again. She only made a minimal fuss, but I lacked impetus—and the thought that Babar had probably already paraded his trunk over that bag of bones ended up leaving me cold. I even felt a shiver of repulsion, which caused her to say: “Are you cold too?”
I paid her; she left. Immediately, I threw the sketches I had just made on to the fire; even in effigy, I could not keep a pullet caressed by Babar in my apartment.
Stretched out on my divan, dreaming under the influence of what that old madma
n Dagerlöff had said, I wondered what attached me to the world. The answer came to me forcefully: women! It was by desire that I was rooted in the stinking compost of human beings and life. I had a little notebook, in which I stupidly inscribed the initial of a forename after each new adventure. I amused myself by counting them; I found a total of 299 forenames, and checked it three times: 299. I found that such a herd does not leave much residue in the imagination—and suddenly, that number, that sum of my escapades, filled me with sadness. Summarized in three figures was my destiny as a hunting dog, long dismal excursions in an endless labyrinth of side-streets, all that time wasted in a thousand wakes…
Why that interminable pursuit? Searching for what? For whom? Was it even a search? I wasn’t looking for anything. There was no definite individual to find. I was following my instinct, like an animal. An instinct, a thing without a face. And it had me in its grip, rather than me following it. I was being pursued, tracked by an anonymous desire…
To escape the bitter depression of that chain of reasoning, I went downstairs, and at the counter of the first bistro I had a glass of brandy, then another. Then I buttoned up my coat and went out on to the boulevard. The last glimmers of the sunset were passing between translucent motionless clouds, brushing the roofs of the city with the delicacy of an angel’s robe.
Instead of going back up to the studio, I wanted to stretch my legs a little, and to soothe my eyes with the translucent mist spreading through the atmosphere. I went through the Luxembourg gardens, from which the last students were emerging, and across the Seine, green, flat and somber between its banks, where the first street-lamps were lighting up. I went as far as the Tour Saint-Jacques, whose gargoyles had been leaning since time immemorial over a swarm of easy girls… It was a diabolical temptation!
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