But I am waking up to these times; not that my amphibological nature has stopped torturing me, since I always find myself disoriented by a single truth and political discussion are a true ordeal for me from which I emerge infinitely sad and discouraged, absolutely sure of my fundamental inadequacy for experiencing the happiness or ordinary troubles that others do. But the country in which I live—and because I’m living at the time when the great wave of war recedes, and after the cruelty of the storm, the ugliness of the mud appears and the muddy eddies, everywhere triumphant stupidity and the sacrifice useless, withering when it ought to flower—this country has awakened in me a feeling so unknown to me in my past life: hatred. I finally have a clear image of society that I do not want because it makes me sick, because it offends everything in me: the humans, morals, customs surrounding me—and this includes the majority of my stupid French companions—nearly all make me burn with indignation. I have become so impatient, so easily offended, even nasty, a purist for the human dignity that is so thoroughly trampled here. I am starting a file on our hosts and I assure you it will be a thick one. Flagrant stupidity makes me suffer horribly, stirs my bile, and overwhelms me. There are some gatherings, meetings, and meals that I leave physically ill, livid with anger, and wishing that I had less self-control and could be calculatingly insolent instead of just displaying my aggressive or embittered distress. And so, as Michelet says, I am sick with France; I would like to be there, to know what is happening. I suffer from its loneliness, from the evil said about it, from the ignoble pursuit of the wounded beast. I need to see the young men of my generation again, to hear what they’re thinking, to take comfort in feeling and knowing that I think as they do.
That would be a reason for me to return in the fall if my health permits it. My dream would be to spend a peaceful year at home taking care of myself. For four years I have been in this funeral parlor, cut off from those I love. I want to live with my mother for a little while and—I would not say this immediately out of modesty but you know it very well—I would consider the joy of spending a year near you a major reason to return. What joy after so much misery! It would surprise me if I resisted the temptation. Just think that this winter we may be able to see each other and not just for a brief time. I would like to be free of any occupation in order to work and to rest for another year. That is a very serious issue. I will decide in August.
Thank you, my friend, for your offers of clothing and money. For the moment, there’s no hurry. Simply see if you can find a way to let me access money through the “clearing.”48 There are excellent things to buy here; and given the situation in France, it would be bad business to leave with nothing. Check with Maman. But you know that is only of minor importance. All the same, why not try to take home from this country the one good thing it has to offer.
My affectionate respects to your mother. Write soon.
Your friend,
Roland
2. Roland Barthes to Jacques Veil
Jacques Veil (1917–44) cofounded with Roland Barthes the Groupe de Théâtre Antique de la Sorbonne in 1936.49 A member of the French Resistance under the name of Gustave Nutte, he was killed by the Gestapo in Marseille the night of January 10–11, 1944.
* * *
Paris, March 16, [1940 or 1941?]
My dear friend,
A word in haste to tell you that never could I express the pleasure and emotion that your last letter brought me. It’s a comfort to witness friendships like yours that can be all these things at the same time: sensitive, deep, active, and faithful. But I have never been worthy of it and you are too indulgent with me. But I hope to be able to talk about all that with you very soon. I’m going to Bayonne for Easter. Would it be all right with you if I stopped briefly in Arcachon on the way there? I would be so happy to see you. But I have some misgivings. Maybe you follow a strict regime and my coming would disturb and tire you. So you must be frank with me. I was planning to arrive in the morning and leave again in the afternoon. But it’s important that this does not disrupt whatever schedule you keep. Don’t worry for my sake and simply tell me where I might see you briefly if I stop in Arcachon.
Until very soon, I hope, unless my visit will bother you!
I send you my best wishes. Please give my regards to Doctor and Madame Monod, whom I had the pleasure of seeing at the Brissauds, if they remember me.
Until soon,
R. Barthes
Everyone here sends you warm greetings.
* * *
Saint-Hilaire, March 28, 1942
My dear Jacques,
I’m happy to take up a large sheet of paper to write to you. I’ve been here for about a week. My journey and settling in went well and I have already adopted the monotonous rhythm of sanatorium life. For the moment my health is excellent. I still have not decided anything with regard to my studies. I have to look at the possibilities.
But it’s mostly about you that I would like to hear word. I’m delighted to feel closer to my dear friends in the free zone and I look forward to getting the details on your life and plans. In Paris, all those I left send along their warmest wishes to you. We have gone for so long without exchanging letters that I seem to have too much and too little to say. Above all I would like this letter—which does not really count as one—to carry with it all my affection and to be an opportunity to answer me at length and tell me everything about you and yours. For the moment, I cannot write much because I must—like all new arrivals—do most things in bed where one can hardly even read and then only when the accordions and visits from the other fellows do not prevent it!
I’m here with Jacqueline Mazon’s brother, and we speak of you often.50
My dear friend, write to me very soon. Faithfully yours with best wishes.
Roland Barthes
Sana des Étudiants
Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet
Isère
* * *
Saint-Hilaire, May 28, 1942
My dear friend,
Your letter made me so happy, but we must be able to see each other. Perhaps if I’m doing well this summer I may get a few days’ leave, and I want to take a short trip to the Midi if possible, in which case I’ll come by to see you briefly. These are nothing more than plans, but I assure you that it would be a great joy for me to see all of you again and have a long chat with you.
I didn’t answer you sooner because I’ve just been ill. I had pleurisy and pneumonia that brought on a fever, fatigue, weight loss, and pain in my side for the month that I just spent in bed. This is quite vexing since I had gotten through a particularly hard winter in Paris with serious restrictions but with no incidents, thanks especially to Brissaud and maternal care. It’s likely that the change of climate and altitude gave me the pleurisy. I promise you that I was angry about catching it here, especially since I had a fine case of pneumonia that was coming along beautifully. I’m doing much better now; I can get up for meals and I’m a little more active. Let us hope no problems develop when the fluid is resorbed.
I’m telling you my troubles without forgetting yours of course, the anxious life you must lead. And yet it seems to me that given your nature, so attuned to all new experiences, you must find great joy in that deep, genuine contact with the land. I’m sure you’ll have a thousand things to tell me, and I can’t wait for the chance to see you since we are already closer to each other than before.
Please give my regards to your parents. And to your brother and you, my faithful friendship.
Barthes
Sana des Étudiants
Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet
Isère
* * *
Roland Barthes to Jacques Veil’s Parents and to His Sister Hélène Veil
[Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet,] July 5, 1944
Dear Madame, dear Monsieur,
My dear Hélène,
Thus what I had feared and have not stopped thinking about since the letter from Claude is really true; Hélène’s letter received this
morning informs me so. I am not afraid of rekindling your pain in mingling it with my own through these words, because nothing can lessen it, console you, or make you forget. I will never forget the one whom you mourn; I have always thought and spoken of him as a very beautiful soul who had all the highest virtues and whose keen divination of the Good and the Just was always instantly accompanied by total engagement of his whole being in his chosen cause. His death makes him greater still. He is irreplaceable not only in the hearts of his family and his friends—needless even to say this—but also in that small army of just men so necessary to the dignity of the world, and for whose friendship and respect we truly do live. I am saying this very badly, helter-skelter, but with seriousness and conviction. We must speak of him now and forever. Through his life and his death, he has earned a place beyond forgetting, beyond death. That is certainly no consolation for our hearts, but it is an obligation, an example for our living souls. I am there with you and share all my sorrow. I will not forget you.
Roland Barthes
3. Roland Barthes to Georges Canetti
Georges Canetti (1911–71), the brother of Elias and Jacques Canetti, and a tuberculosis victim, stayed at Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet many times in 1934, in 1941–42, and when he had a relapse between 1944–47. Already a doctor and researcher at the Institut Pasteur when he met Roland Barthes in the sanatorium, he was a specialist in tuberculosis and went on to become one of the great innovators in the discovery of protocols for modern care.
* * *
[Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet,] Wednesday, March 24, 194451
My dear Canetti,
You will have guessed that I haven’t written to you sooner because of this bleeding that Vincent must have told you about and that came on the day after my return; it was not very much but it started again eight days later, which made it nearly two weeks that I was immobilized almost without eating—and I am very hungry. For two days now it seems to be completely over and I’m reviving. I had no fever or fatigue, and the radioscopy indicates nothing more than before. I’m awaiting the results from an X-ray and will keep you posted.
I arrived to a very unpleasant concern: Caron must have an extrapleural in a month, right here with Bonniot, because any scheme with D. Lefoyer is impossible, as you know. Given Bonniot’s reputation with extrapleurals, this operation is truly worrisome and I am quite morose, I would even say—you will understand—in anguish. As for Caron, he is optimistic; he draws much from the fact that Bonniot’s unfortunate record is old news and that he might have performed successful surgeries since at Rhône or Mines. But it seems to me you can’t deny that his chances might be better with a surgeon in Paris rather than here. And I’ll also admit to you that despite all my affection and respect for the doctors here I worry that they are a bit new to the postoperative care that’s said to be so critical for extrapleurals. What is your opinion, my dear Canetti? I feel that it’s a very delicate thing for you to tell me and surely very indelicate of me to ask you. I am troubling you again by mail and you must be assailed with these kinds of little medical consultations. But I cannot bear doing nothing and remaining passive without getting information. It’s a very delicate thing for me to be continually drawing Caron’s attention to the risks he runs with Bonniot, because it’s likely that it will be Bonniot. On the other hand, there is a kind of duty that affection requires of me, no matter what.
I will tell you that these apprehensions, which I very much believe to be heartfelt, are nevertheless without self-interest. I hope for nothing more from Caron and if I continue to worry about him as I would a loved one it’s because, of all the times when I could abandon him, this is the only truly impossible one. But my trip changed many small things, broke a few habits, overturned the mirror of love, as it were. I am beginning to be unjust in the opposite direction, getting exasperated by his faults, which are great and many, contradicting him continually, and finding irritating what used to enchant me. I watch this love dissipating without being able to do anything about it, without even really wanting to stop it, because I’m hoping that at the end will come the positive benefit of freedom. But I am annoyed with him and with myself. I find it ridiculous that rejection, frustrated hope, can corrupt and ruin what was progressing quite beautifully. I must tell you that meeting the whole family together, which happened in Paris—I had lunch there—left me strangely moved and, frankly, irked. I must tell you about that house; there, for the length of a proper Sunday meal, that is, a good couple of hours, I had the intense experience of a thousand amusing or poignant sensations watching this large and hierarchical bourgeois family eat. Each member exhibited a familiar but distorted or caricatured trait (but really? that’s when the doubts began), and between Uncle Jean, Aunt Rosine, and the great goose of a sister, there was only Caron’s delightful younger brother, who will no doubt make many futile conquests among those ten years younger than me. But I’m impenitent; what happened to me doesn’t keep me from envying them, those others.
My dear Canetti, in one sense I very much regret getting to know you during this strange period in my life—oh, I admit they occur frequently—because, completely tied up in this love affair, I haven’t been able to offer you anything by way of distraction, interest, or visible and palpable affection, all of which I had wanted for us in that vibrant and truly intimate obscurity of ourselves, that secret, sincere place where the passions hide, retreat, founder, but from which true pleasures and true progress come. I was thinking that through letters we could speak more freely but I see that I’m beginning to talk only about myself; don’t hold it against me, don’t focus on me when you respond, but tell me about yourself as I’ve told you about myself, only better, because I hope that you are less unhappy.
Believe, my dear friend, in my very strong and faithful friendship. I miss you very much, and I am certainly not the only one.
R. Barthes
* * *
[Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet,] Sunday, April 23, 1944
My dear friend,
I am writing to you from the terrace where I have a very beautiful view; the weather is splendid and I’ve never seen anything more calming than this Sunday afternoon. Nearly everyone is at the cinema; they don’t know what they’re missing. After my last letter, I felt such remorse at having told you all my troubles, thinking of the troubles that threaten you continually, the precariousness of your work, of your situation. I was very self-involved, but you must be so used to people wanting you to listen.
I also felt some remorse at having asked you for a medical assessment for Caron, but your response was so wise and so obvious that I really do not regret it. It is exactly what, as a layman—but not indifferent—I thought. I explained your response to him patiently, going over it many times without insisting too much—I have no right to. But his mind was already made up; he wants to have the operation immediately and is waiting to leave very shortly for Paris to put himself in the hands of Bourgeois. His arguments are plausible but, in my opinion, not entirely in good faith, since he has never really given the basic reasons for his decision. Well, I don’t blame him, he is exposed to enough risks and problems. Thank you, my dear Canetti, for answering me regarding his situation; Caron attached much importance to your opinion, but his impatience prevailed. Moreover, isn’t it true that in this matter you and I can only judge from a certain distance, a certain silence? No doubt you will see him in Paris because the questions concerning file transfers will bring him to postcure. Besides, he may think his departure will be easier and quicker than it is.