It was the first time in my life that I had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else. Garric and Nodier, who were much older than me, had impressed me in their time: but their dominance had been remote and vague, and I had had no chance of measuring up to them in person. Day after day, and all day long I set myself up against Sartre, and in our discussions I was simply not in his class. One morning in the Luxembourg Gardens, near the Medici fountain, I outlined for him that pluralist morality which I had cooked up to accommodate the people I liked but whom I didn’t want to resemble: he soon demolished it. I clung to my system, because it authorized me to look upon my heart as the arbiter of good and evil; I argued with him about it for three hours. In the end I had to admit I was beaten: besides, I had realized, in the course of our discussion, that many of my opinions were based only on prejudice, dishonesty, or hastily formed concepts, that my reasoning was at fault and that my ideas were in a muddle. ‘I’m no longer sure what I think, nor whether I can be said to think at all,’ I noted, with a sense of anti-climax. I took no credit for that. My curiosity was greater than my pride; I preferred learning to showing-off. But all the same, after so many years of arrogant solitude, it was something serious to discover that I wasn’t the One and Only, but one among many, by no means first, and suddenly uncertain of my true capacity. For Sartre wasn’t the only one who forced me to take a more modest view of myself: Nizan, Aron, and Politzer were all much further advanced than I was. I had prepared for the competitive examination at the double: their culture had a much more solid grounding than mine, they were familiar with hosts of new things of which I was ignorant and they were used to discussion; above all, I was lacking in method and direction; to me the intellectual universe was a great jumble of ideas in which I groped my way blindly; but their search was, for the most part, well-directed. Already there were important divergencies of opinion between them; Aron was accused of being too much in favour of Brunschvig’s idealism; but they had all explored much more fundamentally than I had the consequences of the inexistence of God and brought their philosophy right down to earth. Another thing that impressed me about them was that they had a fairly precise idea of the sort of books they wanted to write. I had gone on fatuously declaring that I ‘would tell all’; it was at once too much and too little. I was alarmed to discover that the novel sets countless problems whose existence I had not even suspected.
But I didn’t let myself be discouraged; the future suddenly seemed as if it would be much more difficult than I had reckoned but it had also become more real and more certain; instead of undefined possibilities I saw opening out before me a clearly-marked field of activity, with all its problems, its hard work, its materials, its instruments, and its inflexibility. I no longer asked myself: what shall I do? There was everything to be done, everything I had formerly longed to do: to combat error, to find the truth, to tell it and expound it to the world, perhaps to help to change the world. I should need time and it would need hard work to keep to my purpose, if it meant keeping only a small part of the promises I had made myself: but that didn’t frighten me. Nothing had been done: but everything was possible.
And then, I had been given a great chance: I suddenly didn’t have to face this future all on my own. Until then, the men I had been fond of – Jacques, and to a lesser extent Herbaud – were of a different order from my own: they were detached, changeable, rather incoherent, stamped with a sort of fatal charm; it was impossible to communicate witn them without reserves. Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence. I should always be able to share everything with him. When I left him at the beginning of August, I knew that he would never go out of my life again.
But before my future took definite shape, I had first of all to clarify my relationship with Jacques.
*
What would I feel when I found myself face to face with my past? I was anxiously asking myself this question when, on my return from Meyrignac in the middle of September I rang at the door of the Laiguillon house. Jacques came out of the offices downstairs, shook my hand, smiled at me, and took me upstairs to the apartment. Sitting on the red velvet sofa, I listened to him talking about his military service, Africa, his boredom; I was happy, but my heart was unmoved. ‘It’s as if we’d just said good-bye a day or two ago,’ I remarked. ‘It’s so easy, meeting again like this.’ He ran his fingers through his curly locks. ‘I should think so, tool’ he answered. Here I was back in the semi-darkness of the gallery; I felt I knew him only too well – those gestures, and that voice. That evening I wrote in my journal: ‘I shall never marry him. I don’t love him any more.’ On the whole, this brutal liquidation of our relationship did not surprise me: ‘It’s only too obvious that in those moments when I loved him most there was always a deep division between us which I could only overcome by denying myself; and so I had to take up arms against my love.’ I had been lying to myself by pretending to wait for his return before risking my future: for many a long week now the the had been cast.
Paris was still half-empty and I often met Jacques. He told me about his affair with Magda, giving it a romantic slant. In return, I told him about my new friends: he didn’t seem to think much of them. Had I offended him? What was I to him? What did he expect of me? It was all the more difficult for me to guess the answers to these questions because almost always, at his house, or at the Stryx there would be a third party with us; we used to go out with Riquet, or with Olga. I felt rather upset. From a distance, I had given Jacques all my love, and if he was going to ask me to give it to him now, my hands were empty. He didn’t ask me for anything, but he would talk about his future sometimes in a vaguely doomed tone of voice.
I invited him one evening to come with Riquet, Olga, and my sister to celebrate my removal to my new quarters. My father had paid for the furniture, and I was very pleased with the room. My sister helped me to set out bottles of cognac and vermouth, glasses and plates and little cakes on the table. Olga arrived, rather late and alone, which made us feel very disappointed. Nevertheless after a few drinks the conversation picked up; we were wondering what Jacques’ future would be. ‘It will all depend on his wife,’ said Olga; she heaved a sigh: ‘Unfortunately, I think she’s the wrong one for him.’ ‘Who do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Odile Riaucourt. Didn’t you know he’s going to marry Lucien’s sister?’ ‘No,’ I replied, dumbfounded. She took great pleasure in giving me all the details. On his return from Algeria, Jacques had spent three weeks at the Riaucourt’s country home; Lucien’s sister had fallen for him at once and had told her parents then and there that she wanted him for her husband. Jacques, forewarned by Lucien, had accepted. He hardly knew her, and, apart from a very considerable dowry, she had, according to Olga, nothing else to recommend her. I understood now why I had never seen Jacques alone: he neither dared keep silent, nor speak to me about it; and this evening he had let me down in order to give Olga a chance to bring me up to date. I feigned indifference as best I could. But as soon as we were alone together, my sister and I gave vent to our consternation. We wandered for hours in the streets of Paris, heart-broken at the thought of seeing the hero of our youth transformed into a calculating bourgeois.
When I next saw Jacques he talked with some embarrassment about his fiancée and with much self-importance about his new responsibilities. One evening, I received a mysterious letter from him: it was he who had opened up the way for me, he said, and now he was being left behind, with the wind taken out of his sails, unable to follow me: ‘Wind and weariness make the eyes water – with tears of a kind.’ I was touched; but I didn’t reply, for there was nothing I could say. In any case, it was all over now.
What had our relationship meant to Jacques? And what sort of person was he really? I was mistaken when I thought that his marriage showed him in his true colours and that after a period of youthful romanticism he was going to settle down cal
mly and become the bourgeois he had always been at heart. I occasionally saw him with his wife: their relationship was one of only moderate rapture. All connexions were broken off between our families, but later on I used to see him fairly frequently in the bars of Montparnasse, lonely, puffy-faced, with watering eyes, obviously the worse for drink. He produced five or six children and made reckless speculations. He moved his plant to the factory of a man in the same line of business, and had the old Laiguillon factory pulled down, intending to replace it with a large block of flats; unfortunately, after he had had the old house pulled down, he couldn’t manage to raise enough capital to build the block of flats; he quarrelled with his wife’s father and with his own mother who had both refused to be associated with him in this venture; Jacques spent his last penny on it, then had to mortgage, and finally sell his plant. For a few months he worked in his associate’s business but was soon given the sack.
Even if he had proceeded with circumspection and the gamble had come off, why had Jacques wound up the family business? It is certainly not without significance that he was concerned in the manufacture not of ironmongery but of stained glass. During the years that followed the 1925 Exhibition, the decorative arts took a great forward leap; Jacques was enthusiastic about modern art styles and he thought that there were immense possibilities in stained glass. In theory this was true, but in practice he had to draw in his horns. In furniture, glass-work, textiles, wallpapers, it was possible and in fact essential to experiment because bourgeois customers were agog for novelty; but Jacques had to cater for little country priests with very undeveloped tastes; either he had to ruin himself, or go on making the traditional and hideous Laiguillon stained glass in his workshops; ugliness made him sick. He preferred to put everything he had into a business that had nothing to do with art.
Without either money or work, Jacques lived for a while on his wife, whose father made her an allowance; but things were going from bad to worse between the two; idler, spendthrift, womanizer, drunkard, liar – to mention the least of his failings – Jacques was without any doubt the most detestable of husbands. In the end Odile asked for a judicial separation and turned him out of the house. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years when I met him one day by accident in the boulevard Saint-Germain. At forty-five, he looked more than sixty. His hair had gone completely white; his eyes were bloodshot; excessive drinking had turned him nearly blind; his face was blank, unsmiling; the flesh had wasted away and his head, reduced to its bone-structure, resembled feature for feature that of his grandfather Flandin. He was earning 25,000 francs a month doing some sort of vague clerical work in a tollhouse on the Seine: on the papers he showed me, he had the rank of a road-mender. He was dressed like a tramp, slept in doss-houses, ate next to nothing, and drank as much as he could get. Shortly after that, he lost his job and was left entirely without means of support. When he went to ask his mother and brother for food, they accused him of having no pride; only his sister and a few friends came to his assistance. But it wasn’t easy to help him; he wouldn’t lift a finger to help himself, and he was a physical wreck. He died at the age of forty-six of malnutrition.
‘Oh! Why didn’t I marry you!’ he had cried, shaking my hands effusively the day we met. ‘What a pity! But my mother kept telling me that marriages between cousins always turn out badly!’ So he must have been thinking of marrying me; when had he changed his mind? And what had been the real reason? Why, instead of staying single, had he rushed so young into such an absurdly calculated match? I couldn’t get to the bottom of it all, and perhaps he, too, no longer knew why he had done it, his brain was now so clouded by drink; nor did I attempt to ask him about his downfall, for he did his best to make me forget about it; on the days when he was wearing a clean shirt and had eaten his fill he liked to recall the past glories of the Laiguillon family and then he would talk like some great bourgeois gentleman: he sometimes told me that if he had succeeded it would have been no more than what other men had done, but this self-deprecation was beside the point: it was no accident that his ruin had been so spectacular. He hadn’t been satisfied with an ordinary failure; he might be blamed for many things, but he never did anything by halves; he had fallen so low that he must have been possessed by the self-destructive folly which I had had an inkling of in his youth. He had obviously married in order to relieve himself of responsibility. He believed that by sacrificing his pleasures and his liberty he would make a new man of himself, a man firmly convinced of where his duty lay and of what was his due, a man who could adapt himself to business life and cosy domesticity; but wishing cannot make us what we would like to be. He still remained the same, unable either to put himself inside the skin of a bourgeois family man, or to shake it off completely. He sought escape in the bars from his role of husband and father of a family; at the same time he tried to rise in the bourgeois social scale, but not through patient hard work. He wanted to get to the top in a single leap, and he staked everything with utter recklessness, as if he secretly wanted to come a cropper. Without any doubt, this destiny was bound up with the heart of the lonely, frightened little boy who at the age of seven strolled around among the dusty glories of the Laiguillon workshops as if he were already the master of its fate; and if in his youth he so often urged us to ‘live like everybody else’, it was because he suspected that he would never be able to do so himself.
*
While my own future was being decided, Zaza was fighting for her happiness. Her first letter was radiant with hope. The second one was less optimistic. After congratulating me on my success in the examinations, she wrote: ‘It is especially hard for me to be away from you at this moment. I should like so much to talk to you–just a few words here and there, and without trying to say anything definite or precise – of what my life has been like during the past three weeks. Apart from a few moments of pure happiness, I encountered many difficulties and felt a terrible anxiety until last Friday. On that day I received from Pradelle a rather long letter in which nothing is said, in which there is not one word that would give me the irrefutable proof I need in order to combat the doubt that, despite all my efforts, continues to haunt me. The hardest things of all to bear are these doubts, these failures of self-confidence, these utterly blank despairs, which are so totally devoid of hope that I sometimes wonder if everything that’s happened hasn’t been a dream. But then when I am filled with happiness again I am terribly ashamed that I had the cowardice to write him a letter which he has since referred to, and without exaggeration, as “rather fierce”. Your own arrived just in time to restore me to life. . . . I have been with you ever since it came, silently in touch with you, and it was with you beside me that I read the letter I received from Pradelle on Saturday and which has set the seal on my happiness, made it so light, so youthful, that for the last three days my gaiety has had the quality of an eight-year-old child’s. I feared that my unjust reply to his first letter might have caused fresh difficulties to arise between us; but he answered it so intelligently that on the contrary everything has become easy and wonderful again. I don’t think it can be possible for anyone else to scold people in such a delicious way, to tell them off so delightfully, and then to forgive them so absolutely, and to persuade them with even greater gaiety and gentleness that everything is going to he quite simple, that everything is lovely if only we will believe that all will be well.’
But Very soon other difficulties, more serious ones, arose. At the end of August I received a letter which filled me with dismay: ‘You must forgive me for this long silence. . . .You know what life is like at Laubardon. There have been hosts of visitors and we’ve spent five days in Lourdes. We got back on Sunday, and tomorrow Bébelle and I will again be taking the train, this time to go and stay with the Brévilles in the Ariège. As you may well imagine, I’d gladly go without all these distractions; it’s so tiresome to have to be amused when one hasn’t the least desire to be entertained. And I have all the more need of quietness just now because life, witho
ut ceasing to be “marvellous”, seems likely to be difficult for some time to come. Scruples which were finally poisoning my happiness made me decide to speak to Mama, whose inquisitive, worried, and even mistrustful attitude, I found unbearable. But as I could only tell her a half-truth the result of my confession is that I may not write to Pradelle any more, and Mama insists that until further notice I must not see Pradelle again. It’s very hard; in fact it’s frightful. When I think of what those letters meant to me, and that now I have to give them up; when I try to foresee the long year ahead, of which I had such high hopes, and which will now be bereft of those meetings that would have made it so wonderful, a suffocating sadness rises in my breast, and my heart seems to shrink with anguish. We shall have to live entirely apart from one another – how terrible! As far as I’m concerned, I’m ready to submit, but it’s much more difficult for me when I think of him. It sickens me to think that he may suffer on account of me; I have long since become accustomed to suffering, so much so that I have come to look upon it almost as my natural condition. But to accept his suffering would be as bad as if I no longer believed in it. Besides, I find it difficult to reconcile the present Pradelle with the one I knew three weeks ago, to link his letters with those fairly recent meetings when we were still so far from one another, and still so mysterious to one another; I feel sometimes that it is all just a game, that everything will suddenly return to the reality and silence of three weeks ago. How could I see him again without wanting to run away from this boy to whom I have written all kinds of things – all so easily – and in front of whom I shouldn’t dare to open my mouth? For I feel so strongly that his presence would intimidate me now. Oh, Simone, what on earth am I saying – how badly I express these things! There is however one thing you ought to know. It is that there are marvellous moments when all these doubts and difficulties fall away from me like things devoid of meaning, and in which I only know the profound and unalterable joy that still abides in me and informs my whole being, over and above all my miseries. Then the mere thought that he exists is enough to move me to tears, and when I think that it is partly for me and through me that he goes on existing, I feel a blissful pain in my heart, and it almost seems to stop beating under its load of unbearable happiness. So you see, Simone, what is become of me. This evening I haven’t the heart to tell you about the sort of life I’m living. The great joy that comes from deep down inside me these days, seems to irradiate the meanest things. But I am so weary of being obliged to go on joining in walks, games of tennis, tea-parties, and other amusements when I’m living such an intense inner life and have such a vast longing for solitude. The one important moment in the day is when the post arrives . . . I have never loved you as much as I do now, my dear Simone, and I am with you always, with all my heart.’