The Bachelors (18 page)

But once he was inside the taxi, and felt that every turn of the wheels was taking him farther away from these happy hunting grounds, it was as though a piece of his flesh was being gradually stretched until at last it was torn away. The pools of scarlet light on the pavements had given way to pools of pallid light: death succeeding life. How ghastly it was to be going back to this death-ridden den with empty hands and heart (and no prospect even of finding a letter). When he got out of the taxi in the dark, deserted avenue, he felt a pang of obscure regret. A strong smell of fresh leaves assailed him; but for the moment this country-lover was interested not in trees but in human beings. The taxi had gone. On his way to the garden gate, he saw the pink sky over the centre of Paris, making the stars almost invisible, mysteriously warmed by human lights, or the memory of those lights, and glowing in the great black body of the night like the palms of a Negro's hands. He felt then that he could not go in like that, that he must try a little longer, exhaust all the possibilities of the night, and that only when he came back in full daylight would the night have finally said no. And this timid man, rising above himself once more, set off through the precincts of the guillotine, along the sinister wall of the prison, into the heart of the night.

In the avenue d'Orléans the little jolting carts of the rag-and-bone men, with their lighted lanterns and their minute, scraggy ponies, had an air of oriental misery. The street sweepers swung their brooms in regular semi-circles along the pavement, like mechanical toys. At the porte d'Orléans only one café was open. He sat down on the empty terrace, vaguely hoping for something that in his heart of hearts he did not expect to come.

There was no real sadness in him. Just as, after having written three letters in order to find himself a job, he had stopped at that, under the impression that he had done all there was to do, so, now, he felt that he had gone through a necessary ordeal, that fate had shown him that he ought not to move out of his shell. What he feared most of all now was that a pretty girl might appear in this café. Once more he would either have to suffer through not daring or if he dared and succeeded, plunge himself into the most frightful complications. 'Renunciation ... renunciation .. . renunciation.'

He dozed off, still holding his portfolio, on which his sweating hands had left a sticky stain.

When he awoke, figures were looming up continually through the night, which had now grown paler, dark figures of workers coming from the suburbs with their little bags, their boots covered with the dried-up mud of three months ago, and their first two gestures of the day, before catching the Métro, were to go and have a drink and to buy a newspaper. The whole of the south-east region, towards Arceuil, was completely in the shadows, without a single light. This was the 'zone', populated by Italians, Arabs, and Jews. But at this hour, plunged in darkness, it seemed somehow mysterious and rather frightening, like no-man's-land seen from the front-line trenches, the desert seen from the last
bordj
, or the ocean seen from the shelter of a harbour. From the dark depths of this ocean there emerged from time to time, lit up like a liner, an empty bus travelling at high speed on the way from its depot.

Dawn broke through; the sky was the colour of Pernod. M. de Coantré went on sitting there, ordering coffee after coffee, croissants, sandwiches, cigarettes, and smoking like a chimney. Ah! these things, at least, were real! When he sat down, or rather collapsed, at this table, he had been overwhelmed with a nameless weariness, the sort of weariness that fills you with nausea and makes you want to vomit. Now, all these compensatory pleasures — coffee, tobacco, having slept a little, having somewhere to sit — had cheered him up. This hour of dawn, in cities, holds all the mystery and promise of the coming day. Dawn and dusk: the urban hours that beckon to adventure. But M. de Coantré expected nothing, and was content to be like that.

At a quarter past six there was a great cascade of men surging into the Métro. This world of dawn and early morning was very much a male world; at this hour the whole town belonged to the men, like an oriental town. This did not worry M. de Coantré. On the contrary, the feeling that had kept him going throughout the night was being purified. He wondered whether it hadn't all been a misunderstanding, whether what he had really been after hadn't been some contact with the people, and whether he hadn't simply been obeying some old bourgeois atavism in seeking the people through their women. When, at seven o'clock, he saw the first puffs of smoke rising from the factory chimneys, he was moved by it: already men were toiling, when so many others were not yet awake. He remembered the workshop he and Levier had had at the Barrière du Trône, and the embarrassment he used to feel when, returning at five o'clock in the morning in an open carriage from some all-night spree in top hat and tails with a camellia in his buttonhole, he met the first workers, with picks on their shoulders — pleasure and toil passing one another with the same white faces. ... As for the women he had met that night, he was content to be able to tell himself that he had desired. To have proved to himself that one had only to stoop and pick up what one wanted seemed to him enough. Already this night was becoming transfigured in his mind; he now had the impression that if he had let these women escape him it was because he wanted to.

At seven o'clock the dustmen passed by, talking in such a strong accent that they might almost have been putting it on. The waiter in the café was cleaning the dominoes. Around 8.15, advancing from the suburbs towards the Métro, came a great wave of women — for the opening of the offices at nine o'clock. Then the flow ceased. One aspect of Paris died away, and its customary aspect reappeared: the bourgeois day began. M. de Coantré considered his 'ordeal' at an end. He took out his wallet to settle his bill at the café, saw the five-hundred-franc note still intact, and regretted the happiness it might have procured him. His bill was six francs; he put down ten and told the waiter to keep the change. A humble and pathetic gesture: after a whole night spent trying to insinuate himself into the life of the people, he ended up with this age-old bourgeois gesture of giving money. And, as it happened, the waiter misunderstood what he said and brought back the change. So M. de Coantré, seeing that even this gesture had misfired, did not insist but left a fifty-centime tip.

As he left, he noticed the name of the neighbouring bar:
Tout va Bien.
'Yes,' he thought, with a sort of smile, 'all is well.' He imagined how bitter he would have felt if he had spent an hour and a half dressing up the previous evening with a view to an amorous adventure, and all to no purpose. He shuddered at the thought. He hailed a taxi and gave the driver the boulevard Arago address.

If we have not described more strongly M. de Coantré's feelings during the course of that night, it is because his feelings
were
no stronger.

8

S
OON
after the war M. Octave de Coëtquidan had illegally increased the rent of a new tenant in a modest block of flats which he owned in Passy. There came a time when the tenant, advised and egged on by a newly acquired son-in-law, a wily lawyer, threatened to sue M. de Coëtquidan. On a technical point operating to the detriment of the tenant, the outcome of the case was uncertain. But, if he lost it and the worst came to the worst, the baron might have to pay over a hundred thousand francs.

In this month of July 1924 the affair had come to a head — and M. de Coëtquidan decided to make a gift of ten thousand francs to a charitable organization.

Here is the connexion between these two facts.

M. Octave, with all his social prestige, saw himself being out-manoeuvred by these people of no standing. With the help of this display of money he would restore his high opinion of himself. Having appeared in the eyes of his agent and his lawyers as a bloodsucker, and a ridiculous one to boot, for having taken advantage of his tenant and then been punished for it, he could take a hair of the dog that bit him by being lordly with his ten thousand francs.

He had no particular charity in mind, convinced as he was that, no matter which he chose, less than half of the ten thousand francs would be used on behalf of the unfortunate beneficiaries, the rest being diverted to various other uses, and partly into the pockets of the directors. In any case, he was indifferent to the poor.

There was a list of charities in the house. The baron opened it at random and came across the Oeuvre des Berceaux Abandonnés. He sent off a cheque for eight thousand francs — having meanwhile decided that ten thousand was too much — and at once began to hate this charity. But the greater his aversion for abandoned infants, for the poor, etc., the more intense became the bitter pleasure he felt at having sacrificed such a sum to an organization whose activities he derided.

At the same time, since he was an honourable man, he was ashamed of having made this gesture in such a frame of mind — especially when he thought of Léon — so much so that, a few moments after having dropped the cheque in the letter-box, he searched his waistcoat pocket for something to give to a beggar he saw on the pavement. He hesitated between fifty centimes and a franc, took a franc between his fingers, and then changed it for a fifty-centime piece when he saw that the beggar's hands were clean, which seemed to him to indicate that the man had money. A moment later, having given his fifty centimes, he turned round and saw another person giving the beggar a coin, then another, and he thought, 'He makes a fortune! I've been had again.'

These various impulses having been finally assimilated, he greatly admired himself for his gesture, and in this admiration, as he had hoped and foreseen, his self-dissatisfaction was swallowed up.

Still cherishing the hope that he might not have to give anything, or only very little, to his brother and his nephew, and fearful lest the accidental discovery of his liberality might be a powerful weapon in their hands, he had asked the charity not to divulge his name.

For the next few days, bathed in self-approbation, he waited impatiently for an acknowledgement from the charity, and smacked his lips in anticipation of its terms. He waited more than a week — which he thought outrageous — and the reply when it came, though friendly, was less so than he had expected. The fact was that the members of the board of the charity, whenever they received a new and unexpected donation, immediately thought, 'This is a man who wants to get in on the charity, What's his motive? etc. . . .' And instinctively they closed their ranks to keep this interloper at bay, for their only interest in the work was to hasten their advancement in the Legion of Honour. Hence the coolness they had allowed to filter through the polite phrases of their reply to M. de Coëtquidan, in order to warn him that they had seen through his game.

In the meantime, M. de Coëtquidan received a visit from his brother.

Here we must turn back once more, as we did with M. de Coantré, and examine the subject of M. Élie and women.

M. Élie had come of age still cherishing the belief that women were equipped in front with the same attributes as men, and that it was modesty that prevented these marvels from being shown on statues and in paintings. This proves at least that guilty conversations are not all that prevalent in the colleges of the Company of Jesus. The army had no chance of teaching him the facts of life, for he was excused military service on account of rickets. What kept him away from women was religious scruple, the belief that his body was a repulsive object (as indeed it was, but women are not so particular), and above all that congenital diffidence which he shared with his brother, quite unlike the diffidence shown by M. de Coantré during his night of madness, which was that of a man of fifty-four who for twenty years has avoided contact with the world and with women.

Up to the age of thirty-five M. Élie had never known a woman. It was then that one of his fellow café-crawlers, M. de Corson de Beauxhostes, an insurance agent at Bois-Colombes whom he met every evening at Scossa's, introduced him to his mistress, Mlle Léa Meyer. A month later this mustachioed businessman flung his lady-friend into M. Élie's arms out of a mischievous desire to observe his agitation and embarrassment in front of women. Finding himself with Léa Meyer perched on his knee, M. Élie fondled her a little, but felt no inclination to go any further. For all that M. de Corson had told him that Léa was 'not like other Jews', he assumed that she was grasping, and that 'the act' would be a great source of complications and ties, quite apart from the eternal damnation he could expect at the end of the affair, which is a big price to pay for something one has no desire for. So he excused himself on religious grounds. A Frenchwoman would have made fun of him, but Léa said there was nothing she admired more than people who take their religion seriously. Whereupon M. Élie, who would have taken his stand firmly on religion if Léa had teased him, with characteristic contrariness told her that he had lied, that he was deeply in love with someone and wanted to remain faithful. Already he found it necessary to make believe in front of her, thereby showing himself aware of the emptiness of his life.

For twenty-five years, and long after the death of M. de Corson, Léa remained with 'Nunkie' — as she called M. Élie — on a footing of platonic intimacy. He went to see her every Saturday in her little flat in the rue de La Rochefoucauld, bringing her each time a few francs' worth of
charcuterie
or cakes, mixed up with the shreds of tobacco and other unspeakable oddments in his pockets. He would fondle her a little, without ever undressing. Once a year he took her to a matinée at the theatre, to a play that he himself wanted to see — La
Fille de Mme Angot, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac
(because of the enemas), or a revival of
La Belle Hélène.
And once a year he 'stood' her something, the cost of which was not to exceed about sixty francs (1924 rate).

Léa Meyer was no more mercenary than the rest of us; in other words, she was mercenary within the limits allowed by French convention. But as she was Jewish, she had only to remark that such and such a thing seemed rather dear for people to exclaim: 'She's a real Jewess!' Faced with such a reputation, against which there is no defence, the temptation is to let oneself become what one is represented as being, since mending one's ways will change nothing. If the aristocracy only knew how little credit they are given for the trouble they take not to appear 'stuck-up', they would save themselves this trouble and remain natural. Léa had the decency to continue, in spite of her reputation, to display a merely Aryan sharpness in money matters. She did think it possible that M. Élie might come and live with her if the Arago household broke up, or that he might give her some tangible proof of his affection in his will, the only sort of tangible proof she knew him to be capable of. But her behaviour towards the old man was little affected by such thoughts, which indeed she often lost sight of altogether.