The Counterfeiters (50 page)

I offered to assist the women in lifting the patient, in dragging her to the door; but at the end of the corridor, right in front of the open door of the lavatory, she literally crumpled. It was all I could do to hold her by bracing myself against the door-jamb. Then with a huge effort I hoisted her, held her on the steps, getting off with her, while the aunt, who had got off ahead of us, caught her in her arms.

“She’s been that way now for eighteen months,” the aunt told me when I had joined her. “Such a shame! A girl of seventeen!… And it isn’t a case of real paralysis at all—just a nervous paralysis.”

“I suppose there were mental causes?” I asked rather indiscreetly.

“Yes; it came from a fright she had, one night when she was sleeping in the room with my brother’s children.… ”

I realized that the good woman would have liked nothing better than to talk, and regretted that I had not questioned her sooner. But a porter came up with a wheelchair, and the patient was put into it; the aunt, thanking me, drew away.

Édouard might encounter her later and reconstruct the past.

Make Édouard say, perhaps:

“The bore, you see, is having to condition one’s characters. They live powerfully within me and I will even admit that they live at my expense. I know how they think, how they speak; I distinguish the slightest intonations of their voices. I know that they are to commit certain acts, and that certain others are forbidden them.… But as soon as I must clothe them, establish their position in the social scale, their careers, the amount of their income—above all, invent relationships, parents, a family, friends—I throw up the job. I confess to you that I see each one of my characters as an orphan, an only son, unmarried, and childless. Perhaps that is why I see such a fine hero in you, Lafcadio. But then—imagine yourself having what we call “responsibilities”—with aged parents to support, for example; a paralytic mother, a blind father.… Such things happen, you know. Or better yet, a young sister in delicate health, who needs mountain air.”

“Might as well make her a bedridden cripple.”

“Imagine what it would be to have a sister! There you are with a little sister on your hands, who had once said to you: ‘Cadio, my little Cadio, since our parents died, you are all I have left in the world.… ’ ”

“I would hasten to find her a seducer.”

“You say that because you don’t love her. But if she were real, you would love her.”

The symbolist school. The worst thing against it is its lack of curiosity toward life. With the single possible
exception of Vielé-Griffin (whose verses consequently partake of a special savor),
²¹
they were all pessimists, forsaking and resigned,

that our country (I should say the earth)—“monotonous and undeserved,” as Laforgue said—was for them. For them poetry became a refuge, their only sanctuary from the squalor of reality; they plunged into it with the fervor of desperation.

Disenchanting life of everything they considered to be mere deception, wondering whether it was worth the trouble of “being lived,” no wonder they brought no new moral code (being satisfied with Vigny’s, which at most they dressed up in irony), but merely an æsthetic.

A character may well describe himself wonderfully while describing someone else or speaking of someone else—according to the rule that each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.

Each time Édouard is called upon to outline his novel, he talks of it in a different way. In short, he is bluffing; in his heart he is afraid of never being able to finish it.

“Why try to conceal it? The form that tempts me is the epic. The epic tone alone suits me and has the power to satisfy me; it alone can free the novel from its realistic rut. For a great many years it was possible to think that Fielding and Richardson occupied opposite poles. Actually one is as realistic as the other. Until now the novel in every country has always clung to reality. Our great literary period found it possible to
carry out its effort toward idealization only in the drama.
La Princesse de Clèves
is without a successor; when the French novel really launches out, it does so in the direction of the
Roman bourgeois
.”
²³

“These young men had a very hazy idea of the limits of their power”—this from
The Idiot
, which I am rereading at present. An excellent epigraph for one of the chapters.

Bernard has taken for his motto:

He tries to work this out in Latin. And when he is thinking about getting Édouard’s suitcase out of the checkroom: “If you don’t do it now, you run the risk of letting Édouard do it.”

The charming thing about these maxims is that they are equally the key to heaven as to hell.

Oddly enough, my novel is taking shape in reverse. I mean to say that I am constantly discovering that this or that which has happened previously ought to be included. Thus the chapters are not added one after the other at all; but they are continually pushing back the chapter I originally conceived as the first.

Do not bring the most important characters too much into the foreground—at least not too soon. Better to hold them back, make the reader wait for them. Do not describe them, but make it necessary for the reader to imagine them, as is fitting. On the other hand, describe the various supernumeraries with precision; lead them boldly to the fore, to let them get that much ahead of the others.

In the first Luxembourg scene I have characters of no importance talking; Olivier’s monologue is unique. He must not be heard; scarcely be glimpsed; but already begin to be liked. You must associate yourself with him, wish to see and hear him. In this case feeling must precede knowledge.

All this I do by instinct. It is only later that I analyze.

Purge the novel of all elements that do not belong specifically to the novel. Nothing good ever comes from a hodgepodge. I have always had a horror of what they call “the synthesis of the arts,” which, according to Wagner, was to take place in the theater. This gave me a horror of the theater—and of Wagner. (It was in that period that symphonies were played and verses recited behind a Munkacsy landscape; that, at the Théâtre des Arts, perfumes were sprayed into the theater during the performance of
The Song of Songs
.) The only theater I can bear is the one that offers itself simply for what it is, and does not claim to be more than a theater.

In the seventeenth century, tragedy and comedy attained a magnificent purity (and
purity
, in art as elsewhere, is what matters)—and in addition almost all the genres, big and little: fables, characters, maxims,
sermons, memoirs, letters. Lyric poetry, purely lyrical
²⁵
—and not the novel? (No, do not make too much of
La Princesse de Clèves
; it is chiefly a marvel of tact and taste.… )

As for this
pure
novel, no one has produced it since either—not even that admirable Stendhal, who of all novelists perhaps approached it the closest. But is it not remarkable that Balzac, possibly our greatest novelist, is beyond doubt the one who mingled with the novel, annexed to it and amalgamated with it, more heterogeneous and inherently indigestible elements than anyone else? Hence the very bulk of one of his books is simultaneously one of the most powerful, but also one of the most turgid, most imperfect, and most dross-laden things in all our literature. It is worthy of note that the English, who have never known how to
purify
their drama in the sense that Racine’s tragedy is purified, yet achieved at the very outset a much greater purity in the novels of Defoe, Fielding, and even Richardson.

I think all this will have to go into Édouard’s mouth—which would allow me to add that I do not grant him all these points, however judicious his remarks may be; that, as far as I am concerned, I doubt whether there could be imagined a
purer
novel than, for instance, Mérimée’s
La double Méprise
. But in order for Édouard to be stimulated to produce the pure novel he envisaged, it was necessary for him to be convinced that such a thing had never been done.

What is more, he will never succeed in writing this pure novel.

I must be careful to respect in Édouard everything that makes him unable to write his book. He understands a great many things, but he is forever pursuing
himself—through everyone and everything. Real devotion is almost impossible for him. He is a dabbler, a failure.

A character all the more difficult to establish since I am lending him much of myself. I have to step back and put him at some distance from me to see him properly.

Classic art:

“You both love each other more than you think.”

(T
ARTUFFE
)
²⁶

Sarah says: “so as not”—a horrible mistake, so common today, that no one ever seems to denounce—“I closed the door so as not to let him out,” etc.
²⁷

Olivier took great care not to talk about things he did not know well. But since this precaution was not shared by the others of Robert’s circle, who were not in the least embarrassed at offering peremptory judgments on books they had never read, Olivier chose to think he was much more ignorant than they, when actually he was only more conscientious.

“I admire the background your friends have,” he told Robert. “I feel so ignorant in comparison that I hardly dare open my mouth. What is this book you have all just been saying such fine things about?”

“It’s a book almost none of us has read,” said Robert, laughing. “But it’s been tacitly agreed to find all those qualities in it, and to look at everyone who doesn’t recognize its merits as a fool.”

A month before, an answer like that would have made Olivier indignant. He smiled.

Bernard: his character still uncertain. Completely insubordinate in the beginning. Becomes motivated, limited, and defined throughout the book, thanks to his love affairs. Each love, each adoration, brings with it a devotion, a sacrifice. At first he is grieved by this, but he readily realizes that it is only by limiting his field of action that he can define it precisely.

Olivier: his character is distorted little by little. He commits actions altogether contrary to his nature and tastes—out of spite and ferocity. There follows an abominable disgust for himself. The progressive blunting of his personality—likewise that of his brother Vincent. (Stress the defeat of his virtue at the moment he begins to win at gambling.) I have not been able to indicate this clearly enough.

Vincent and Olivier have quite fine and noble instincts and plunge into life with a lofty concept of what they are to do—but they are weak characters and allow themselves to be deflected. Bernard, on the contrary, reacts to each influence by fighting back at it. The cards were dealt out wrong: Édouard should have adopted Olivier; it is Olivier he really loved.

Vincent gradually lets himself be permeated by the diabolic spirit. He imagines he is becoming the Devil; it is when things go best for him that he feels the most damned. He tries to
warn off
his brother Olivier, and every attempt to save him acts to Olivier’s prejudice and to his own profit. He actually feels he has
taken sides
with Satan. He feels that the more he succeeds in disbelieving in the real existence of the Evil One, the more he becomes the pawn of Satan. This is always an easy metaphorical way for him to explain things; but one theme always returns to his mind: “Why should you
be afraid of me? You know very well I don’t exist.” In the end he believes in the existence of Satan
as in his own
; in other words, he eventually believes he is Satan.

It is this very assurance (the assurance that the Devil is backing his game) that makes him succeed in everything he undertakes. He is frightened by this; he gets to the point of almost hoping for a measure of failure; but he knows he will succeed, no matter what he undertakes. He knows that in gaining the world he is losing his own soul.

He realizes by what arguments the Devil
tricked
him when he first found himself with Laura in the sanatorium neither of them expected to be able to leave—he knows he took sides with him from the instant he used a sophism as the basis of argument: “Since we aren’t going to live on, and since, therefore, nothing we might do henceforth could be of any consequence …”

I am unable to admire fully the courage of the man who scorns life.

It is appropriate, in opposition to the manner of Meredith or James, to let the reader get the advantage over me—to go about it in such a way as to allow him to think he is more intelligent, more moral, more perspicacious than the author, and that he is discovering many things in the characters, and many truths in the course of the narrative, in spite of the author and, so to speak, behind the author’s back.

Dreamed last night:

A servant in livery came with a tray to carry away the remains of the meal we had been served. I was sitting on a plain stool beside a low coffee table, almost in the center of a large, dimly lighted room. The person I was talking to, his face half hidden by the wings of a
large armchair, was Marcel Proust. The attention I was paying to him was distracted by the departure of the servant, who, as I noticed, was dragging behind him a piece of string, one end of which was in my hand, while the other end led off between the books on one of the bookshelves. The bookcase covered one of the walls of the room. Proust had his back to it, and I was facing it. I pulled the string and saw two huge, old, and sumptuously bound volumes move. I pulled a little more and the books came half out of the shelf, ready to fall; I pulled still a little more and they fell. The noise of their falling made my heart pound and cut short the story that Proust was telling. I leaped to the bookcase and picked up one of the books to make sure the full morocco binding had not been bent at the corners, so I might immediately reassure my friend that the book was undamaged. But the boards were half torn from the back; the binding, in short, was in a lamentable state. I realized intuitively that Proust thought a lot of the books, this one especially. But in a tone of exquisite kindness befitting the well-bred gentleman: “It’s nothing. It’s a Saint-Simon in the edition of …” He told me the date, and I immediately recognized it to be one of the rarest and most sought-after editions. I tried to stammer excuses, but Proust cut them short and began showing me, with many a comment, some of the numerous illustrations of the book he had kept on his knees.