The Bachelors (15 page)

People whose faces had been puckered up with concentration until six o'clock, because
time is money
{2}
were now idling away the time they had gained by means of taxis, secretaries and shorthand. There were Frenchmen there, not exactly handsome (but let that pass), and Frenchwomen, of indifferent looks (because 'unfeminine') but well-dressed and often pleasing (one would think that, with us, it was man who was created from the rib of a woman: women have all the advantages). And amongst these French people flowed the dregs of every nation, by whom the French were in no way incommoded, and whom they did not even recognize as dregs. From café to café, just as the crater of a volcano releases the fire within, the loudspeakers served as outlets for all the false sentiment, the false pathos and the false glamour in the heart of this crowd. In fact everything that was offered to them along these boulevards, of whatever category, was false — although in our age at least, authenticity is the
only
luxury. Shops displayed hollow 'bronzes' and 'pearl' necklaces for one hundred francs; street traders hawked 'watches' for ten francs, 'scent' that was really coloured water, 'fountain pens' that would not write; cafés served orangeade in which there was no orange, barley water in which there was no barley; gramophones played tunes which bore little relation to the tune created by the composer; banks advertised fictitious rates of exchange; newspapers presented made-up news, fake photographs, sporting results that had been decided in advance; cinemas showed films in which there was no difference in talent, or rather lack of talent, between the millionaire star and the smallest bit-player. And was all this peculiar to Paris? Indeed no, but here it was following a great tradition. The works being played or sung in this neighbourhood, and the way they had been played or sung for centuries past, testified to the fact that with us nothing is beautiful except what is false, only the false is agreeable. When, in a play put on in Paris in the nineteenth century, a shepherd said to a shepherdess, 'The grass is wet. Sit on my jacket,' this remark, simply because it expressed a true and natural and amiable sentiment, was enough to kill the play: it was considered naïve, and your ordinary, asinine Frenchman cannot bear naïvety.

M. de Coantré walked boldly through the crowd. His outings during the past year had toughened him; he no longer felt dizzy. And: then the two pleasant surprises he had just received gave him additional confidence. He was as happy and pleased with himself as a dog trotting along with a fir cone in between its teeth.

Around the bleating ballad-singers, typists stood enraptured and sergeant-majors cried their eyes out, forgetting the iron rules of their rank. There were two sorts of street-vendors: those who wanted to sell, and those who did not. Those who wanted to sell performed incantations that were calculated to stun their audiences, to induce in them a mystical condition whereby they would pay forty francs for a comb they could buy for twenty in any shop. The incantation consisted of a string of words between which there must never be the slightest pause to allow the listener to recover his wits and take flight; so the man had phrases ready made to be slipped into the slightest gap — 'I know the ropes all right', or
'I
don't care, I nicked 'em'. .And at the thought that perhaps the man really had stolen them, the whole audience brightened up and warmed towards him. M. de Coantré paid little attention to the hawkers. He picked out the younger women among the groups of listeners and, edging in beside them, he brushed against them and sniffed the smell of their hair, a smell which is generally good among the women of Paris, even ill-dressed women of the people. This must seem an extraordinary thing for M. de Coantré to do, and so we must retrace our steps.

As a young man, M. de Coantré had had mistresses — laundry-women, sempstresses, servant-girls street-walkers — with a marked preference for dairymaids. What excited him more than anything else in the world was a worn-out woman's shoe or an ill-fitting stocking, and a woman he saw entering a cheap restaurant was sure to win his heart: because with her he would not have to stand on ceremony. A lot of fun, a lot of pleasure, no love. It lasted like this for ten years. When he was working on the enlargers, he met an eighteen-year-old girl whose widowed mother sold sweets, lemonade, waffles, etc., in a kiosk on the Cours de Vincennes, and without much difficulty became her lover. She was skinny, and sexually unsophisticated; the pleasure he got from her at first was only moderate; but he liked her gentleness. Soon this gentleness acquired a kind of radiance. Her caressing ways, her constant need to snuggle up to him, the way she always closed her eyes when she held out her face to be kissed — but rarely kissed herself, being always rather passive. Unintelligent, slow-witted, knitting her brows in order to grasp the simplest thing, she was nevertheless sweet and trusting and loyal and disinterested. And so graceful, with her slightly Japanese looks (she resembled the actress Marie Leconte), so well-mannered, so withdrawn, like a little Spanish infanta. M. de Coantré began to love her tenderly. After ten years of pure sensuality, he had discovered a new category of experience, that of sensuality mixed with tenderness. However splendid pure sensuality may be, this other category is to it what paradise is to limbo. They have no common denominator.

One day, Mariette and her mother left Paris for Lyons, where they were to spend the summer holidays. She wrote to him once from Lyons, and then no longer answered his letters, which he addressed to her poste restante. He went there and looked for her, alone and through friends. The two women had left their hotel without leaving an address. On returning to Paris, he found the kiosk reopened with a new tenant. He could get no news of Mariette.

After a few weeks he returned to Lyons. In vain. He was handicapped in his search by the fact that this sweet little thing, like nine out of ten girls or boys of her age, was a monster of falsehood, duplicity and guile towards her mother, who knew nothing of what had been going on. He was afraid of compromising Mariette.

He remained obsessed by the memory of this child. This memory poisoned everything else for him; it was a cloud overshadowing his whole life.
'Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé
'
— how well he knew it! Now he felt nothing but disgust and nausea, yes, nausea for human beings and their bodies — even the most delectable — because he no longer had what he loved. Three or four times he wrote to Lyons, more letters flung into the void; he returned to the Cours de Vincennes and wandered there, sick at heart, devouring the dried-up avenues with his eyes, as though the concentrated strength of his desire would squeeze that beloved form from the atmosphere and force it into being.

For four months he remained like this, in an abyss of melancholy, his whole emotional and sexual life steeped as it were in this memory, without the energy either to exhaust the possibilities of finding Mariette (putting a private detective on her track, or even the police), or to turn resolutely elsewhere and try unknown women until he found the right one. He remembered that it had taken ten years and about sixty women to find one who could arouse in him that marvellous tenderness which now he felt he could no longer do without. At this rate, how many barren and exhausting experiments, how many false starts would be faced with before meeting with a similar success, how many melancholy caricatures of the lost paradise!

He was in this paralysed condition when the collapse of the enlarging business occurred. In his misery, he flung himself into the streets and picked up some creature who in the darkness of the night had made some impression on him but who, seen in the light, turned him to ice. A whole night through, this woman who was either insatiable or else had found in Léon something that excited her, clasped him in her arms, wrestled like an obscene monkey with his inert body, offering him wide open her mouth with its decaying teeth, which he incessantly refused, covering his face with kisses which he did not return, sliming him all over with her sweat, embracing him as he lay there unresponsive, still as a stone, paralysed with loathing and disgust. Shortly afterwards he left for Chatenay.

In a desert such as Chatenay restraint was obligatory. He could have made excursions to Paris, but two considerations held him back: an experience such as he had had with Mariette seemed to him more and more like a miracle which could not be counted on to occur again, and that last, truly infernal night of 'love' reminded him forcefully of the risks involved in trying to renew the miracle. Add to this the fact that he had no money left — though this is incidental: a man can always find enough money to make love. More important was the fact that, at Chatenay, M. de Coantré had begun to dress like a tramp and had given up washing. Soon, the idea of possessing a woman began to arouse in him powerful objections: having to dress up, to wash, to spend money, to cut a dash. Far too much bother! True, he would not have been averse to a little bit of fun. But the price to be paid for it in trouble and inconvenience was too high. The game was not worth the candle.

This continence lasted for twenty years. Impossible! it will be said. Young people imagine that monastery walls conceal unspeakable debauches. It is our belief that monastery walls generally conceal a great composure of the flesh. The more one makes love, the more one wants to. Conversely, if one abstains completely (provided one has got beyond the first flush of youthful ardour and has had one's fill) the desire for it disappears: the sexual organs fall asleep and atrophy.

If he had known many other women, and even if he had loved one as he had loved Mariette, he would still have remained faithful to her. Fidelity resides not in actions but in the heart. We think we can tear the scab off a little sore with impunity; we do so, and hours after the wound occurred it starts to bleed again. For twenty years M. de Coantré bled whenever he thought of Mariette: her memory was always fresh inside him. Time made no difference. For the first ten years after their liaison (and even during it) he had never dreamt about her, but thereafter, once a year, with mysterious regularity, she appeared to him in his sleep. In his waking hours it was rare for a couple of days to pass without his thinking of her and his life relapsing into a hushed recollection and regret. She lay deep inside him, her face as always held out towards him with the eyelids closed. The smallest thing would bring it to the surface of his consciousness.

7

T
HAT
night, on the boulevards, M. de Coantré felt himself quivering, as it were, in the breeze from the open sea. His packing over, and now the estate.... The second mooring rope cast off. One by one the rest would fall; he would leave the shore and sail away towards the unknown, which in his ignorance he envisaged in the brightest colours. When he brushed against a woman, he had no intention of having an adventure, first of all because his linen was dirty and secondly because he did not feel inclined. What he wanted (and even then rather vaguely) was to talk to a friendly woman, to find out where he could meet her again (perhaps) one of these days, to get to know something of her life. Later on, it was conceivable that... After all, he had five hundred francs in his pocket, unexpectedly. A sum that arrives out of the blue can be spent without its affecting your financial position....

M. de Coantré strolled back along the boulevards, holding his gloves in one hand, like Diocletian his staff of office. (These gloves were no longer the famous mourning gloves; they were old, threadbare kid gloves, but in his pocket was a pair of new cotton gloves which he had brought to put on at M. Octave's and had taken off when his visit was over so as not to wear them out unnecessarily.) With his other hand he was clasping against his chest a portfolio full of documents concerning his mother's estate; Bourdillon had given him back all the papers he no longer needed. Outside the office of
Le Matin
a group of men and boys, almost foaming at the mouth with excitement, were examining a notice-board on which the results of the latest stage of the Tour de France were advertised, and jotting down names in greasy notebooks. A Press campaign lasting three weeks would have been enough to make them accept some political deal with disastrous effects for France: but this evening their eyes were popping out of their heads because a Frenchman had taken the lead in the race. M. de Coantré, soaked in perspiration, sat down on a bench. How could he help but sweat? Apart from his 'bum-freezer' (and he had not shed even that until a month after everyone else), he was dressed exactly as in winter, flannel vest included. He must have seen aertex vests in the windows of drapers' shops. But as he had always kept his flannel vests on in summer, he continued to do so. And he believed he was sweating because the weather was hot, when in fact he was sweating because he was dressed for winter.

The same, in fact, applied to most of his fellow Parisians. Here on this bench they were wearing their winter suits, including waistcoats, and starched collars, starched cuffs, hats, ties, tie-pins, rings, trinkets, ankle-boots, even gloves. They fanned themselves and gasped: 'How hot it is!' It was
22°
Centigrade. Perhaps, under their trappings, they really were hot, but every one of them would rather die of heat than risk being taken for anything but a good bourgeois, for whom these trappings were a uniform. Perhaps the words 'How hot it is!' were simply a polite formula for the benefit of their neighbours, as devoid of meaning and consequence as the mysterious 'eeny meeny miny mo' of little girls.

When a newsvendor offered him the evening papers, M. de Coantré bought one. It was three months since he had read a newspaper, but that evening he wanted to renew contact with life. The news bored him; but when his eyes fell on a page of advertisements they fit up at once. People
wanted
one another — even if it was only to cook or polish floors! There was give and take. How easy everything seemed!

On the terrace of a nearby café a woman was sitting alone at a table. Nothing special, but young. He sat down at the table next to hers.