The Counterfeiters (49 page)

Finished the preface for
Armance
¹⁷
in Paris.

At present there is nothing to keep me from the novel with the possible exception of the
Curieux malavisé
,
¹⁸
the rought draft of which I took out before I left, and hope to finish up this summer; and the last chapter of
Si le grain ne meurt.…

Z. told me the story of his sister. She married his wife’s brother; her husband’s health is extremely delicate
and she, considerably older, cares for him. She nurses him so well that he finally recovers and runs off with another woman, leaving his exhausted wife behind. The most painful part for her is that she soon learns that her husband has a child by the other woman (he had been too delicate during the time he was faithful, and she had abandoned any hope of ever being a mother).

And I imagine further: the two women are sisters; he has married the elder (considerably older than her sister), but gets the younger with child. And the elder sister cannot rest until she has won over the child.…

This afternoon all this seemed lucid; but this evening I am tired, the thing seems quite flat—and I am putting all this down as a matter of duty.

The first thing to do is to establish the field of action and smooth off a space upon which to erect the book.

Difficult to explain this properly in metaphors; might as well say more simply: “lay the bases.”

1. First the Artistic bases: the problem of the book will be set forth through Édouard’s meditation.

2. The Intellectual bases: the subject of the baccalaureate composition (“to skim the surface—
effleurer
—to take only the flower”).

3. The Moral bases: filial insubordination; the opposition of the parents (who apply in this regard the sophistry of England with respect to Egypt or Ireland: if they were given the liberty they demand, they would be the first to repent of it, etc.).

It must be considered whether that is not where the book should begin.

Note: William James’s extremely remarkable observations on habit (in his psychology text, which I am reading at the moment):

But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case,
among the squalid “other particulars” of which that same Good lurks disguised
, treads straight on Rousseau’s path.
All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world
.
¹⁹

Back here since last night, after a stay in Rome, which, although it greatly distracted me from my work, nevertheless left me with a feeling that I now see much more clearly what I want. During my last stay at Cuverville, in October, I had already worked out the first chapters; unfortunately I had had to stop at the moment when the inert mass was beginning to stir into motion. This comparison is not very good. I prefer the image of the churn. Yes; I churned the subject in my head for several evenings on end without getting the least bit of butter, but without losing my conviction that the curds were indeed going to form in the end. A strange liquid substance which, long after you begin, refuses to acquire consistency, but in which solid particles, stirred and shaken every which way, at last clot together and separate from the whey. At present I have the raw materials, which I must work together and knead. If he didn’t know beforehand from experience that through beating and shaking this creamy chaos he was going to see the miracle repeated—who wouldn’t throw up the job?

During the thirteen days that I have been here I have written the first thirty pages of my book with hardly any difficulty and
currente calamo
—although it’s true that for a long time I have had it all worked out in my head. At present I am at a standstill. Looking back over yesterday’s work, it seems to me that I am on the wrong track; the dialogue with Édouard, especially (however successful it may be), leads the reader as well as myself into a region from which I am not going to be able to get back down to real life. Or else I should have to put the principal irony of the tale into the words: “toward real life”—implying plainly that real life exists equally in the region of thought, along with anxiety, passion, and suffering.…

Of the need to go farther and farther back to explain any given incident. The slightest act requires an infinite motivation.

I am continually wondering: might such an effect have been the result of other causes? Each time I am forced to acknowledge that it could not; that anything less than all that—and precisely
that
—would not do, and that I cannot change the least figure without immediately falsifying the end product.

The problem for me is not
how to succeed
—but rather how to
survive
.

For some time now I have aimed to win my case only on appeal. I write only to be
re
read.

The extreme difficulty I am encountering in making my book progress is perhaps but the natural result of an initial vice. From time to time I am convinced that the very idea of the book is ridiculous, and I come to the point where I no longer even understand what I want. Properly speaking, the book has no one single center for my various efforts to converge upon; those efforts center about two foci, as in an ellipse. On one side, the event, the fact, the external datum; on the other side, the very effort of the novelist to make a book out of it all. The latter is the main subject, the new focus that throws the plot off center and leads it toward the imaginative. In short, I see this notebook in which I am writing the very history of the novel poured into the book in its entirety and forming its principal interest—for the greater irritation of the reader.

The most questionable strayings of the flesh have left my soul more tranquil than the slightest intellectual error. When I feel uneasy in conscience, it is upon leaving the fashionable salon, not the brothel.

The more G. sinks into devotion, the more he loses his sense of truth. The state of deception in which a
pious soul can live—a certain mystic splendor turns his gaze away from reality. He no longer seeks to see things as they are; he no longer can. When Édouard tells X. that G. seems to him to have lost all love of truth, X. presents the Catholic thesis:

It is not Truth we must love, but God. Truth is only one of God’s attributes, as is Beauty, which is worshipped exclusively by certain artists. The exclusive worship of one of God’s attributes is a form of paganism, etc.

The forming into groups.

The Argonauts. They devote themselves to the “nation”; but there are manifold dissensions in the very heart of the group:
how
can France be best served?

On the other hand, the grouping of enemies of society. Partnership for crime. In opposition to these, the conservatives look like cads. The important thing is to know what is worth protecting, what is worth the trouble of …

As for personal opinions—in short, Valentin simply had none. Or, more precisely, he had them all and tried them out one by one, if indeed not simultaneously. He would follow a discussion as though it were a chess game, ready to advise one or the other of the adversaries, thinking only of the proper way of playing the game and of not giving unjust (that is to say, illogical) advantage to anyone.

What we call “wrong-headedness” (the other shrugged his shoulders at this ready-made expression and declared it had no meaning)—well, I am going to tell you: it is the person who finds it necessary to convince himself he has a
reason
for committing every act he wants to commit, the person who enslaves his reason to his instincts, to his interests (and this is worse), or to his temperament. So long as Lucien tries only to convince
others, the evil is merely embryonic; this is the first step toward hypocrisy. But have you noticed that, with Lucien, the hypocrisy becomes deeper day by day. He is the first victim of all the false motives he brings forth; eventually he convinces himself that it is these false motives that are guiding him, whereas in reality it is he who bends and guides them. The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

M. says of Lucien that he is “completely penetrated by his façade.”

Jude had this intellectual shortcoming, shared by so many young men—which often makes them insufferable to their elders—of exaggerating his praise or his blame. His judgment admitted no purgatory. Everything he didn’t find “admirable” was “frightful.”

Édouard might very well have encountered on the train that extraordinary creature who forced us to give up our reserved seats. I felt it was beyond my power to spend the night in the same compartment with her.… Imagine a person of indeterminate age and sex, with an absent expression and a flabby body propped up with an assortment of pillows; to
this
clung two middle-aged women. The compartment closed and overheated, the atmosphere stifling; an odor of medicine and sickness.… I immediately shut the door again. But the car in which we then ensconced ourselves, Marc and I, went only as far as Marseille. When we got there we had to change; and in the packed train the only space we could find was in the compartment where our seats were still reserved. The window was open; one could breathe … and perhaps, after all, I had imagined the bad odor.

The young girl now seemed to me almost pretty. Her hair, cut page-boy fashion, clung to her temples with perspiration. From time to time she smiled at the
two women who accompanied her, who might have been her mother and her aunt. Whereupon the aunt would ask:

“How do you feel?”

But the mother would immediately exclaim: “Now, don’t keep asking her how she feels. The less she thinks about it, the better.”

At times the girl tried to talk, but immediately a shadow seemed to creep over her face, and an expression of insufferable weariness strained her features. A little before we got to Nice, the two women began their preparations for leaving, and when the train pulled into the station they struggled to raise their companion’s inert body; but she began to weep—or not exactly to weep, but to moan—a sort of whining lamentation, so strange that the startled passengers began running up from all sides.

“Here we go! The same old song again,” exclaimed the mother. “Come, come! You know very well it won’t do any good to cry.… ”