The Lepers Read online

  THE LEPERS

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART TWO

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  EPILOGUE

  1928

  1929

  1930

  1931

  APPENDIX

  PART ONE

  1

  If the dead, in the Beyond, were not entirely absorbed in jockeying for precedence (ditto the heavenly hosts - the Thrones pushing themselves forward to become Dominations, etc.), the late M. Dandillot would have squirmed and twisted himself into knots during that month of October 1927. Ever since their return from Etretat, his widow and daughter had been engaged in altering everything in the flat, and their efforts were almost entirely directed towards counteracting the tastes of the dear departed. It was chiefly his bedroom and his study that they were determined to transmogrify - that study in which M. Dandillot, catching his wife 'meddling with something' one day, had said to her: 'Here you're only tolerated.' Three months after her marriage, Mme Dandillot had not yet unpacked her personal belongings, imagining that she would not be staying long, that she would soon be returning to her parents; and when she had eventually resigned herself, she had not so much mingled them with as added them to those of her husband. Now it was the turn of M. Dandillot's belongings to be withdrawn from the communal hoard. Even his sporting files and his photographs of athletes had been burned (in spite of the fact that Mme Dandillot felt some gratitude towards sport, convinced as she was that physical culture had accelerated her husband's death by ten years). The sober grey wallpaper had been replaced by something pink with a pattern of nightingales. M. Dandillot having been anti-Christian, the mantelpiece now sported a Virgin, flanked (in order to 'soften this austerity') by a pastel drawing of some mimosa and a charcoal sketch of a King Charles spaniel - products of Mme Dandillot's girlhood - and a 'pretty thing' cut out of l'Illustration and framed: Exquisiteness - a woman in a cloud of muslin, signed Domergue. And Sacred Hearts and Calvaries and First Communion cards: for Jesus Christ was everywhere in a place of honour in this household ready for civil marriage, divorce and abortion. Not to mention innumerable other more or less unspeakable objects, mostly presents - for it was a household so lacking in personality that every present they had ever received was kept and displayed in a prominent position. In the same way a French literary man invited to Morocco will admit that although he has no desire to make the journey he will go nevertheless because 'he likes free trips'. Doing something one has no desire to do because one can do it gratis, making use of an object one dislikes because one has got it for nothing - and this when one is very comfortably off - is a characteristic, and infallible, sign of mediocrity.

  Solange Dandillot had returned from Genoa rather down in the mouth. Genoa should have settled matters. What had come of it? Nothing. And now he was out of range, and for how long? A man who has just received a severe blow, and needs to think about all sorts of urgent and important matters, is often inclined to fling himself into any mechanical chore: even sew on buttons or clean his shoes in order not to think. In the same way Solange tidied and tidied, 'finishing' an old dress, wearing gloves in order to protect her hands (though in fact it gave the impression that she did not want to touch anything that had belonged to her father), glued to her task, which she complicated unbelievably, in accordance with the natural propensity of the female of the species; at once meticulous, niggling and disorderly, in accordance with that same propensity. Apart from the distraction it provided, she experienced from this tidying the sort of voluptuous pleasure one feels on seeing a void take the place of the objects one has eliminated - an intellectual gratification, one might say. The thing became an obsession. More! Still more! Now let's have a go at this corner! Reducing whole sectors of bric-à-brac as passionately as a general reducing an enemy pocket. And, by evening, overwrought, with circles under the eyes as after a sleepness night, but conscience at rest in a way one rarely experiences after having performed a good deed or some high and arduous duty. With certain women it is a good sign when they start tidying: it means that the crisis is over, and they have begun to cherish their home again. With others, however, it means that they need to find an escape in some meaningless task. Solange dreaded the day when everything in the house would be in order. To put off the evil day, to draw out her task, she invented household errands in every direction, going out, coming back and then going out again: more parsimonious, however, than before the trip to Genoa, as though something inside her had tightened up. Finally, vegetative by nature, she had always slept a good deal, but now she was in bed with the light out by nine o'clock.

  Meanwhile, the physical space occupied by M. Dandillot in the establishment went on shrinking until in the end, of all that this man had woven round himself in sixty years, there remained no more than the equivalent of a small packing-case, which was relegated to the attic: similarly, of an incinerated corpse there remains nothing but a handful of bones. If the dead take possession of the living, as they say, the living repay it with interest.

  Solange participated in this operation against her father largely unconsciously, though not entirely so. In diminishing her father's physical traces, she was not unaware that she was diminishing his moral traces in the process. Women always want to diminish a dead man, as they diminished him when he was alive. If a man has been a free-thinker, a mother, a sister or a wife will climb on to his grave and relentlessly seek to prove that he was a Christian 'without knowing it'.

  When Solange received Costals' first letter, in which he complained of the weather in Genoa, spoke in pathetic terms of his solitude, and, without saying precisely that he missed her, recalled her presence with a touch of nostalgia, she had a feeling she had never experienced before: she was rather glad that he did not seem happy. It did not even remotely cross her mind that Costals, in Genoa, between his work and his amatory adventures, might be as happy as a king. If he had adopted a slightly pathetic tone, it was because, guessing that she was discontented, he did not want her to think him contented - partly out of charity, and partly because, like the Athenians of old, he often made sacrifices on the altar of Envy. Solange's reply was consolatory, and ever so slightly patronizing; mention was made of 'a taste of ashes in the mouth' - the pity men feel for women is matched by the pity women would like to feel for men. Costals guffawed when he read this shop-girl's cliché. It was the taste of Mlle Bevilacqua's saliva that he had in his mouth.

  She thought of him now with a touch of acerbity. Her fervour had been crushed, the spontaneity and integrity of her love corrupted. No longer, she told herself in her still rudimentary parlance, was she willing to 'trust to appearances'. She deliberately made him wait two days for her reply: she must not appear too eager. . . . Perhaps, too, since living alone with her mother, she had become morally less sound. Whether man, woman or child, a person always changes for the worse by living only with women.

  The author pauses … Describing mediocrities always gets you down in the end. 'And now, Madame Baudoche, back to the kitchen!' cried Barrés, exasperated with the principal character of his novel. If only these two Dandillot women were sufficiently highly developed in one aspect of their mediocrity to be caricatured. But they even elude caricature; and besides, photography is better than caricature. Costals had often thought what a sad and pitiable subject for a writer a young girl was. True, her face and her b
ody, if they are beautiful, are at their best at that age. But underneath! ... 'To introduce them into his work, look at the treatment Shakespeare is obliged to put them through. He remakes them. He invents them. He forces himself to romanticize them. A young girl has to be idealized in order to make her possible at all as a subject for poetry. Byron admits it quite openly. [I have always had a great contempt for women; and formed this opinion of them not hastily, but from my own fatal experience. My writings, indeed, tend to exalt the sex; and my imagination has always delighted in giving them a beau ideal likeness, but I only drew them ... as they should be.' Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron (Author's note).] And Dante's Beatrice is pure Theology. When a writer does not transfigure a young girl, she is a failure. Molière's are failures.... Balzac's are failures.... '

  The author has made no attempt to transfigure Mlle Dandillot. A failure? True to life, at any rate. If she bores the reader it must be because the author has reproduced her faithfully, since she was by nature boring.

  One Sunday in November, as they were preparing to get eleven o'clock Mass 'over and done with', Mme Dandillot stared at her daughter:

  'Why are you putting on such acres of powder?'

  'No more than usual.'

  'But yes, my child, look at yourself, you're like a clown.'

  Solange rubbed the powder off with her handkerchief. Her face remained deathly pale. Mme Dandillot's clouded over.

  Some days later, leaning her elbows on a table, Solange noticed that her wrist-watch had slipped two or three centimetres further down her fore-arm than usual. Only then did she realize why, for some time past, she had felt that her hands were literally swimming in her gloves. She said nothing: she was ashamed. But soon afterwards Mme Dandillot saw the light, and a bottle of tonic appeared on the dining-room table. The Dandillot household thus became even more representative: a bottle of patent medicine is a feature of the armorial bearings of the bourgeoise. (They need a doctor to tell them to eat less. They need a doctor for their 'rest cures'. They consult the doctor if they are putting on weight. They consult the doctor if their child starts playing with himself.) Solange also bought some rouge. And she altered her hair-style, because the existing one was very 'young girlish', and with her drawn features the 'young girl' style gave her a look of an overgrown virgin, while the new one made her look rather more the 'young woman', and a young woman has a right not to look all that fresh.

  Costals' letters went on arriving two a week, still full of tenderness. 'But is he sincere?' wondered our neophyte of mistrust. She had some difficulty in answering these letters. Since she expressed herself awkwardly when she was at her most fervent, it may be imagined what it was like when that fervour had waned. 'You have carried away a part of my being, a fairly recent me which you yourself created, which had taken a predominant place, and which now leaves a great void.' That was true enough, but she remained too detached not to end up with a bit of literature: .. 'like finding oneself alone in a house in the evening, when the child has gone.' Or again: 'My plush rabbit awaits you, still the same, with his boot-button eyes and one ear drooping like a weeping willow.' Excellent, but then she added the following, which was pure invention, designed, it would seem, to titillate both the sentimental streak and the satyr in Costals, always prone to be aroused if ever she evoked her childhood: 'I took him in my arms and laid him on my pillow, as I used to when I was a little girl, not so long ago.' (Every woman up to the age of fifty likes to pretend she is a little girl; there is not one woman in a hundred who has not said at least once to a man: 'You know I'm only a little girl.') Solange had deliberately waited before answering the first letter from Genoa. Now it was because these answers had become almost a drudgery that she often put off writing them for several days. Mlle Dandillot belied the cliché that a woman becomes more attached to a man who has made her unhappy, and also that other cliché according to which a woman expects the man she loves to yield to her in small things and resist her in great. The truth is that every human being has a certain capacity for love, hate, suffering, application and patience. In Genoa, Solange had launched the longest wave of her love. Now that love was imperceptibly withdrawing, like the tides.

  In these circumstances, how are we to account for her not throwing in the sponge? Let us try. She was a girl who, up to the age of twenty-three, had desired little, and had never had to exercise her will. But now at last she wanted something, and it was as though all that unused will-power had gathered itself together for a single onslaught. Ah! so I haven't any willpower, have I? Well, I'll show them! Her lack of desire in all things was taking an enormous revenge. She was as tenacious in clinging to this marriage as she was docile in submitting to 'impossible' behaviour in order to keep the man who was the master of her fate. She had committed herself totally. Obstinacy is not so far removed from morbid indecision: weak-willed people are as slow to stop as they were to get started. And then there is the feminine addiction to chimeras. What could be more different, at the outset, than an Andrée Hacquebaut and a Solange Dandillot? Yet both ultimately arrive at the same point: a belief that sheer obstinacy must prevail. For obstinacy is the blind and crude opposition of the self to a reality which it fails to grasp; and this opposition is a feminine thing. People talk of diseases of the will. The will itself is also at times a disease.

  And yet, beyond all this, the desperate persistence of these two women in wanting something so obviously foolhardy remains incomprehensible. But why write novels at all unless to show adults as they are (and as children see them), that is to say arbitrary and incomprehensible? The intrigues of women to get themselves or their daughters married usually spring from self-interest, ambition, etc. They can also be simply the result of stupidity, and this was perhaps the case here. But what a betrayal of life, so desperately to want a loveless marriage!

  Solange was not suffering from unrequited love; she was suffering from frustration, and that uncertainty from which women suffer so much more than men. Her resentment sometimes had a touch of rather sly aggression: the fighting bull is especially dangerous at the end of the fight, after he has been wounded. When Costals wrote her an enthusiastic letter about the beauty of Italian women (at a time when she herself was wilting), she felt the lack of a private life of her own, a past which she could use as a weapon against him. Having come across an unpleasant article about our hero, she took a great delight in sending it off to him. She needed both to hold on to him and to punish him.

  In mid-November Costals announced that he would be returning on the 25th. In the following letter he postponed his return, without specifying a new date. Solange took this letter calmly, but a little later, caught sight of her typewriter and burst into tears. She was feeling unwell at the time, and her imagination was always more impressionable at such moments, as with those men of the people who start writing poetry when they are ill. She had bought this typewriter three months before. Convinced that she would type Costals' manuscripts when she became his wife, she had wanted to learn to type. On her return from Genoa, the machine had been relegated to a corner.

  Exasperated by the knowledge that he did not need her, she began to wonder if he had not falsely announced his return with the sole object of making her feel how self-sufficient he was by later postponing it. And also to see how much she would put up with. Would there never be a day when it was she who called the tune? How tempting it would be, if ever he made the first move, to take a step back herself and play with him a little!

  Often she had the sensation of being bereft of all feeling; it was as though she had ceased to exist since no one was paying any attention to her: scenes, contemptuous remarks, insults - anything would have been better than this nothingness. She was even more silent than ever, or left her sentences unfinished, as though speech were a futile waste of effort; and she no longer wanted to see anyone, starting involuntarily and even turning slightly pale whenever the door-bell rang.

  'I know perfectly well why I no longer want to come out of my sh
ell. No, no! relations with other people are too difficult! Altogether too wearing. To think that, even with those one loves most, everything has to start again from scratch.... '

  'There's always me, darling, you know that,' Mme Dandillot had replied. Solange must have thought: 'Parents, that's not the same thing....'

  Mme Dandillot's efforts to interest her in lectures, in a political group, were met with remarks such as: 'What for?' or 'Why complicate one's life?', etc. And it was true that the slightest little effort created a vacuum in her brain, like an air-pump: tidying a cupboard, unravelling a ball of wool, were things that occupied her completely. Her handwriting began to disintegrate: she scribbled the ends of her words, skipped accents and punctuation. The maid's presence exasperated her, as though it distracted her from her obsession and her ruminations, and because it made her think up orders to give which she would never have thought of if she had had to ring for the maid, and she was incapable of giving orders without endlessly verbose explanations. Her lips were dry and her breath smelt. Finally she developed two boils on one of her buttocks, and then another on her thigh. Cold weather had always stupefied her; her whole character changed in winter; how much more so now that her vitality had dwindled. Sitting sideways on the radiator, her sick buttock in the air, beside Madame Vigée-Lebrun and her daughter (the two tabby cats, who always slept entwined), she spent hours knitting sweaters for some charity (Costals had indignantly refused her offer to knit one for him), not so much because she was interested in making garments, or out of sympathy for the poor, but for the sort of distraction which the manipulation of the needles provided. So absorbed was she that she would fail to hear Mme Dandillot speaking to her, or fail to understand what she said. The wrist-watch had moved no higher up her fore-arm, in spite of the tonics. But from time to time her eyes would come to rest on the veins of her wrist which Costals had once told her he loved, as though to re-assure herself, with astonishment, that there was still something about her that he had loved.