The Girls Read online

  THE GIRLS: A TETRALOGY OF NOVELS

  Henri de Monterlant

  Tr. Terence Kilmartin

  Introduction by Peter Quennell

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

  This tetralogy first appeared in France as four separate volumes published by Grasset—Les jeunes filles (June 1936), Pitié pour les femmes (October 1936), Le Démon du bien (June 1937), and Les Lépreuses (July 1939). The text I have used is Henry de Montherlant's final version, published in one volume by Gallimard (1959), in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

  TERENCE KILMARTIN

  LES JEUNES FILLES (Les jeunes filles, Pitié pour les femmes, Le Démon du bien, Les Lépreuses). Copyright by Librairie Gallimard, 1954. THE GIRLS: A TETRALOGY OF NOVELS. English translation copyright © 1968 by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 49 Hast 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016.

  FIRST U.S. EDITION LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-28224

  INTRODUCTION

  Byron often talked of the letters he received from women. They had begun to arrive in 1812, when he took the London world by storm; and they continued to pursue him during the years of Italian exile until he left Genoa bound for Greece and death. Some were from old acquaintances, like Lady Caroline Lamb, whom he remembered far too clearly; others from admirers he had met once or twice, and was anxious not to meet again; but many of his correspondents were total strangers, and wrote simply because they reverenced his genius and believed that he alone, in an unfriendly world, could give them the appreciation that they felt they needed. Though Byron did not always reply, he seldom threw away their scribblings. He was an inveterate hoarder of every kind of written record; and even the wildest and most ridiculous effusion passed at once into his personal archives.

  Those archives can still be examined. Here, among others, are the letters of a mad peeress, an unhappy Swiss governess, an ill-starred actress, a disconsolate housemaid, a famous demi-mondaine, and an impressionable day-dreaming girl who addressed Byron as 'My dear Papa'. Some letters are hastily scrawled; some blotted and blistered with tears; some written in a flowing copperplate hand on expensive gilt-edged paper. But all are romantic and enthusiastic; and all do their best to establish an emotional link between the writer and the poet. Every correspondent endeavours to stake out her claim to the great man's sympathy and interest.

  Nearly thirty years ago, when I first read through these letters and edited a sheaf for publication, [To Lord Byron by George Paston & Peter Quennell, Murray, 1939.] I was immediately reminded of Henry de Montherlant's sequence, Les jeunes filles, Pitié pour les femmes, Le Démon du bien and Les Lépreuses, of which the last volume had recently appeared. Montherlant, too, describes a celebrated writer beset by wild, enthusiastic women, each of whom has managed to convince herself that only she can understand her hero. Costals' correspondents, however, though just as unfortunate, are less numerous and varied than those of Byron, his chief epistolary persecutors being Thérèse Pantevin, a crack-brained country girl who confuses her passion for Costals with her love of God, and Andrée Hacquebaut, a provincial bluestocking, who aspires one day to become his mistress. Both are rebuffed; of many of their letters the recipient notes : 'Cette lettre est restée sans résponse' Often he does not open the envelope; and, when Andrée eventually visits Paris and makes a forlorn and desperate attempt to force her way into his intimacy, he stages a particularly atrocious scene in which, with another young woman acting as hidden eye-witness, she has her pride demolished and her pretensions humbled. Costals exhibits certain Byronic features; his fund of patience is strictly limited; and, if he is driven too far, his cynical good humour is apt to turn to downright cruelty.

  The character of Costals has frequently puzzled critics; and some readers have not unnaturally assumed that it is based upon a self-portrait. This Montherlant has always denied. 'Le caractère de Costals', he remarks at the head of Les jeunes filles, 'est, en partie du moins, un caractère de "libertin" ou de "mauvais sujet" (comme on disait autrefois). Il a donc fallu lui donner des particularités convenables à ce caractère. S'il est sûr que l'auteur a mis de soi dans ce personnage, il reste qu'il y a en celui-ci nombre de traits qui sont du domaine purement objectif ... '

  The Avertissement to Pitié pour les femmes includes an equally emphatic declaration : 'L'auteur rappelle ici ... qu'il a peint en Costals un personnage que, de propos délibéré, il a voulu inquiétant, voire par moments odieux. Et que les propos et les actes de ce personnage ne sauraient être, sans injustice, prêtés à celui qui l'a conçu.'

  Yet Montherlant admits that there is something of himself in Costals; and his reader will observe that many of Costals' opinions on life are also to be found, more or less accurately reproduced, among his published notebook jottings. To judge from his Carnets, Montherlant bears as much, and as little, resemblance to Costals as Byron bore to Childe Harold; each fictitious character is a literary persona, which incorporates some of the traits of the artist who produced it, but does not pretend to be a full-length likeness. Costals is the moving spirit who controls the story, the exponent of a system of ideas, a voice that denounces and derides, a principle against which the other characters react. Although Montherlant tells us a good deal about his habits, tastes and antecedents, he remains a somewhat enigmatic figure - a personification of the writer's beliefs and prejudices rather than an individual human being.

  But then. Les jeunes filles has little in common with the average modern novel; for Montherlant rejects the conventions of story-telling that most novelists have inherited from their nineteenth-century predecessors. 'Si ce roman,' he writes in his second volume, 'sacrifiait aux règles du genre, telles qu'elles sont établies en France, la scène à la cuisine, entre Costals et Solange, y eût été placée à la fin.... Mais la vie, qui ne sait pas vivre, prétend sottement se dérober aux convenances du roman français.' Les jeunes filles is not a 'well-constructed' book in the accepted meaning of the phrase, but follows its own rules of construction and possesses its own interior harmony. It includes a mass of exceedingly diverse material - letters, notes, comments, asides, together with long passages of straightforward narrative - and is written, as the story develops, from several different points of view. One is that of the narrator, who sometimes blends into his imaginary novelist; another is the redoubtable Costals speaking in his proper person. Yet the subsidiary characters are also allowed a hearing; and there comes a moment when the ridiculous Madame Dandillot - a commonplace middle-class matron, described as resembling a policeman's horse - suddenly dominates the scene and exhibits all her hidden virtues. Her intrinsic absurdity and vulgarity are redeemed by the unselfish strength of her maternal love; and, as she looks down on her sleeping daughter, she becomes a great and good woman. Although this is an aspect of his prospective mother-in-law that has escaped Costals, and seems to be strangely at odds with the narrator's previous attitude, it inspires him to produce a particularly moving passage on the theme of love and sleep :

  'Brusquement elle se tut, comme une petite boîte à musique qui s'enraye.... Elle dit: "Tu dors?" Pas de réponse. Elle alluma. Solange dormait, un peu de salive au coin de la bouche.... Comme la nuit est grande sur le monde, et comme la terre est silencieuse quand on regarde dormir ce qu'on aime! Celui qu'obsède la disparate enclose dans chaque objet, et qui veut y voir une des ciels de la nature, ne méditera-t-il pas sur la tendresse humaine, qui est à la fois le comble de l'inquiétude et le comble du repos?'

  Costals, as it happens, is also a devoted par
ent; he has an illegitimate son, child of a discarded mistress, for whom he feels a deep, but undemanding, love. Brunet monopolizes his strongest affections; otherwise he distrusts and despises love, more especially romantic love, since he sees it as the arch-foe of his personal integrity and independence; and Costals cherishes the belief that he is, above all else, a free man. 'C'est une de mes grandes forces,' writes Montherlant in his Carnets, 'd'échapper à l'amour en connaissant, mêlées, la sensualité et la tendresse.' Similarly, Costals has done his best to exclude love - at least, as it is understood by the average woman - both from his life and from his work. 'Je connais bien l'amour;' he tells Andrée Hacquebaut. 'C'est un sentiment pour lequel je n'ai pas d'estime. D'ailleurs il n'existe pas dans la nature; il est une invention des femmes. . . . Dans chacun des livres que j'ai publiés vous trouverez, sous une forme ou l'autre, cette affirmation: "Ce qui m'importe par-dessus tout, c'est d'aimer". Mais il ne s'agit jamais de l'amour. Il s'agit d'un composé d'affection et de désir, qui n'est pas l'amour.'

  It is the conflict between these two different theories of love that provides the basic drama of Les jeunes filles. According to Costals, love, 'the invention of women', is always enervating and demoralizing: moreover, romantic love may lead to marriage; and marriage is the fatal 'hippogriff'; whereas the emotion that blends desire and tenderness suffuses the heart with peace and the mind with energy. In an interview, the author has claimed that Les jeunes filles has a definitely 'salubrious' message. Nor will he agree that it constitutes an attack on Woman : 'J'y suis souvent dur pour les femmes.

  Mais, dans toute mon oeuvre, ne suis-je pas aussi dur pour les hommes?... Ce que j'attaque, ce n'est pas la femme, c'est l'idolâtrie de la femme, c'est la conception "cour d'amour" de la femme, c'est la situation privilégiée de la femme. Dans Les jeunes filles, au lieu de cultiver les imperfections de la femme avec une complaisance béate, j'ai voulu la traiter d'égale à égal....'

  This, however, though it may be true of Montherlant - his plays present the opposite sex in a much softer and more advantageous light - is not entirely true of Costals, whose attitude towards women is certainly harsh, and who makes very little attempt to treat his female associates upon an equal footing. The personage Montherlant describes is at once a rake and a misogynist; and, as a 'libertin', he belongs to the same family as Richardson's Lovelace, Choderlos de Laclos' Valmont or, indeed, as Casanova. Like Costals, Lovelace is a 'marriage- hater'; and he believes that, by conquering Clarissa Harlowe, he is merely reconciling 'herself to herself and illustrating the 'triumph of nature' over an outworn social code. He, too, is 'noted for his vivacity and courage', and possesses, we are told, 'sound health and ... a soul and body fitted for and pleased with each other.' Though highly educated, he represents natural man as opposed to sentimental, artificial woman.

  Valmont, on the other hand, resembles Costals only in his more Machiavellian aspects; but Montherlant's description of how the novelist humiliates Andrée while Solange lurks behind a curtain, and of the meaner details of his treatment of Solange, might well have been imagined by Laclos. As for Casanova, he had more generous feelings than Costals, but often voices much the same opinions. Thus Costals remarks that, if he had a daughter, ']e la désirerai sûrement un jour'; and Casanova admits that he could never understand 'comment un père pouvait tendrement aimer sa charmante fille sans avoir du moins un fois couché avec elle.' But, in Casanova's life, women were the centre of existence; and Costals announces that, 'à la rigueur, je puis répéter à cent ou cent cinquante femmes les mêmes paroles, en étant sincère à chaque coup, parce que la femme reste dans le superficiel de ma vie.' Casanova was occasionally cruel because he loved too violently and indiscriminately; Costals is cruel because the desire he experiences is apt to conceal a fundamental distaste.

  Here he has many distinguished predecessors; a strain of fierce misogyny runs through European thought and writing. Shakespeare himself was not immune from it; and just as Costals is moved to protest against the weakness and untidiness of the flaccid female organism, Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost compares it to an ill-functioning piece of household clockwork:

  What I! I love! I sue! I seek a wife! A woman that is like a German clock. Still a-repairing, ever out of frame. And never going aright ...

  - an image that Shakespeare apparently derived from a popular sixteenth-century proverb.

  Another poetic misogynist was the author of Les Fleurs du mal. He, too, attacked 'l'idolâtrie de la femme', declared that it had always astonished him that women were allowed to enter churches - 'Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?' - and asserted that in a woman's composition physical and spiritual qualities were inextricably bound up together: 'La lemme ne sait pas séparer l'âme du corps. Elle est simpliste comme les animaux.' In short, Woman was the antithesis of the Dandy; by which Baudelaire, of course, meant not a modern Beau Brummell, but the 'well-born soul', the literary aristocrat, perpetually at war with the world in which he finds himself. To sum up, Woman is essentially a vulgar being; and at this point one recollects Costals' remark on the change that overtakes a woman's personality as soon as she begins to hum : 'Solange fredonna la mélopée des Bateliers.... Costals pensa qu'il y a, en toute femme, une grue prête à ressortir, et qui ressort quand elle chantonne.'

  In Les jeunes filles Montherlant expresses his view of the opposite sex more eloquently, forcibly and unreservedly than in any of his earlier or later novels. But it is already obvious in such books as Le Songe and Les Bestaires, published in 1922 and 1926 respectively. Each introduces a young man who represents the noblest type of human comradeship; and each draws the portrait of a girl who stands for the opposing principle, and who offers, not steady, unselfish affection, but self-centred and self-destructive love. Gentillesse - a word difficult to translate - is one of Montherlant's and Costals' favourite virtues; and, among the characters who appear in Les jeunes filles, Brunet, Costals' adolescent son, alone exhibits this redeeming quality. Solange puzzles, distracts and annoys; his association with Brunet is refreshingly uncomplicated and straightforward. 'Je n'aime pas,' reflects Costals, 'ce qui est une occasion de bêtise pour l'homme, et c'est pourquoi je n'aime pas la femme.... Eternelle supériorité des gosses sur les femmes....' This superiority, moreover, is not only spiritual and emotional; the hero suggests that it is also physical. In Solange's embrace, he notes that her body is strangely scentless, and that even her hair has a weak and faded aroma. 'Pourquoi Costals évoqua-t-il l'odeur si bonne et si vivace des cheveux de son fils? Il ignorait que c'est un règle, que les cheveux des jeunes garçons sentent plus fort et meilleur que ceux des femmes.' This comparison temporarily deadens his desire; and soon afterwards, for the first time in his relationship with Solange, he feels a humiliating lack of energy.

  During the course of an interview on the subject of Les jeunes filles, from which I have already quoted, Montherlant admits that he may, now and then, have been inclined to generalize much too widely and too freely - 'j'y dis trop "les femmes" et "les hommes"'; and that a certain simplification has at times resulted. With this criticism many of his readers will agree. Costals is an extremely dogmatic personage; and, like most dogmatists, he is apt to assume that he has mastered the whole art of living. Besides being entirely self-sufficient, he is, he repeatedly claims, a thoroughly happy and harmonious character; 'la mélancolie est le petit luxe des âmes pauvres'. Thanks both to his natural lucidity and to his 'discipline d'égoisme', he can confront the universe without alarm : 'Les gens disent qu'on est malheureux quand on voit trop tout ce qui est. Moi, je vois tout ce qui est, et je suis très heureux.' The life he leads is 'perfectly intelligent'; he has neither fears nor misgivings.

  Such self-sufficiency, a reader may object, is seldom found in real life; but Montherlant the artist keeps a wary eye on Costals the dogmatic theorist. His hero is slightly incredible only so long as he remains invincible, 'avec sa jeunesse, sa santé, son impudence, son oeuvre, son gracieux fils, son collier de maîtresses
très jeunes, et tous les avantages de la puissance ...' But, although Costals never quite vails his sword or drops his intellectual panache, Les jeunes filles is still the story of his successive misadventures. He falls into the trap that has been laid by Solange; he becomes engaged; he is nearly overtaken and devoured by the appalling Hippogriff. In the last volume, having temporarily escaped from Solange, he seeks a refuge among the Atlas Mountains, and there suspects that he has contracted leprosy - a symbolic disaster that sends him hurrying back towards a European hospital.

  I have suggested elsewhere that Montherlant is a remarkably gifted comic novelist; and the story of Costals' brush with Death, and of his long struggle against that legendary monster, Marriage, is told with wonderfully enlivening humour. Few characters in fiction have been more savagely treated than Andrée Hacquebaut and Solange Dandillot; but Montherlant is far too good an artist to pass a summary verdict on his own creations. The ridiculous bluestocking has a kind of farouche dignity that even Costals cannot quite extinguish; and one reader at least has never lost his regard for the unhappy young girl. Although Solange has a limited, commonplace mind, she is patient, affectionate and good-natured and, despite Costals' ferocious diatribes, by no means altogether stupid.

  Style is a quality that seldom ranks very high in the contemporary critic's scale of values; but it would be impossible to discuss Montherlant the novelist without considering his achievement as a modern master of the French language. His prose style is uncommonly rich and various - tart, idiomatic, incisive, when he attacks some typical or controversial issue; measured, euphonious, poetic, when he deals with wider and less transitory themes. He has always loved nature, and shown a deep understanding of the life of plants and animals. What could be more vivid than his description, in Le Démon du bien, of the four cats whom Costals meets in an Italian restaurant; or, on another plane, his picture, in Les Lépreuses, of the desolate landscape of the High Atlas?