Pity for Women Read online

  The case of Andrée is all the more extraordinary for the fact that Andrée is a very intelligent woman - really somebody.

  You know my ideas about the automatism of female reactions. All the reactions you will find here have long been classified and described. The reaction which causes a rejected woman to accuse her 'insulter' of being a M. de Charlus is No 174. The reaction whereby an unhappy woman tries to convince the man she loves that he is unhappy too is No 227a. The reaction whereby a desperate woman turns to Christianity is No 89. The reaction whereby a desperate woman pretends she is ill in a final attempt to arouse in her lover that 'pity for women' which they long for and disapprove of at the same time is No 214. This last, it must be admitted, is no more than adumbrated in the case of Andrée. And it must also be admitted that one of the most typical reactions. No 175, whereby a rejected woman accuses her 'insulter' of sexual impotence, has not yet manifested itself here. In spite of this lacuna, there is in Andrée's graph something so classical and so pure, in a word, so perfect - in its vulgarity - that the mind derives from it an equally perfect satisfaction, a satisfaction as delicious as it is possible for any sensation to be: the sort of satisfaction astronomers must feel when they contemplate the acrobatics of the stars. I can also see myself as the chemist who, having put two solutions in a test-tube, watches the vicissitudes of the combination; knows what the final result will be, though the layman does not, and knows that it will be very unexpected for the layman; and at last sees these elements assume precisely the form, the colour and the density which nature intended. But the most splendid thing of all is that the curve of Andrée's progress, classical though it is, is at the same time absurd. There is in it, at one and the same time, something both baffling and foreseeable. And in this it is the quintessence of nature itself. Andrée is not afraid to write that the fact of having recognized me in M. de Charlus has 'transformed her vision of the universe.' I daresay my own vision of the universe, if I had one, would be transformed for less.... To remain in the same key, and since nothing less than the universe is in question, I may say that the Cabourg letter inclines me to believe that a celestial economy really exists, - which up to now, pace the priests and pace Voltaire, I had been rather inclined to doubt.

  All this might also provoke a few reflections on the lack of psychological understanding in women, which I have always found rather striking. Most of them are quite out of touch with reality. If one cared to go back over the whole of Andrée's behaviour one would see that time after time she makes the grossest blunders, with a regularity that is as startling as it is baffling. She believes she's pretty, she believes I love her, she believes I have no children, she believes I'm M. de Charlus, she believes I'm unhappy, etc. You'd think it was something to do with a bet. And I repeat, Andrée is a woman of almost exceptional intelligence. You will say, perhaps: 'It isn't women who lack perception, it's women in love.' But since they're always in love!

  Mistaken about what men are and what they think, women are also mistaken about the way to go about winning them. A woman maddens you by coming into your room while you are working, or by giving you little presents, or badgering you too often, or bringing along her friends, who are not yours. You are on good enough terms with her to speak out frankly. Well, she stops for a while, and then starts again. A woman delights you by her lack of affectation. You tell her so again and again and you castigate all affected women. Well, sooner or later she herself begins to get coquettish and indulge in little wiles. All women without exception spoil their chances with you by their inexhaustible demands for money, and the time comes when the pleasure you derived from them has been poisoned at the source; and so you break with them. Demanding nothing, they would have had everything, one would have been so touched. But no, they can't help it: you might almost think there was something that forced them to be so clumsy.

  And just as women deceive themselves about their men, they deceive themselves about their children (girls or boys, though much more so with boys, of course). That 'maternal instinct' we hear so much about is nothing but a fraud. No mother ever knows what goes on in the mind of her child, nor what ought to be done for it. I could write a book on the subject, composed entirely of 'true stories', a few of which were provided by my own mother, for there are exceptions to everything. Any man who dares to look life in the face, whether he be a moralist, a doctor, a teacher (religious or lay), or a psychiatrist, will tell you so. But they will only tell you privately. They will never say so in front of a woman, or in public. They would never print it either, being far too frightened of public opinion which is created by women. Even the great Tolstoy himself said to Gorki: 'When my body is halfway into the grave, I shall say what I really think about women, and quickly slam down the tombstone over my head!' To my knowledge, Herbert Spencer alone had the courage to write: 'A mother's intervention is often more harmful than her complete abstention would have been.'

  And grown-up sons, too, are well aware of their mothers' delusions about them, their profound lack of understanding. But they too will never say so; they will hardly admit it to themselves. They are sorry for their mothers: always this pity for women.

  As for me, I have a son, and he is what I love most in the whole world. That is why I was determined to protect him from motherhood. I arranged that his mother should have absolutely no rights over him. And I put him in charge of a woman who is not his mother; he stands a better chance that way. As you know, the 'maternal instinct' of cats does not always prevent them from devouring their young. There's a terrifying symbol there for you: I may well have preserved my son from being eaten up.

  Such, dear friend, are my reactions to Andrée's little effort, on the purely general plane. On the personal plane, I find it almost unbearably funny. I almost feel inspired to do a burlesque commentary on the whole thing. For instance: Andrée says that in loving me she took me for someone else. But that's quite commonplace: when you kiss a cat, you think you've kissed a cat; well, if you look closer, you find you've kissed a flea. And so on … This kind of thing doesn't get one very far, but I feel madly inclined to go on: the absurdity of it all is intoxicating.

  I never had much faith in Andrée's friendship for me, because I knew she was in love with me. I pretended to believe in her friendship, in the same way that, as a writer, I pretend to believe in the demonstrations of friendship of some of my confrères, even though I know they hate me like poison. And now, how am I to behave towards her? I might have been able to put up with her insults: there is something in me that rather enjoys being insulted, ['My self-esteem has always increased in direct proportion to the damage I was doing to my reputation.' - Saint-Simon] like that famous shark Alain Gerbault writes about, which, while being eaten up by all sorts of other fishes, 'seemed not in the least to resent being torn to pieces'. What I cannot stand is her stupidity. I love and venerate, in a truly religious spirit, stupidity in pretty women, so long as it is sweet and passive. But the braying stupidity of an ugly woman, no thanks. (Incidentally, have you noticed how her stupidity, born of her anger, has affected her style - 'decadentism', a capital A for 'abyss', etc. - she who nearly always wrote so naturally and powerfully? And the intoxication with which she writes the word 'pansy'! It's obvious that she learnt it only yesterday, and wants to show how up-to-date she is. Just as Brunet, at the age of four, when one taught him a new word that caught his fancy, would go round bawling it out for a whole afternoon.) Now it's my turn to write Andrée a similar letter, fifteen pages long, in which I shall tell her exactly what I've thought of her from the beginning.

  But it isn't only stupidity. If I were eighteen and Andrée the first woman I'd come across, I might have said to myself: 'This is what love must be like. It's bound automatically to turn into something squalid. It's the nature of things.' But I can't think that any longer: I've seen so many women and girls who, disappointed, abandoned, even betrayed, have managed to retain their dignity (not to mention their critical faculties) and have gone on wishing their to
rmentors well.

  So, no forgiveness. And besides, I've had enough of forgiving all the time. A fifteen-page letter.

  This episode prompts three further observations.

  The first is that I have never been insulted by a pretty woman; always by ugly ones. When some unknown woman writes me an insulting letter, I know she is ugly.

  The second is that the sublime Andrée seems cut out to be a literary critic, by which I mean a Parisian literary critic, vintage 1927. The way in which, in identifying me with Charlus, she 'proves' that an object which is black, as black as ink, is white, as white as chalk, shows how well she is qualified for such a role. She would put her pen to delightful articles in which she would demonstrate how some purely lyrical novel was in fact a work of realism, or how some obviously euphoric writer was really a manic-depressive; she would show how Morand is a Baudelairean, Giraudoux a proletarian writer, etc. And she would soon be widely esteemed, since the important thing for a critic (I mean a critic in Paris in 1927) is not to write the truth but to write something that has not been written before; not to possess a sound judgement, but simply to concoct pieces which will be 'taken up' in other journals.

  And thirdly. You know how fond I am of secrecy, and of covering up my tracks. The Arabs, who are experts in this form of sport, maintain that the lion obliterates his with his tail; and it is said that one of their sultans had his horse shod back to front. 'Hide your life as the cat hides its excrement,' says the Egyptian proverb. Let us be clear about this: the secrecy I like is not the kind of secrecy practised by the majority of people, but the kind that deepens the more one confesses and shows off. Next to the 'aristocratic' pleasure of displeasing, of which, God knows, I have amply availed myself, there is the pleasure of being taken for something one is not, provided that it is a little to one's discredit. I do not know whether this pleasure can be called aristocratic, but it titillates me. Well, the maenad of Saint-Léonard has given me an idea: I would not swear that some day or other I might not include a Charlus in my collection of masks. Nothing could be simpler: I would merely have to start abusing women from the intellectual point of view, and the public is so obtuse - and moreover so ignorant of my carefully concealed liaisons - that it will inevitably deduce that I despise them from the carnal point of view. And then ... then my horizons broaden. Can you understand how? Can't you see how much less distrust I shall arouse in parents, how much easier my parthenomachy will become, if I am classified as 'a gentleman who does not care for women'? Indeed, Andrée may well have injected a new dose of happiness into my life. This woman I rejected may well be worth twenty to me. God grant that she may hear of it some day!

  I conclude, my dear Pailhès, by sending you my warmest greetings, and a quotation from Juvenal: 'A woman's resentment is implacable when humiliation spurs on her hatred.'

  C.

  All the same!

  For fifteen years, to have been transfused with the power of women as an organ is with air, and to have reverberated with it; one's travels, one's comings and goings, one's disappearances, one's long 'literary silences', everything that appeared inexplicable in one's life, all that to have had no other cause but the erratic race of women; to have spewed forth the world (how often!) in everything that was not love; to have sacrificed everything but one's art to one's private life, and that private life to have been exclusively devoted to love; to have suffered, more often than not, only from the suffering one was forced to inflict on women, or rather on young girls, for every adventure with a young girl that does not end in marriage is doomed to end in suffering and unhappiness; to have had one's whole life constricted, weakened, slowed down by a constant preoccupation with not hurting them; to be unable to read the words 'little girl ' without feeling in one's throat the first spasms of tears; to be unable to hear a girl admit to having failed her bachot without longing to worship her; to be unable to see a spelling mistake in a letter from an unknown girl without kissing it - and then to be taken for a M. de Charlus by an intelligent, cultured, perceptive woman who has the whole of one's work at her finger-tips. Mind you, it is not the Charlus thing that frightens me. 'What we call unnatural is merely unusual' (Montaigne). The 'unnatural' is nature itself, as a torpedo-boat destroyer is no more and no less than a torpedo-boat. The silly woman talks of my 'Abyss'; but our abysses are elsewhere. No, what frightens me is the darkness that divides one soul from another. In spite of all appearances, she has never understood me in the least, since she could be so utterly mistaken about me. And I haven't understood her in the least, since never, never, would I have believed her capable of being so mistaken. Baudelaire was right: there's nothing that is not based on misunderstanding. I knew it, but how one forgets, or rather how the mind forgets! Forgetting is so essential to it that the mind might well say: I forget, therefore I am.

  to Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  (Please forward)

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  3 July, 1927

  Well, dear Mademoiselle, that was quite a letter you sent me! But what of it! My gratitude to you still has the upper hand: a man who professes to study the human heart cannot but rejoice at not having missed that. For five years you have given me your friendship. You are giving to me still by withdrawing it.

  I think we have nothing more to say to each other for the time being. But I know you: doubtless you will come back to me one day. And I know myself too: doubtless I shall welcome you as if nothing had happened. However, let us not rush things. You must need a breather.

  Please rest assured of my warmest regard. I follow your various moods with interest.

  C.

  p.s. I am sending you by the same post the book on Cosima Wagner which you told me you wanted to read in one of your letters last winter and which I've just discovered by chance on a second-hand bookstall.

  to M. Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Madame Blancmesnil

  Avranches (Manche)

  2 July 1927

  My name will mean nothing to you, but the name Thérèse Pantevin possibly may.

  Do you remember these words: 'Should I ignore those cries? I haven't the heart to.... Perhaps there are forces in you that might be consecrated.... ' And then: 'On Saturday next at 6 p.m. I shall have pity on you.' Then a month's silence, which you probably did not even notice: what did Thérèse Pantevin matter to you? For you this correspondence was merely a game. But what you must know is the result of your little game, and the reason for this silence: three weeks ago my unfortunate cousin was taken into the lunatic asylum at Avranches. Will she ever come out again?

  Thérèse Pantevin, the daughter of well-to-do farmers, full of bestial pride ever since her childhood, thought herself a genius because of her teaching certificate. I too have my teaching certificate. Do not therefore imagine I am envious. Envious of a poor madwoman! Lazy, scornful of manual work, bigoted, full of absurd intellectual pretensions - how she despised us! Shutting herself up with her repressions in her farm at La Paluelle; and then discovering the works of Costals. Costals, the one and only man capable of understanding her! She breaks with her friends, with her dearest pupils, everything, in order to read you and meditate on your work for days on end in her room, poring over all the photographs of you which she had cut out of the newspapers, and which were found on her. ... Finally she writes to you....

  And you who, even though you are young and know nothing about life, in spite of all your pretensions (I have only read one of your books, but that was enough to make me detest you), you, who cannot after all have been so blind as not to guess my cousin's mental state from her letters, instead of throwing these letters into the waste-paper basket, you answer them, you add fuel to the fire. Vanity or sadism - what other motive could have prompted you? You were safe, you knew perfectly well that the little peasant-girl with her hair pulled back from her temples (she had sent you a photograph) would never come up from the depths of the country to pester you in your marbl
e halls and that in any case, even if she had the impertinence to do so, you would have had her thrown out by your flunkeys.

  In April, she leaves home to catch a train to Paris to see you. Her mother stops her in time and locks her up. In May she escapes again: we have to have her arrested at Vire by the gendarmerie. She flung herself on her knees in front of them and said: 'Let me see him for just five minutes and then you can arrest me!' They were obliged to keep her in prison for the night until we came to fetch her. Then, in June, she has a fit of hysteria.... That, Monsieur Costals, is what you have done.

  And then there is the poor, wretched mother who has had to sell her farm to pay for her daughter's keep and who, at the age of sixty and more, has undertaken to read all the books of Pierre Costals in order to find out what sort of man is responsible for the ruin of her daughter and herself.

  And now, Mr Great Writer (!), now that I have forced you into an awareness of your responsibility in all this, what do you propose to do about it? In case there is a shred of humanity left in you, which I doubt, I should like to point out that your victim's boarding fees at the asylum are 15,000 francs a year. If you should feel it your duty to contribute towards them, you could deal directly with me. I would hand over whatever you sent me to Mme Pantevin, who is hardly capable of dealing with such matters herself. If, on the other hand, you choose not to reply, we have your letters to Thérèse Pantevin and we shall know what steps to take.

  Antoinette Blancmesnil

  Written by Costals on a blank page of this letter:

  'For you this correspondence was merely a game.' Played with Andrée, yes, sometimes. With Th. Pantevin, never. The opposite of a game. Put her on her guard against confusing the sacred and the profane. Snubbed her so that she would take against me. Urged her, not to enter a convent, which would have been presumptuous of me, but to go and see a priest who might help her to discover herself. Tried to give her the impression that she was a real person (which indeed she was). Simply and solely pity. Pity all along the line, without an atom of malevolence. Pity, sympathy, understanding and respect.