Pity for Women Read online

  Imprudence? Agreed. But every contact with another human being is imprudence.

  The imprudence of generosity - that's more like it. Any action undertaken out of pure generosity always turns back upon its author as automatically as a boomerang returns to the man who threw it. Without exception. Anyone subject to generous impulses can, as a matter of course, and in advance, be classified as a victim.

  This being so, the tragedy is not that the Pantevin affair should have earned me such a letter: that was but the logical consequence of the premises. The drama, the tragedy, is that Thérèse Pantevin is very probably not mad at all. She has been put away at twenty-five because she was in touch with the higher regions of the spirit: being different, she was envied, that is to say hated. Thérèse Pantevin has been put away by the people she lived among for having been superior to them.

  And what do I care even if she was mad, seeing she was suffering!

  If I believed in God, I would pray for her.

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  8 July 1927

  Dear Costals,

  I no longer know where I am with you, and I no longer know what you are, and I am writing to tell you so, although I am well aware how much I must lower myself in your eyes with these eternal 'last letters'. As if it wasn't enough to be crushed by you in Paris, I had to go through it again with that revelation in Cabourg. And now, this: in my indignation I wrote to several acquaintances in Paris, people in the know. I asked them why they had never warned me about you, and they wrote back calling Baroness Fléchier a lunatic and telling me that 'nothing could be more grotesque than to believe such nonsense'. So now I no longer know what to think. There are still moments when I believe that the woman was telling the truth, but they may simply be the moments when my suffering is too great. At other times I doubt. I suppose this uncertainty must be pleasing to one who once wrote to me that he liked nothing better than 'the fringe of uncertainty where one thing merges into another.'

  However, something new has happened to sustain me. I am no longer the thirty-year-old spinster whom no man had ever taken in his arms, to whom no man had ever said: 'My little one.' Now I too have my joys, [Pure invention. This 'man' who was supposed to be part of Andrée's life did not exist (Author's note).] which are just as good as yours, whatever they may be (oh! this frenzy to know what sort of pleasures you enjoy... ). Now I have other friends besides you, and they don't invite me to second-rate restaurants. So you needn't despise me unduly any more. Nevertheless you must know that even if I get married, that night of love I asked from you will always remain a hope for me. My life will never stir again until you yourself make a move. If you are not what I thought you were in Cabourg, if you should realize one day that I mean something to you, that you want me in your life, body and soul, that I am as irreplaceable to you as you are to me, if I should ever seem worth the perturbations and anxieties that love inevitably entails for the man who loves a woman and considers her worth it all, then send for me and I shall be yours, whatever man I may belong to at the time and whatever the ties that bind me to him.

  Good-bye. I have loved you very very much, and I love you still. As for you, nothing can alter the fact that you allowed yourself to be loved. I feel that if I heard you being attacked as I did the other night in the Casino at Cabourg, I could not and would not endure it at any cost. However cruelly you have wounded me, there is something between us which can never be lost or destroyed. And then, perhaps my name will live on in the character you will draw from me in that novel you promised me. [Pure invention. Costals never promised her anything of the kind (Author's note).]

  A. H.

  But to think that some day, perhaps, you will marry! If you were to marry a rich woman, I could at least console myself with the thought that she was giving you something I could never have given you. But if you should marry a woman no richer than I am! It's enough to drive one mad!

  This letter remained unanswered.

  'There is something divine in serious illnesses.' Saint-Cyran.

  Costals received a note from M. Dandillot saying that he would like to see him two days later, at four: 'We shall be alone.' In the same way the daughter had said: 'Do come, we shall be alone.' What it is to belong to a family! Whereas many dying people write in a firmer, better-formed hand than usual, because they make it a point of honour to do so (as a drunk man will try to indulge in the refinements of calligraphy), M. Dandillot's handwriting was falling apart, and meandered all over the place: a corpse of a hand, preceding the other corpse. His letter was written in pencil.

  M. Dandillot was now confined to his room. As Costals entered, a male nurse came out - a man with the sort of face one would not care to meet in a dark wood at night. The first thing M. Dandillot said was: 'Isn't there a bit of a sick-room smell in here? I get them to burn aromatic paper, but I don't know whether.... The only real dignity, you see, is health. And God knows I used to be a healthy man. But now!' His voice had become a little shrill, and weak, like the voice of a man who hardly speaks anymore, who no longer has the strength, and who has anyway lost interest in the sounds he emits. His eyes seemed to be veiled by leukoma. He was unshaven, and proceeded to explain why:

  'I've done enough for people. Why should I shave for them? Why should I be nice to them? I see now that one should never try to do good to people one doesn't love. Nothing requires more naturalness and spontaneity than doing good. There too I went wrong by forcing myself. And besides, the good we do is poisoned by the fact that we do it the wrong way.'

  'One should never try to do good to people one doesn't love,' Costals repeated to himself, thinking of Andrée.

  Costals had realized from their first meeting that M. Dandillot was only interested in himself, and he liked him for it. But now that death was drawing near, he saw him shrink even further into himself. He had always thought it natural for old men to be selfish. How the devil could they love the world after having endured it for a life-time?

  'My oldest friend has just left,' M. Dandillot said, unconsciously picking up Costals' train of thought. 'We've been cronies for fifty years. Do you know what we talked about? For a quarter of an hour he described his plans for a trip to Egypt, India and Ceylon, going into ecstasies about all the wonderful things he'd see. He spent the next quarter of an hour asking me for letters of introduction for his son. And for the last five minutes - the last five minutes of our friendship, since I shall be dead by the time he returns from his trip - he scolded me very severely for living in a room with the shutters closed. That's what a man says to the friend of half a century who is on the point of death.'

  'It's simply lack of imagination.'

  In a dense cone of sound, the piercing cries of the swallows came surging in from the trees in the avenue.

  'And the veronal?'

  'Always ready.'

  'You'll never take it. We once had an old cat at home, who developed an incurable sore by scratching himself. So we had him put to sleep. Then my mother felt remorseful. "Even with his sore he might still have enjoyed a few happy hours." When you're on the point of swallowing your veronal, you'll say to yourself: "Perhaps I might still enjoy a few happy hours".'

  'I haven't taken the poison yet because the pain isn't bad enough. What I feel most of all is tired. Tired! And do you know what makes me so tired? It's having done too much good all my life, having obliged too many people. I was destroying my correspondence the other day. And do you know, I sometimes went through ten or fifteen letters in succession and every one of them was a request for some favour or other or to thank me for a favour I had done. And if you allow that only one person in two ever thanks you for something you've done, it will give you some idea of the number of people I've obliged - and for what, ye gods? Remember this, Monsieur Costals: the people we help never deserve it.'

  'I'm lucky enough not to be obliging, so I'm not a good judge. But how a man of your calibr
e...? Only fools are hurt by ingratitude. Isn't generosity just another way of saying "Return to sender"?'

  'What makes me tired is not the ingratitude with which my generosity has been repaid, it's the generosity itself. So futile! Such a waste of time! Ah! Be selfish, Monsieur Costals.'

  'But I am.'

  'Well then, the world is yours.'

  Then M. Dandillot went on to say that he was so tired that he would be glad to die. He expounded, as if it were his own, Mechnikov's theory that a man dies only because he wants to. He proclaimed: 'I hate people who are afraid of death, like the Pascals, etc...." Costals was glad to find him in this frame of mind, since it relieved him of the necessity to put on a solemn face.

  'That said, I wonder why I've lived at all,' M. Dandillot concluded with a gloomy stare.

  'You've lived because you could not do otherwise,' said Costals impatiently. 'Nearly all men's lives are corrupted by the need to justify their existence. Women are less subject to this infirmity.'

  'If I had been happy, I shouldn't feel the need to justify my existence: it would justify itself. But I have not been happy, and I've discovered that that is why I'm dying at sixty-one, instead of seventy or seventy-five as I should logically have done with the principles on which my life has been based. Can you realize what it means to have lived for forty years without ever meeting an intelligent person? And I'm so tired of people who aren't intelligent '

  'It takes a lot of searching to find an intelligent person '

  'And now I meet you, just as I'm about to die!'

  'It's better that way. We should never have got on together.'

  'Why not?' M. Dandillot asked, shyly.

  'Because I should have grown tired of you.'

  'How can you say such a thing to me?' M. Dandillot said, flabbergasted.

  'Because I know you won't understand.'

  'Yes, I'm stupid, aren't I? And boring too.' (A terrifying expression of bitterness spread over his face.) 'Boring ... people have made it plain to me often enough. I should have loved to know whether my wife really thought me an imbecile, or whether she merely pretended to, just to be disagreeable. It's true that I actually do become an imbecile when I'm with her.'

  'Haven't you become more intelligent since you've been ill?'

  'Yes, I think more.'

  'If you'll forgive me, I don't believe you really think. Not real thinking. I myself don't really think. I've often tried to see things clearly, but the time goes by and I still don't understand a thing.'

  'You consider that I think like an amateur, isn't that it? My family have always looked on me as an amateur. If I'd had a job of some kind, it would have been different. For ten or twelve years now, they've made a habit of ignoring what I say. It would be impossible to climb back up that kind of slippery slope even if there were still time. Even if the Minister came in person to decorate me in this armchair, they wouldn't understand. Did I show you the letter I wrote to the Minister refusing the Legion of Honour?' (With a scornful emphasis on 'Legion of Honour'.)

  'Yes, you did.'

  'Forgive me, my memory goes at times,' he said with an absent stare. 'Did I tell you the story about the man who was prepared to sacrifice ten years of his life for the sake of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour?'

  Costals shook his head.

  'A friend of mine has a brother aged seventy-two. This brother is unhappy because he considers that, according to the promotion schedule, he should have had the Grand Cross a couple of years ago. My friend said to him jokingly one day: "I believe you'd rather die in a year but be promoted at once than live another ten years without it." "Of course I would," the brother answered, without a smile. Isn't life wonderful?'

  'It is. I couldn't have done better if I'd created the world myself.'

  M. Dandillot smiled, under the impression that Costals was being blasphemous. He did not realize that Costals was in fact very fond of Catholicism. Then he frowned in an effort to re-focus his eyes, which had grown vacant again, and which now wandered from one object to another until they finally came to rest on a drawer of his filing-cabinet.

  'Would you be kind enough to get that drawer out? It contains all the correspondence I had with my mother when I was a young man. I should like to give it to you. We'll make a parcel of it. If someone comes in and asks you what it is, you can say that it's press-cuttings about physical culture.'

  'Someone!' Costals was still rather surprised at the way M. Dandillot 'annulled' his daughter, as it were, passed her over in silence, or let it be understood that she was one of the people he despised. And just as he had been irritated by Solange's irruption into the room the other day while he was talking to her father, he was now forced to the conclusion that any reference to her would have lowered the tone of their conversation. She seemed so unimportant compared to the kind of preoccupation with which he and M. Dandillot were absorbed; even more, she seemed unimportant compared to M. Dandillot himself.

  'This is the second time we've met, and yet you want to give me your mother's letters!'

  'Who else can one trust if one doesn't trust strangers?'

  'Give them to me some other day.'

  'There may not be another day.'

  'Of course there will!'

  'So you really think I may live a bit longer?' said M. Dandillot, his face brightening, although not so long before he had professed himself happy to die.

  M. Dandillot then asked for paper and string and began to parcel up the letters. They kept slipping from his fingers; he could scarcely move without dropping something or other.

  'Everything falls ... everything falls …

  Things run away from me.

  They can sense the corpse.'

  And as Costals drew nearer to him to help him with the parcel, he said:

  'I should be glad if you would tell me frankly whether my breath smells. I've changed so much since I've been ill. I looked quite a different man six months ago, you know. People thought I was only fifty-three or fifty-four.'

  Among the letters, Costals noticed some press-cuttings. They were reports of social functions dating back to 1890, and M. Dandillot's name had been underlined in red pencil. He had repudiated his worldly phase to the extent of ostentatiously selling his evening clothes, and yet his vanity was such that he had kept these pathetic accounts of provincial parties for forty years, simply because his name was printed there. Ah, nature had indeed erred in refusing M. Dandillot the gift of expression. He was born to be a man of letters.

  'What is your motive for giving me these letters? Am I to destroy them? Am I to keep them without reading them - in which case, what's the point? Am I to read them, and if so, on what grounds?'

  'I'm giving them to the novelist. Read them, and you may find things that are of use to you in your novels.'

  'Well, well! what a bunch!' thought Costals once again, rather flabbergasted in spite of himself. 'I knew of course that there were female readers one had never met in one's life who sent one whole notebooks in which they described their conjugal life in the most intimate detail "in case it could be of some use". But a man! And what would the late Mme Dandillot have had to say about it all? Would she have been pleased to know that her letters to her son would eventually be handed over to a stranger - for after all, I am a stranger to him - to be "made use of"? Humanity? A swarm of thoughtless idiots.'

  M. Dandillot's hand went up to his forehead.

  Those swallows,' he said, 'what a din they make! Swallows, sunlight, everything that's good exhausts me. Just now there was a workman singing on the landing: you may have noticed that the staircase is being painted. You can't imagine how true his voice was, and I thought to myself. "He's in overalls, he doesn't wash, he's coarse and vulgar, and yet his voice is so pure, so tuneful … A voice from another world".'

  'And that voice tired you too?'

  'No.'

  'I had the impression from the way you began that you were about to tell me that the workman's singing tired you lik
e everything else...."

  'I'm sorry: I can't remember how I began. These gaps in my memory.'

  He began to fiddle with the medicine bottles on the table beside his armchair.

  'In fact you don't know whether the workman's song pained you or pleased you, any more than you know whether you really welcome death, as you said earlier on, or whether it horrifies you, as you have also given me to understand. You find it both horrifying and acceptable, simultaneously. Just as the workman's song simultaneously exhausted you and did you good.'

  'I don't know,' said M. Dandillot, like a schoolboy who has been asked which way the Gulf Stream flows. Before saying this he had clenched his fists (the nails must have dug into his palms) as though he were making an effort to pull himself together.

  'I was wondering why I liked you,' said Costals with a sidelong glance at a pattern on the carpet. 'Now I know. It's because you are like me. And you gave me your mother's letters, because you know that I'm like you: I've only this moment realized it.... O God! give him eternal life!' he added in a passionate murmur, his eyes on the carpet. M. Dandillot gave a start:

  'What did you say? So you believe, then! ...'

  'Me, believe!' hissed Costals with withering scorn. 'The words just came to my lips. It doesn't mean a thing.'

  'The last time, you fortified me in my unbelief. And now you throw everything into doubt again. And at this late stage - when I am so weak! Men, like nations, never stop declining from the moment they start hearing about God. I can't help it if the moral dregs of mankind cannot do without religion. But you, if you have a religion, at least you should be ashamed of it and keep it dark.'

  'You are about to die. Could you not concern yourself with something more important than God? You told me just now that you used to be a healthy man. A healthy man doesn't bother about God.'