Pity for Women Read online

  'But it was you who … You pretend to be an atheist and you think about God all the time.'

  'What you say is simply ludicrous. I might have expected some such cheap psychological commonplace from you.'

  'How you enjoy insulting me!' said M. Dandillot in a milder voice and with even a friendly gleam in his eyes.

  'Yes, I like being rude to you. It's because you often say things which exasperate me. Here you are, on the verge of death, trying to brush up your conception of life, like a schoolboy mugging up his syllabus three days before the exams. But don't worry: even if I enjoy insulting you, it doesn't in the least affect my feeling for you.'

  'I'm not worried. You don't worry me at all. Does that surprise you? But why do you despise me?'

  'I have a right to, if I despise myself, as I in fact do. Just as I have a right to kill if I don't mind being killed myself.'

  'You mustn't despise human nature so. You know it has some admirable virtues.'

  'I despise it in its virtues too.'

  'Why are you smiling?'

  'Because I can see myself in the mirror,' replied Costals, who had just caught his own reflection in the mirror and found it amusing.

  'My exams! That's exactly it,' said M. Dandillot, smiling a little in his turn. 'Will I pass or fail my entrance to paradise? Whichever way it goes, eternity is now opening out in front of me. You, I imagine, even if you believed, would distrust an eternity that hadn't been tailor-made for you....'

  He was still fingering the bottles and tubes of pills on his table. One of the bottles fell.

  'What I distrust above all is eternity as such. If God existed, he would by definition be intelligent, and in that case he would never have created anything permanent.'

  'There's a brand-new proof of his non-existence.'

  'I always thought "proofs" of God's existence were the last word in human stupidity, but I see that those of his nonexistence can go even further.'

  'No matter, I like your proof.'

  'And I prefer dry port,' said Costals, hoping that M. Dandillot would offer him a glass. Perspiration was soaking through his shirt and moistening his face as though he had just emerged from a river. Life was oozing from his body, shamelessly, in this liquid form.

  'Is it true. Monsieur Costals, is it really true that it was only a figure of speech?'

  'I swear it. It would take too long to explain … '

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say: 'In three weeks' time you'll be a dead man. Why should I bother to explain anything to you? My passions alone interest me.' He did not say it, but mentally turned away from him as the Greek gods turned away from corpses. And at the same time he had a horrible sensation of loving what was doomed in this man.

  'Tell me you believe in nothing,' said M. Dandillot, convulsively seizing him by the hand.

  'I believe in nothing. And it's because I believe in nothing that I'm happy.'

  'The happiness of the man without God! Thank you,' said M. Dandillot, looking him in the eyes with an unbearable expression of gratitude. 'Oh! those swallows! Why swallows in July? It's in September that they congregate before migrating. But everything's at sixes and sevens, isn't it? You do agree with me, don't you?' he insisted. 'There are no laws governing the world. I find the thought so comforting.'

  He was silent. But soon his face, which had relaxed, began to express discomfort. In a few seconds, he was deathly pale, and sweat broke out all over his forehead.

  'Are you going to die?' Costals asked softly.

  'No, but please ring the bell, quickly! I must go to the lavatory, at once. Yes, I'm subject to these ... Everything's going slack inside me ... Please go away. I'm so sorry. And don't forget the letters … '

  Costals rang the bell, then went to the door and called the nurse, and as soon as he arrived, slipped away quietly. 'How much longer will he last?' he thought, feeling as exhausted as the dying man. 'When will I be able to stop suffering on his account, and to tell myself that it really is too late?' In the avenue, he sank on to a bench, and fanned himself with his hat. Then he lit a cigarette. 'He never even offered me a cigarette, on the pretext that he was dying.' Above him, the swallows still clamoured shrilly.

  He opened one of the bundles of letters. He read the first ten, skimmed through the next twenty (there were well over a hundred). They were a cross-section of what is supposed to be the most sacred thing in the world: the trusting, tender relationship between a mother and her son. A cross-section of human love, in its purest and least questionable form. And yet the whole thing was triteness itself, not to say inanity; it was nothing, nothing, nothing. There was a drain-hole nearby. Costals tied up the letters and threw down the drain the love between Mme Dandillot and her son.

  A week later, on the 15th of July, by means of a telegram from Solange delivered poste restante, Toulouse, Costals learnt of the death of M. Dandillot.

  A natural death? Or had he taken the veronal? Presumably a natural death. In any case the question was totally irrelevant. He was dead: that was all there was to it.

  For a long time he wandered aimlessly through the streets, holding the telegram in his hand. He felt limp all over; anyone could have jostled him without fear of reprisal. Soon his eyes were wet with tears. 'I bet there isn't a passer-by who doesn't think it's because a woman has let me down.'

  He continued his conversation with M. Dandillot: 'Here I am weeping over you who, egotist that you were, probably never shed a tear over anyone. And yet you tried to give me a taste for the future, a future that you knew you would never see.'

  In the restaurant, he was unable to eat. He sat there gloomily, unable to hide his grief: 'People must think I've got money troubles.' But he was thankful to be in Toulouse on the day of the funeral. Nothing on earth would have induced him to get mixed up with that sort of mummery.

  Back at his hotel, he wanted to write to Solange and her mother. But he found himself writing 'Mons ..." on the envelope. So he took another envelope and wrote on it: 'Monsieur Charles Dandillot' and the address, and he kept this envelope in front of him. The thought that he would never have to write this name again brought the tears back to his eyes. 'Why weep for a man after he is dead? It's during his life, and for his life, that one should weep. It's better to be dead than to be only half-alive.' He remembered the tears he had shed, some years earlier, over the death of a great writer, tears that would subside for an hour and then burst out afresh as if their source had meanwhile been replenished, so much so that eventually his mother had observed testily: 'You didn't cry like that when your father died.' And he savoured to the full the words that now sprang to his lips: 'Never again will I make friends, because one suffers too much when one loses them.' They were the self-same words old ladies use when their little doggies pass away (but then, was M. Dandillot his friend?). He decided to send merely a telegram to Solange and her mother. They did not interest him.

  In bed, incapable of sleeping, he jerked his leg up and down over the sheet in an incessant movement, like a dying horse pawing the ground. An immense community of suffering linked him with those dying horses, an immense chain stretching between him and them.

  After a while he remembered something that had struck him in a letter from his son. One of Brunet's school-mates had just died of meningitis, and the child wrote: 'I feel awfully sad, but let us hope I shall get over it.' Costals, too, hoped that he would soon get over it. 'It's nature that has wounded me, and it's nature, too, that will heal me through oblivion. The day will come when I shall feel as indifferent to M. Dandillot's death as to the memory of his daughter. Since for the very same reason that I am weeping today I shall have ceased to weep tomorrow, then my weeping today is merely a game.'

  At four in the morning Costals woke up and thought: 'A girl living alone with her mother is almost bound to fall. A boy likewise. So powerless is the mother, unless her power is evil. But Solange has already fallen. How stupid; M. Dandillot died for nothing.' He went back to sleep.

  to Pie
rre Costals

  Poste restante, Toulouse

  Solange Dandillot

  Paris

  18 July 1927

  Why this silence, nothing but that telegram to my mother, did you not promise when you left to write to me within three days? and can you not feel that I am all the time on tenterhooks waiting for the next post?

  This intolerable existence has now lasted five days, I beg of you, put an end to it. I implore you to come to my help. I'm at the end of my tether.

  Or else it means that you have gone away for good and are going to abandon me. Then you must say so, it's better than not knowing.

  All my love.

  Your

  Rosebourg

  I am enclosing a stamped addressed envelope with some paper inside, if you don't feel like writing, you only need to write your name on the paper, nothing more, and I shall know that you are not abandoning me.

  My poor papa was buried this morning. What a void it has left for us! I shall write again to tell you how he died. We were so glad that he agreed to see a priest.

  Costals' Note-Book

  Well! So much for cold little Rosebourg!

  With her letter in my hand, I wandered through the crowds, my eyes on the ground and biting my lips with emotion.

  So she too, in her turn has begun to howl like a beast, to screech like a cat locked in a cellar. She too has gone mad in her turn. It took Andrée four years to go mad. G. R. one. Undstein six. Claire one. But she has gone mad in two months. That's what comes of being a quiet little thing.

  As Andrée's desperation subsides, hers begins to rise. Always these female lamentations, this music of flutes and tears that accompanies me all through my life.

  (Her punctuation is inexcusable.)

  Like the sorcerer's apprentice, I have unleashed this virgin love, this wild element of which I am no longer the master. At the Opéra-Comique, she was well behind me. Then she gained and gained, moving much faster than I, and caught up with me, and has now overtaken me. I have the feeling, almost, that she is starting again when I've only just arrived.

  Is there, perhaps, some slight exaggeration in her letter? As I, at the age of sixteen, used to date my love letters two in the morning when they were written at two in the afternoon. This sudden outburst is so surprising! Had Solange been a little more 'demonstrative' with me, such a suspicion would never occur to me. Perhaps the poor child is paying now for having been so discreet and reserved. How unfair that would be. But what can I do about it?

  I accept her love.

  I agree to enter into the world of duty.

  Sweet duty, since I love her. But duty all the same, and duty has never suited me.

  However, I accept this love. With respect. With gravity - that intermittent gravity of mine which, in spite of everything, always comes into play when it is needed, if only at the eleventh hour. With ... the word escapes me; I meant to convey that her love does not displease me, that I do more than accept it: I welcome it.

  And now, another matter.

  Her indifference to her father's death! That postscript. She thinks of nothing but me, and I feel ashamed for both of us.

  And yet she's a nice girl. Of course, fathers are not made to be loved by their children. Such is nature, and Brunet, tomorrow, with all his niceness … But getting used to nature is always a painful process. We always expect it to be the extraordinary that takes us aback, when in fact it is the ordinary that is so terrifying.

  Whenever I have visited the recently bereaved widow or orphan of someone I was more or less indifferent to, I have felt that I was more deeply moved - more sincerely moved - than was necessary: I seemed to be teaching them a lesson. It was always they who were the first to change the subject.

  to Solange Dandillot

  Paris

  Pierre Costals

  Toulouse

  20 July 1927

  Peace, my child. Peace, peace, peace everlasting to little girls. Why all this frenzy? An artichoke is always cool and collected.

  You ask for reassurance: I give it to you. Peace, my darling little girl. Peace in the present. Peace in the future, as far ahead as it will please you to want me in that future. Total and absolute peace. Gaiety and serenity of mind in trust and in peace.

  I have held you against my heart at the peak of my solitude, and you were alone there also, yet protected. You may remain there as long as you wish; I shall not go away from you. I love you, and what is rarer, I love the attachment you have for me. I shall never leave you until you have left me.

  I have heard it said that a woman in a situation such as this should be put to the test. I do not put what I love to the test.

  I have heard it said that one loses a woman by loving her too much, that an affectation of coldness, from time to time, brings better results. And so on. I shall play no such tricks with you. No tricks at all. I am not one of those people who see love as a battle; it is a notion I abhor. Let love be truly love - that is, let it be peace - or let it not exist at all.

  Why this terror of my absence? What more could my presence bring you? You are here, silly one, did you not know? In the daytime, like a little shadow, you glide quietly by my side. At night I go to sleep with you in my arms.

  And my body thinks of you too. It wakes in the night and reaches towards you, as a dog stretches out its neck asking for a drink.

  I have followed up your preoccupations in the order in which they appear in your letter. I have spoken first of you and me. Now a word about your father.

  I do not know whether you loved your father, but I met him twice and loved him. I do not know whether you respected your father, but I met him twice and respected him. I had the impression that he was someone superior to you.

  You think of no one but me, and yet you hardly know me. The casual way in which you refer to your father's death in your letter shocked me, although I understand it; exactly that: I understand it and am shocked by it. Granted, you are 'in love'. But I would have you know that love is not an excuse, but an aggravation. Precisely like drunkenness, which the insane justice of men treats as an extenuating circumstance, when it is an aggravating circumstance.

  Must I be the one to make you realize what sort of man your father was?

  I want you to be the person you ought to be. And you ought not to be altogether the person who wrote that letter.

  There now, my little one, I send you my fondest love. Other men, perhaps, will love you more than I do. I love you as much as I can love you. I cannot do more.

  C.

  The punctuation of your letter is inexcusable.

  to Mademoiselle Rachel Guigui

  Paris

  Pierre Costals

  Toulouse

  20 July 1927

  Dear Guiguite,

  Two whole months since we last met, and since I last wrote to you.

  When I discovered the angel you know of, my first reaction was to drop you: one fancy drives out another. I gathered in my scattered affections from right and left in order to concentrate them all upon my angel and to make them into something powerful, like heat concentrated in a burning-glass. This adventure gripped me; I was full of it. In reality I was disregarding not only my own nature, but nature itself. Nature accumulates, and a well-endowed man does so too; in him, as in nature, there is room for everything. My angel is what she is; you are something else, and that is enough to make me want you as well. And so I trust that in your kindness you will see fit to resume your place among my delights.

  Of course, as you remember, I had intended that we should eventually get together again. But I thought that would be when I had grown tired of the angel. Quite the contrary, my feeling towards her has never been so serious, so deep, and so strong: affection, supported by the twin pillars of esteem and desire. And it is on the tide of a great uprush of feeling that I have for her at the moment (as a result of a note received from her yesterday) that I am reverting to my natural instinct and the guiding principle in accordance with whi
ch I cannot have only one woman in my life.

  Besides this, I love intelligence. And that is why, whatever my team of the moment, I must always have a Jewish mistress in the batch. She helps me to put up with the others.

  I shall be in Paris on the 25th. Come on Tuesday, the 26th, the feast of St Barnabas, at 8 p.m., to Port-Royal. We'll have dinner, and afterwards you shall see what you shall see.

  Goodbye, my dear; I stroke you with my hands, and even send you a kiss, for, as you know, my sensuality is of the tender kind. You, too, are a very sweet girl, and that is why my affection for you is so real. But get ready to make me happy, for I badly want to be. Thinking of you, I feel a spasm of fuliginous joy, comparable to the transports of the mystics or the final spurt of a flame. And lastly, after such a dose of the sublime, I yearn for a love that is not disinterested.

  C.

  to Mademoiselle du Peyron de Larchant

  Cannes

  ('to be given to Brunet')

  Pierre Costals

  Toulouse

  20 June 1927

  My pet,

  I do not like doing things behind your back; what's more, I cannot. I must tell you therefore that I wrote to Mlle du P. five days ago asking her whether by any chance you mightn't have done something really naughty, and begging her to tell me the whole truth. She answered that there had been nothing out of the ordinary run of your day-to-day tomfooleries.

  Now this is why I wrote to her. Not a day passes without my thinking of you at length, and the time I spend thinking of you is always the best part of the day, however good the rest of it may be. But this time it was a dream. I dreamt that, taking advantage of a moment when the chest of drawers in Mlle du P.'s room was unlocked, you poked inside it and took out some money. And this dream was so striking, so plausible, so coherent from beginning to end, that I could not help wondering whether it might not be a mysterious warning, and so wrote the letter.