The Lepers Read online

  In Genoa, Costals went on writing the novel into which he was putting Solange. (Feeling all these things as he did, he would have gone mad had he not written them down there and then.) Everything of her that he put in the novel he took away from her: that was a hold stronger than any carnal hold. The day he dotted his final i and crossed his final t, Solange did not die, drained dry, but she felt, at the dinner-table, something hard in her mouth, and spat into her fingers the crown of a broken tooth: she was so run down that she was becoming decalcified. 'Madame de Chateaubriand, whom I made to spit blood at will…' (Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe).

  Costals announced his return for the 2nd of January, a date chosen in order to 'skip' the New Year celebrations, and made a date with Solange for the 3rd. But on arrival in Paris he found a letter from Mme Dandillot. She wanted to see him urgently, before he met Solange.

  Also a letter from Andrée Hacquebaut, which he did not open, but put away. He had a file for letters which he kept without having read. And a file for letters which the (female) senders had marked: 'To be destroyed'.

  2

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

  30 December 1927

  I have been sulking for six months. I am obliged to acquaint you with the fact, since you refuse to do me the honour of noticing it yourself: you ignore my very indifference. But I cannot let this date pass without wishing you a happy New Year, Costals. Is it undignified of me to write to you again after six months of silence, now that I no longer ask anything of you? You have bled me of my love - there is no other word. You will never know what you refused: I would have given you Love with a capital L - something full, round, compact, glittering, like a loaf, or a cake. But don't let's go back over all that.

  I am writing to you. The door of the mirror-wardrobe, in which I keep everything that concerns you, is open, and it is as though I were in a tiny little room face to face with you alone. One can scarcely see, because of the gloomy weather. It was inevitable that I should start writing to you again on a Sunday. There is such a piercing sadness about a rainy Sunday in Saint-Léonard. So many Sundays wept away outside my window!

  I am calm but I am not cured. A little music (I now have a wireless set), a little insomnia, a little rain ... or, on the other hand, a ray of sunshine, is enough to cast me back, body and soul, into everything that hurts me. I am bored to distraction. Waking up dejected, with one thought alone: getting through the day as fast as possible, like holding one's nose as one swallows a dose of'medicine. Ever since my sinister 'holidays' in Cabourg last June, I haven't been away from Saint-Léonard except for twenty-four hours in Orleans. I no longer want to go anywhere. No one awaits me anywhere. No one, anywhere, wants to see my face. If one knew that one's face pleased someone - how one would be reborn! If one knew that one's face existed for someone in a world full of dead men who neither look nor love - what a fragment of immortality!

  I am not in the least embarrassed to be writing to you. I still have the impression, as strongly as ever, that we ... how shall I put it? ...that together we know things that others don't know, things that you have not even said to me but which nevertheless you've said to no one but me.

  A.H.

  This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

  3

  The great French novelist said to one of his fellow-writers one day:

  'I've had fourteen books published. And if I were a bachelor, I should only have published seven.'

  'In other words: one book in every two to keep the pot boiling. Don't you think the proportion ...?'

  'Ah, but I've got three children.'

  And yet the great French writer is rich....

  Everything they do that is vile or second-rate is blamed on their families. One would think they only married in order to have this excuse, just as there are people who only volunteered for the war in order to be able to boast of the gesture for the rest of their lives. Mme Dandillot, in the taxi that was taking her to Costals' house, felt sustained by her clear conscience as though by a steel corset. Her clear conscience was her love for her daughter; in the name of that love, she would have been prepared to rob. We know, moreover, that her love was firm and true. When a boy reaches puberty his mother's love slackens: she can no longer go near this monster, about whom she understands nothing. The metamorphosis of the little girl into the adolescent, on the other hand, makes maternal love blossom and develop into friendship. Later, the transformation of the adolescent girl into a woman brings a new blossoming. Since Solange had become a woman, Mme Dandillot loved her more than ever.

  What she wanted from Costals today was a 'yes' or a 'no'. If he continued to prevaricate, she herself would say 'no'. But when Costals appeared she felt intimidated. It was the first time she had come to his flat, and she felt disorientated, like a football team playing away. Moreover, the absence of worry in the past three months had given Costals a healthier appearance (he had also drawn sustenance from Solange - whence, perhaps, those full round cheeks). Outwardly calmer and more assured, he over-awed her a little. For some while, keeping her most telling arguments in reserve, she confined herself to repeating what she had often said before.

  'You hunch yourself up, instead of bracing yourself against the wind. You balk at the hurdle. You're afraid of making a mistake, afraid of failure. One must throw oneself into the water to learn to swim.'

  'Don't you think that if a man who can't swim throws himself into the water, the chances are that he'll drown?'

  'The truth of the matter is that you don't love Solange enough.'

  'Exactly, I don't love her enough. Don't turn that against me. Heart! One needs a great deal of heart to love even a little.'

  'But love will come, I tell you. It always happens like that.

  'So you want a man for a son-in-law who admits he doesn't love your daughter enough.'

  'I appreciate frankness more than anything,' said Mme Dandillot. She was thinking what all women think: 'Let him keep his frankness to himself; it only diminishes and degrades him.' How often had she not said to Solange: 'A man's frankness is a trap that makes us drop our guard. When he tells you he doesn't love you "deep down", beware!'

  'There's no need for a great romantic love,' she went on. 'You love Solange enough, it seems to me, to provide her with the help and support which every woman has the right to expect from her husband.'

  'Excuse me,' said Costals firmly, 'I don't live for other people. I am, if I may say so, perfectly natural. And nature does not demand that we should devote ourselves to others. It only demands that we should live.'

  'Solange is natural too. And yet I can assure you that if ever you found yourself in trouble....'

  'I'm never in trouble.'

  Mme Dandillot laughed. The more embarrassed she was, the more relaxed and cheerful she appeared. She thought: 'I shall go away without having done what I came to do, without having delivered my ultimatum. I can see it already.' She also thought it would be a mistake to emphasize Solange's determination, because that would make Costals dig in his heels, and so, before each sentence, she was careful not to draw attention to it. But she was so intent on what she ought not to say that eventually she blurted it out: 'She has a will of iron, that child. She's told herself: "This is the man I want".' She had gone slack, as an organism in the last stages of debility no longer retains its faecal matter: Solange had infected her mother with her own exhaustion. Costals' riposte was immediate: 'I like refusing,' he said. She fell silent, checkmated. Through the silence, from the floor above, could be heard the noise of children rolling a ball about, and a dog scampering across the floor-boards. Mme Dandillot massaged the pouches under her eyes with her fore-finger. The telephone rang. Costals went to answer it.

  ‘…’

  'Do you think the novel is an outmoded literary form? No, monsieur, it's lack of talent that's outmoded. Talent can sustain any literary form. Besid
es, you know as well as I do that the novel's in splendid condition. So don't you think we're wasting our time?'

  ‘…’

  'Meet you? Why? I've just answered your question. But will you allow me to ask you a question in return? I should like to know whether, in your opinion, the telephone interview isn't a journalistic form that should be considered outmoded?'

  ‘…’

  'A gentleman whose opinion is presumably of some value, since he is asked to state it with a view to benefiting the human race, must be engaged in doing something important: thinking, or having a rest from thinking; or deciding things, or controlling someone's fate, or making love, or having a rest from love-making. The telephone hails him brutally, doubly disturbing him - in his mind, by interrupting its train of thought, and in his body, which has to move in order to get to the receiver. And it turns out to be a total stranger, who wants to know if he thinks the novel is an outmoded form and who, as likely as not, will not even publish his reply, because he already has too many contributors, or because the enquiry has been dropped in the meantime. Well, my dear confrère, I say this sort of behaviour is - I'm searching for a mild world - is unworthy of savages....'

  From time to time there was a rattle of machine-gun fire from the adjacent flat (water-pipes?). Mme Dandillot played with her necklace, her mind a blank. She stared at the globe of the table-light, which Costals had switched on while telephoning - the glowing kernel at the heart of this nebula - or at the windows of the neighbouring house, lighting up one after the other in the gathering dusk, like people's faces when something nice is said to them, or when they are spoken to about themselves. She could not have explained why these interiors, revealed for a few seconds between the switching on of the lights and the closing of the shutters, made her dreamy: it was because they suggested to her that unknown interior in which Solange, in the company of this man, would spend her life in happiness.

  Costals, having hung up, went on where they had left off.

  'I cannot understand why custom, which demands so many precautions, signed and sealed, in defining the material rights of intending couples, and their property, demands so few as regards the respective rights of the mind and personality. Today, every government in Europe has adopted a code of morality under which everything you and I understand by morality is trampled underfoot the moment the good of the State is in question. Personally, I consider a work of art as important as a State, and deserving of equally great sacrifices. Salus operis suprema lex. I'm behaving badly to you by leaving you in suspense, but I'm justified in behaving thus, because this suspense saves me from marriage, which would be detrimental to my opus. Citizens allow their rulers the morals of highway robbers in the interests of the State. Allow me, then, in the interests of my work, those departures from commonplace morality which I permit myself when it is at stake. Loving an artist must, for a girl, be as though she loved death....'

  ('Fie, madam Nurse, how you do prattle on!' But he had not finished yet.)

  'There are two categories of men: those who lead, and those who are led. The first are the creators - literary, artistic, scientific, political. In short, the conquistadors: the conquest of thought by the writer, of beauty by the artist, of truth by the scientist and the philosopher, of power by the politician. Conquistadors need peace of mind, which marriage dispels. Let other men marry. Let them have children to make up for all that they fail to contribute to the patrimony of the human race. But let the conquistadors take from coupling, and from paternity, only what may be of use to their economy.'

  'Allow me the last word,' said Mme Dandillot. 'Besides, chivalry demands it,' she simpered, with a forced smile (this simpering, at a moment when she was deeply moved, was somehow monstrous; but it too had materialized in spite of her). 'You, my dear sir, you have your work. It is, if I may say so, your tether, you who loathe being tethered. But I have my daughter. Happy women are fond of their children; unhappy women love them desperately. And moreover, all the affection M. Dandillot failed to give his daughter, I have had to give her myself; I have had to love her enough for two. And now look what's become of my daughter, thanks to you.'

  She took from her bag one of those slips which chemists give their customers after they have been weighed, and handed it to Costals. He read:

  9 December - 59 kg.100

  16 “ - 58 kg.100

  23 “ - 57 kg. 200

  30 “ - 56 kg. 300

  She saw him raise his head. His expression was grave.

  'Do you know what it means to have boils? People get boils when their blood's gone wrong. Solange has had three boils since last month. Do you realize ... do you realize what this means?'

  She took a folded piece of tissue paper out of her bag. Costals put the chemist's slip on the table, and took the piece of paper and opened it. It contained the crown of Solange's broken tooth.

  'You know what's meant by decalcification? You can imagine the extent to which an organism must be affected to produce all these symptoms: loss of weight, boils, and decalcification. And when the only disease it's got is moral rather than physical ...'

  'Have you a good doctor?'

  'From the fees he charges I presume he's a good doctor.'

  'And she told me nothing about this in her letters!'

  'I can see you don't know her.'

  (How to stifle the voice of conscience, as one stops a woman from screaming...)

  There was a ring at the front door. They fell silent. The manservant brought in an express letter. Costals sniffed it.

  'Excuse me, but this missive has the little crooked look of a blackmail letter....'

  He read it, and handed it in silence to Mme Dandillot, who read it in her turn:

  Dear Sir,

  You must surely feel, as we do, that the time has come to reconsider the Universe. Studio 27, a team of young people, has taken upon itself the most delicate of these essential investigations: to take the measure of mankind. Our Council has therefore decided that the first pre-requisite is to open an immense debate on that most urgent problem: God, the Revolution, Poetry. A Congress, to which the thinking Youth of the entire World will be fraternally invited, will be organized by us in March. At the end of these sittings, during which we shall have compared our conclusions and weighed up our desiderata, we shall make proposals - and if necessary demands.

  A preliminary enquiry is needed to provide us with the tools for our task. We would ask you therefore to reply to the following questions (N.B. since Studio 27 is so far able to appear on a limited number of pages only, you are requested to confine your replies to not more than four typewritten pages.)

  Questions:

  1. What is God?

  2. Do you not think that God is the permanent message of the revolution? If so, what place does this thought occupy in your life?

  3. Are the gratuitousness of God and the gratuitousness of the revolution inter-dependent?

  4. Does the doctrine of Studio 27 - God begins where poetry ends - seem to you calculated to condition your vocation as a European?

  5. Reasons for your despair.

  We remain, dear sir, etc.

  P.S. We go to press at nine o'clock this evening. May we hope to have your reply in time?

  'I must confess I hardly understand a word of it,' said Mme Dandillot, handing the letter back to Costals.

  'But Madame, there's nothing to understand.'

  'Ah! good. Perhaps they're schoolboys?' she asked, remembering that her son used to write stuff of that sort at the age of sixteen.

  'Oh no,' said Costals. 'I know some of the signatories. They're men of between thirty and forty. But there are certain intellectual circles in Paris that can hardly be called precocious.'

  He put his hand to his forehead.

  'So you see, we haven't been able to devote half an hour to serious matters without being twice interrupted by those whom I shall call the Fools, because they are people who, first and foremost, lack that decidedly cardinal virtue: common sen
se. French life is continually shot through by the Fools. Women living fantasy lives, semi-intellectuals for whom words are everything, bourgeois blinded by the blinkers of class, proletarians blinded by their ignorance, students blinded by their stupidity - all of them, for one reason or another, out of touch with reality. Yet all of them having a say in the tragicomedy, and - you sense the Shakespearian grandeur of the thing - the Hero, he who holds all our destinies in his hand, whatever he may think in his own mind, not daring to decide without their approval. But the ones who astound me most are these Fools of the intellect who have just burst in on us and buzzed around our ears while we were having a serious discussion. Their race is ours through and through. They are the descendants of the Sorbonagres of Rabelais, the Précieuses and the Médecins of Molière, the Idéologues of Napoleon: intellectual quackery is one of the eternal characteristics of France. With us, they say, everything ends in a song. Everything also ends in a students' jape, but a jape that takes itself for something extremely important....

  'Where were we before all that? Ah yes, decalcification.... Well, it's agreed, I marry your daughter.'

  Mme Dandillot had swallowed with equanimity the reading of the express letter, the digression on the Fools.... She had reached a stage where it seemed to her that the verdict had been given long since, and given against her. She did not leap at Costals' words; it was as though she were henceforth beyond reach. She simply said: