The Girls Read online

  When the laughing man has had a good laugh and a good sneer, etc. ... to the point of thinking, if he is a bit sour: 'Let's have a nice little war to clean up all this riff-raff' (although it's true, adds this deplorable man, that one of the horrors of war, to which attention is never sufficiently drawn, is that women are spared) - when the laughing man has had a good laugh, he turns the switch and the lusting man appears. The man who cannot read 'Girl, 22' without a quiver of excitement.

  Behind each of these advertisements a face, a body, an unknown something which, after all, may well be a heart. Behind these printed pages, a hundred and fifty living women, living at this very moment, each of whom wants a man - and why not me? - each of whom, since she is there, is ready for adventure, legal or illegal (the legal being a thousand times worse than the other), each of whom has reached such a pitch of deprivation that she is ready to offer herself to the first comer. The men, for their part, demand 'large fortunes'. We read this, for instance: 'Gentleman wishes meet young pretty woman with large fortune view marriage.' Full stop. You: young, pretty, with large fortune. Me ... well, me, 'a gentleman': aren't you satisfied? Most of the women do at least specify 'gentleman with job' - bed and board. The bed first. And what more natural, what more respect-worthy than this demand? 'You don't feel poverty any more when you're under a blanket', as a Marseilles street-walker once rather splendidly observed. (Sometimes you feel a different sort of poverty. But that's another matter.) The lecherous man, scanning these pages, sees them pulsating as the sea pulsates, swarming as the Roman arena swarmed when the beasts were let loose in it. There are too many of them, and he loses heart - like the art-lover confronted with two thousand pieces in a museum. A herd of women enclosed in the arena. Menacing as the beasts of the arena, and yet, like them, half innocent and defenceless: all victims, even the worst. It is simply a matter of shooting an arrow into the heap. Brutes, cads and perverts, swindlers and blackmailers, all the archers are up there choosing their prey. Every kind of threat against the race of woman. Extremes of candour and baseness, deceptions, disappointments, all the social dramas, even happiness, simmer in the witches' cauldron of a matrimonial gazette. Absurdity and pathos too, as in everything that has to do with life - and this is life itself, a microcosm of life.

  As for the thinking man, he sees this matrimonial journal, so ridiculous from one point of view, as an extremely valuable piece of social machinery.

  The author remembers coming across the alluring phrase select company in an advertising brochure for some spa hotel. And one often hears people say to each other: 'You should go to the So-and-So's. You'll make a lot of social connections there.' Whereupon every well-born person draws himself up and recalls the remark of the old aristocratic lady who, on her death-bed, pestered no doubt by tiresome visitors, left her grand-children with this final word of advice: 'Above all, avoid social connections.'

  And yet, after this initial reaction, one is struck by all the misfortunes engendered by the lack of connections. It seems a trite thing to say; but in fact it is less widely realized than one might think. One is struck by the vast number of agreeable things people lack simply because they have not known which door to knock at. And it is surely tragic to think of those doors simply waiting to be opened on to gardens of Eden which remained closed because people passed them by.

  The people who wait all their lives for the one person who was made for them - who always exists - and who die without having met that person: the men who fail to find an outlet for their abilities and waste their lives in inferior jobs: the girls who remain unmarried when they could have made a man happy as well as themselves: the people who sink ever deeper into penury when there are charitable organizations which might have been expressly created for them; and all this because none of them happened to know of this person, that organization, that vacancy - it is a problem that can haunt one.

  And it applies to small things as well as big. There is the book which, at a particular moment, might have raised your spirits, but which you did not know about. There is the place that would have made the perfect setting for your love affair, the treatment that would have cured your illness, the scheme that would have enabled you to gain time. They were all there waiting for you, but no one pointed them out to you because you had too few connections. The promised land is all around you, and you do not know it - like a wasp trying to get out of a room, endlessly beating and buzzing against the window- pane although the window is ajar a few inches away. A man is thrown into the water with his wrists tied, and no one has taught him the knack of freeing himself - yet such a knack exists.

  This counterpoint of offers and appeals resembles the flight of birds criss-crossing in the vastness of space until at last some of them meet and they fly off two by two. Montaigne tells us that his father would have liked to see in every town 'a certain place appointed, to which those who needed anything could betake themselves. Such a one desires company for a journey to Paris. Another requires a servant of a certain quality. Yet another a master, etc …' And he cites the example of two 'most excellent persons' who died in penury and who would have been succoured if their sad plight had been known. Truly, the man who first thought of using a gazette to help people find what they seek should have a statue erected in his honour. Anything designed to bring people together deserves encouragement, even when they are brought together for sentimental ends, with all the silliness and triviality that implies.

  The old lady who enjoined her family with fierce pride, 'Above all, avoid connections', was condemning anyone who took her at her word to all the miseries of non-fulfilment - of soul as well as body - and an agonizing regret for all that could have been theirs for the asking, but which eluded them. Turning in on oneself is bad for all except strong and exceptional natures, and even then only on condition that it is relative and not continuous. Others pay dearly for it. One cannot shut oneself up in one's room with impunity. One cannot live on oneself alone with impunity. One cannot send one's fellow-creatures 'packing' with impunity. And it is right that this should be so, since turning in on oneself - unless it is dictated by high intellectual or spiritual motives - is more often than not the result of idleness, egotism, impotence, in short that 'fear of living' which has not yet been sufficiently recognized as one of the major evils that afflict humanity.

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Thérèse Pantevin

  La Vallée Maurienne

  6 October 1926

  †

  A.M.D.G.

  My Beloved, once again you have failed to answer me! God has not permitted it; blessed be His Holy Name.

  Convinced that your silence means that great things are happening - no doubt you are working - I will respect that silence. Yes, until All Saints Day even. On that date I will send you another De Profundis.

  I kiss your right hand, the one that writes.

  Marie Paradis

  p.s. Do not put your name on the envelope.

  This letter remained unanswered.

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Thérèse Pantevin

  La Vallée Maurienne

  All Saints Day

  Quick, let me have something to hold in my hands which has felt your breath on it! If you only knew the people around me! If you only knew what a horrible thing it is to be entirely dependent on a power that does not wish you well. Only you can save me. Gjve me life, so that I can be sure of having it for all eternity.

  This is a supreme adjuration. You are the breath of life to me: do not let me expire.

  Marie

  I have had my photo taken, and am sending it to you. As you see, I am young but not pretty. And in fact the photo flatters me.

  (Do not put your name on the envelope.)

  to Thérèse Pantevin

  La Vallée Maurienne

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Mademoiselle,

  I never for a moment imagined that one day I should find mysel
f answering one of your extravagant missives. Alas! I was touched by the most recent ones; the damage is done. You say that your life is in my hands. We know all about that. But the possibility that you may really believe it is one that I must face. Ought I, in that case, to ignore these appeals?

  I cannot be so hard-hearted. Let us see what can be done for you.

  There is no chance of the feeling you think you have for me ever arousing the slightest echo on my side. Do not persist in it: it would be like beating your head against a wall; you would wear yourself out. And besides, even if you were to reach me, you would get nothing from me, for I have nothing to give to anyone. Let me tell you this once and for all. Do not imagine that I shall ever weaken.

  However, if that path is closed to you, it is not the only one. There is obviously a certain force in you, and it would be a pity to waste it on the first oaf you came across, with whom you might become infatuated for want of anyone better. When allowance is made for the element of sentimental gush in your devotion, which comes of your sex and age, what remains is perhaps not wholly bad; though it would be strange if God were to find it acceptable. I do not know exactly what he is, having not an atom of faith. But in him, or in the idea you have of him, you will certainly be better off than in making a 'home'. Homes! Plague centres, every one of them. If there is anything I can do for you, it is to encourage you in this quest, and to follow your progress with sympathy from afar - although, as I say, I believe neither in the divinity of Jesus Christ nor in the divinity of anyone else. But the rarefied heights of non-belief are familiar to me. They will be my prayer for you, if you wish. For it is all the same thing. Luckily.

  Do not write me letters eight pages long every three days, as you will no doubt consider yourself entitled to do after this one. I tell you frankly, I shall leave them unread. My interest in you amounts to my being able to read a letter from you about once every three weeks, not every three days. Do not give in to the urge to write to me until you have put up such a fight as will have done you credit. And do not expect me to answer you. I will only answer you if I feel inclined, which is to say that my replies will be few and far between.

  Upon which, I remain. Mademoiselle, yours sincerely,

  Costals

  to Mademoiselle Rachel Guigui

  Carqueiranne (Var)

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  6 November 1926

  Dear Guiguite,

  Could I ask you to post from Carqueiranne (with apologies for sending it to you in a sealed envelope) this letter addressed to a young lady in the Loiret who has been wishing me well (from the Loiret) for the past four years. Since she has literally nothing else to do but think about me, you can imagine what a good time she has. Plain, anything but desirable, but intelligent, cultivated, worthy. She is an orphan (her father was a country solicitor of no standing), she learnt Latin all by herself, etc. ... in fact altogether most estimable. I have a certain sympathy for her, being acutely aware of what it must be like to be a penniless spinster approaching thirty, and of a fairly superior type, in Saint-Léonard (Loiret) of all places. It's pathetic to see a woman of this calibre condemned either to turn into a sour old virgin, or to marry a local shopkeeper, or to take a lover (which might not be easy, since nature has not been over-kind to her), and let herself go. I keep up the illusion of friendship with her, because I know it bolsters her up. She is coming to Paris in a day or two, and this time I don't want to see her. A woman who loves you, but whom you neither love nor desire, is just possible as a correspondent. But face to face, ouch! I am giving the strictest orders at home to say I have left for the Midi.

  There is another young lady, this time from the Manche, to whom I've just written after leaving unanswered three or four letters she has sent me over the past three years. The other day she sent me her photograph - she's a proper little peasant, in a black orphan's smock; you couldn't imagine anything more ill-favoured. She's completely mad (in the mystical mode), and would be nothing without her madness, which is her only asset. A remark in one of her letters struck a chord in me, and opened, if not my heart, at least that place deep inside one where kindness and pity are thought to dwell: 'If you only knew what a terrible thing it is to be entirely dependent on a power that does not wish you well!' I imagine she means her family. Since it is not easy, with piety, to distinguish the boundary between madness and sublimity, I have plumped for sublimity and would like her to take advice as to whether she may not be made for the convent: anything would be better than that farmyard with all those cow-hands full of contempt for the little mystic. I'm sure that you, dear Guiguite, who are imbued with the humane spirit of Israel, would have approved of my answering her in the end. I know it was rash of me: good deeds are always rash. But I don't like refusing people the little bit of happiness they ask of you when their paths cross yours.

  Nothing in particular to say to you, except to thank you for the pleasure you have given me so faithfully for so many months. Now that you are at Carqueiranne (I hope you had a good journey), you will have seen the fishermen's nets held up on the surface of the water by fragments of cork. My nights with you are like those fragments of cork holding me up on the surface of life. Without those nights, and the nights spent with my other little companions, I believe I would sink like a stone, what with the stupidity of my family, the vile- ness of my fellow-writers, and the time my friends make me waste.

  I hope the latest of your protectors is a fine figure of a man and a nice chap. Come back to me in good form at the end of the month. I don't think I should mind losing you: it would amuse me to have a gap to fill. But on the whole I should be glad if you stayed.

  Dear Guiguite, I love the pleasure I have with you, I love the pleasure I give you; in short, you are eighteen and I like you. Good-bye, my dear.

  Your devoted servant,

  C.

  to Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  [Letter dated from Carqueiranne and enclosed with the preceding one.]

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  7 November 1926

  Dear Mademoiselle,

  What a bore! Here I am in this God-forsaken place, where I shall be stuck all the time you are in Paris. If I had been nearer, I would willingly have popped up to Paris to spare you this disappointment. But from here! ...

  If you need help of any kind in Paris, a letter of introduction, or anything, let me know at once at Carqueiranne, 'c/o Mile Rachel Guigui, 14 rue de la Plage.' Mile Guigui is an elderly Jewess with whom I am lodging for a few days. Incorrigible as I am, I shall no doubt end up by falling into her arms, assuming that one can be inflamed by a person called Guigui, which I find hard to believe.

  As I write to you, I can see from my window the irradiations of the zenith multiply themselves in sparkling facets on the shimmering methylene-blue of the sea. Then I think what it must be like to spend eleven months of the year at Saint-

  Léonard (Loiret) And the beauty of the sea no longer

  seems quite so innocent.

  Cordially yours,

  C.

  Well, no! I've just lied to you. I can't see the sea at all at the moment, for the simple reason that I am writing this in a café in Carqueiranne from which it is not visible. Even to tell you this harmless lie would have been painful to me. It is true that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, it does happen that I do things that are painful to me. Rarely, but sometimes.

  to Pierre Costals

  Carqueiranne

  Mademoiselle Andrée Hacquebaut

  Hôtel des Beaux-Arts Paris

  11 November 1926

  Costals, dear Costals, was your letter from Carqueiranne a disappointment to me? Yes and no. Yes, because to come to Paris and miss you is too idiotic. No, because a little letter like that easily makes up for a few moments of your presence. Your niceness! Still the same after all these years! So you would really, if you had not been so far away, have 'popped up' to Paris simply to
see me! And your adorable postscript, the guilt I can detect in you for having told me an insignificant little lie! How could one not love you, in spite of your moods, your weeks of silence, your harsh words, the teasing, rather disturbing side of you, the cruel mischievous- ness, when all this is mitigated and absolved by your truly divine goodness and delicacy of feeling? I have had nothing but joy through you.

  I am alone in my room in this little hotel. The fire is roaring; down below, Paris stirs and bustles in the rain. Your letter is on the table in front of me. It will help me to live through these few days in Paris without you. It will help me, too, to say to you everything I have to say. For this is a very solemn letter.

  During the summer at Saint-Léonard I find almost acceptable a pattern of life which in winter makes me shudder with horror. There are, even at Saint-Léonard, nice young men to go boating or bathing with, to while away the time with, and they suffice. With the beginning of the cold weather, with lamps and books, all that comes to an end. The cold makes me feel the need for the things of the mind. And then I am drawn to Paris. A few hours in Paris - yesterday Beethoven at the Salle Gaveau, this morning the Fragonards at the Galerie Charpentier - and I say to myself: No, it's impossible! I have no vanity about being what I am, but I must recognize it. And what I am makes me refuse to marry a nonentity. I have always had the idea firmly rooted in my mind that a woman's love cannot be an act of condescension, since in the carnal act it is she who is the victim.

  A provincial girl without means and without connections, I cannot make a 'good' marriage which would bring me money and position - for example a marriage in Paris, into a cultivated, well-to-do milieu (to find a cultivated husband I should have to live in Paris half the year, independently, and I can't afford that). A 'good' marriage being impossible, I only want a marriage that will allow me to be overtly in love. If I were to remain equally lonely and deprived, and in addition tied for life to a man who bored me but whom nevertheless I cared for sufficiently not to want to make him feel it, with all the disadvantages I have now, minus my freedom, plus innumerable worries, what would be the point? Only a great love and the knowledge of performing a really fruitful task would make the sacrifice of my liberty worthwhile.