Climates (4 page)

When it was quite dark, I crawled closer to Denise and made out a fellow beside her, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer famous in Limoges for his wit, and I could not help hearing their whispered conversation. He asked her to meet him in Paris, at an address that he gave her. She murmured, “Do be quiet,” but I knew she was laughing. I did not relinquish her ankle, which she left to me happily, indifferent, but I felt hurt and immediately conceived a savage contempt for women.

On the table in front of me now, I have the little schoolboy notebook in which I kept a reading record. In it I find: “June 26, D.,” an initial ringed with a small circle. Beneath it I copied out a sentence from
Barrès: “We need not make much of women, but should be moved when we look at them and should admire ourselves for having such pleasant feelings for such meager things.”

Throughout that summer I wooed young girls. I discovered that you could catch them by the waist in dark alleys, kiss them and toy with their bodies. The Denise Aubry episode seemed to have cured me of my romantic flights of fancy. I established a technique for licentious seductions, and it had a guaranteed success rate that filled me with pride and despair.

The following year
,
my father, who had been a regional councillor for some time, was appointed senator for Haute-Vienne. Our way of life changed, and I finished my philosophy studies at a lycée in Paris. Gandumas was now merely our summer residence. It was agreed that I would study law and undertake my military service before choosing a career.

During the summer vacation, I saw Madame Aubry when she came to Gandumas with my cousins from Limoges; I was under the impression it was she who asked to come with them. I offered to show her the grounds and took great pleasure
in directing her toward a pavilion that I called my observatory. Back in the days when I loved her, it was here that I had spent entire Sundays aimlessly daydreaming. She was impressed by the deep wooded gorge in whose depths we could make out rocks surrounded by foaming waters, and the fine smoke from the factories. When she stood up and leaned forward to have a better view of the workmen in the distance, I put my hand on her shoulder. She smiled. I tried to kiss her, but she deflected me gently, not sternly. I told her I would be returning to Paris in October. I would have a small apartment to myself on the Left Bank and would like to see her there. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “It’s difficult.”

In my diary for the winter of 1906–1907, I can see a good many days marked with the letter D. Denise Aubry disappointed me. I was wrong. She was a nice enough woman but, though I cannot say why, I had hoped she would prove to be a studying companion as well as a mistress. She came to Paris to see me and to try on gowns and hats. This inspired strong feelings of contempt in me: I lived inside books and could not understand how anyone could do otherwise. She asked me to lend her
Gide, Barrès, and Claudel about whom I talked so much; what she then said about them wounded me. She had a pretty body, and I longed for her desperately the moment she went home to Limoges. But after two hours spent with her, I wished I could die, evaporate, or have a proper conversation with a male friend.

My two greatest companions were André Halff, an intelligent but rather touchy young Jew I had met at law school, and Bertrand de Jussac, a classmate from Limoges who had enrolled at the Saint-Cyr military academy and came to spend Sundays with us in Paris. When I was with Halff or Bertrand I felt I was diving into a seam of perfect sincerity. On the surface was the Philippe my parents knew, a simple creature sharing some Marcenat conventions along with some feeble elements of resistance, then came Denise Aubry’s Philippe, prone to bouts of sensuality and tenderness and reacting to this with brutality, then Bertrand’s Philippe, courageous and sentimental, and last the one Halff knew, precise and uncompromising. I was also well aware that, somewhere underneath, there was yet another Philippe, one who was more real than all the others, and he alone could have made me happy if I had coincided
with him, but I made no effort even to get to know him.

Have I told you about the room I rented in a small house on the rue de Varenne, furnished in the austere style I favored at the time? A mask of Pascal and one of Beethoven hung on the bare walls. Strange witnesses to my exploits. The divan that served as my bed was covered with a large gray cloth. On the mantelpiece there was one book by Spinoza, one by Montaigne, and a few scientific volumes. Was that out of a desire to surprise or a genuine love of ideas? A mixture of the two, I would say. I was studious and inhuman.

Denise often told me my room frightened her but that she liked it all the same. She had had many lovers before me; she had always dominated them. She grew fond of me—I mention that in all humility. Life teaches us all that, where love is concerned, modesty is easy. Even the most underprivileged can sometimes appeal and the most alluring fail. I can tell you that Denise felt more for me than I did for her, but I will be just as sincere in describing the far more significant episodes in my life when the
situation was completely reversed. In the period we are looking at, that is, between the ages of twenty and twenty-three, I was loved but I loved little myself. If the truth be known, I had no idea what love was. The thought that it could cause pain struck me as intolerably romantic. Poor Denise, I can picture her lying full length on that divan, leaning over me and anxiously asking questions of my face that remained so utterly closed to her.

“Love,” I would say, “what is love?”

“Don’t you know what it is? You shall … You’ll be caught too.”

That word
caught
struck me, I found it crude. I did not care for Denise’s vocabulary and resented her for not talking like Juliet or Clelia Conti. I responded to her person with the sort of exasperation some might show for a badly cut gown. I drew back, then came closer, trying to find an impossible balance. I learned later that over this period she earned a reputation in Limoges for her intelligence, and that my efforts had helped her win the heart of one of the most difficult men in the province. It seems women’s minds are made up of the successive sediments laid down by the men who have loved them, just as men’s tastes retain jumbled, superimposed
images of the women who have come into their lives, and the appalling suffering inflicted on us by one woman often becomes the reason we inspire love in another … and the cause of her unhappiness.

M was Mary Graham, a little English girl whose eyes were shrouded in mystery and whom I met at my aunt Cora’s house. I must tell you about this aunt because she has an intermittent but not insignificant role in the rest of my story. She is one of my mother’s sisters. She married a banker, Baron Choin, and, although I have never known why, always cherished ambitions of playing host to as many ministers, ambassadors, and generals as possible. She established her first nucleus of acquaintances by being mistress to a fairly well-known politician, and earned her victory by exploiting this success methodically and with admirable perseverance. She was to be found on the avenue Marceau from six o’clock every evening, and every Tuesday she gave a dinner for twenty-four. Aunt Cora’s dinners were one of the few subjects about which my Limousin family joked. My father claimed, and I think he was right, that the series never suffered an interruption. In summer, the dinners moved to the villa in Trouville. My mother said that when she
knew my uncle was about to die (he was suffering from stomach cancer), she went to Paris to help her sister and arrived on a Tuesday evening to find Cora setting the table.

“What about Adrien?” she asked.

“He’s very well,” Cora replied, “as well as his condition will allow, only he won’t be able to dine at the table.”

At seven o’clock the following morning, a servant called my mother: “Madame the Baroness regrets to inform Madame Marcenat that Monsieur the Baron died suddenly in the night.”

When I first came to Paris, I had no wish to see my aunt, having been brought up by my father to abhor the social scene. When I met her I did not dislike her. She was a very good woman who liked to help others and, through her connections with men who held a variety of positions, had acquired a haphazard but genuine knowledge of the workings of a company. For the inquisitive, provincial young man that I was, she was a mine of information. She could see I enjoyed listening to her and took to me as a friend. I was invited to avenue Marceau every Tuesday evening. Perhaps there was added coquettishness in her inviting me because she knew that my
mother and father were hostile to her salons, and she was not against triumphing over them by commandeering me.

Aunt Cora’s gatherings inevitably included a number of young ladies as necessary bait. I undertook to win several of them over. I wooed them without loving them, as a point of honor and to prove to myself that victory was possible. I remember that whenever one of them left my bedroom with a tender smile, I would calmly sit down in an armchair, pick up a book, and effortlessly drive away her image.

Do not judge me too severely. I think that, like me, many young men who do not quickly find a truly remarkable mistress or wife almost inevitably resort to this aloof egotism. They are hoping to find a way of living. Women instinctively know that these enterprises are pointless and enter into them only condescendingly. Desire creates illusions for a while and then invincible boredom rears up within these two almost hostile characters. Was I still thinking of Helen of Sparta? That was a feeling I glimpsed deep below the surface, an underwater cathedral beneath the dark depths of my cold strategies.

Occasionally when I went to concerts on Sunday evenings, I would catch sight of a ravishing profile in the distance, and with a strange jolt I would remember the blond Slavic queen of my childhood and the chestnut trees of Gandumas. All through the concert I would offer the powerful emotions stirred by the music to this stranger’s face, and I had the fleeting feeling that if I could only get to know this woman, I would finally find in her the perfect, almost divine creature for whom I wished to live. Then the fallen queen would be lost in the crowd and I would go back to a mistress I did not love on the rue de Varenne.

I now struggle to grasp how I could have harbored two such contradictory personalities. They lived on different planes and never met. The tender lover who hankered for devotion had realized that his beloved did not exist in real life. Refusing to confuse an adored but ill-defined image with the unworthy, vulgar individuals who had walk-on parts in his life, he took refuge in books and saved his love for Madame de Mortsauf and Madame de Rênal. The cynic dined with Aunt Cora and, if he liked the woman seated beside him, entertained her with bright and daring conversation.

After my military service, my father invited me to run our factory with him. He had now moved his offices to Paris, where most of his customers, major newspapers and publishing houses, were based. I was very interested in his business and helped develop it while still pursuing my studies and my reading. I went to Gandumas once a month in winter; in summer my parents lived there and I spent a few weeks with them. I enjoyed rediscovering my solitary childhood walks through Limousin. When I was not at the factory, I worked either in my bedroom (still the same one) or in my little observatory overlooking the Loue ravine. Every hour I would get to my feet, walk to the end of the long avenue of chestnut trees, and walk back at the same brisk pace and return to my reading.

I was glad to be rid of the young women who strung a flimsy but unavoidable web of meetings, complaints, and gossip over my life in Paris. The Mary Graham I mentioned earlier was the wife of a man I knew well. I did not like shaking her husband’s hand. Most of my friends would actually have taken ironic pride in doing so. But my family’s traditions on such subjects were strict. My father’s marriage of convenience had, as is so often the case,
become a marriage of love. He was happy in his own silent and serious way. He never had affairs, at least not after he was married, and yet I sensed a romantic side to him and was obscurely aware that if, like him, I were lucky enough to find a woman something like my Amazon, I too could be happy and faithful.

In the winter of 1909
I was struck down by bronchitis twice in succession and, toward the month of March, our doctor recommended I spend a few weeks in the south. I thought it would be more interesting to visit Italy, a country I did not know. I saw the northern lakes and Venice, and settled in Florence for the final week of my vacation. The first evening, I noticed a young lady at the next table in the hotel; she had an ethereal, angelic beauty, and I could not take my eyes off her. She was accompanied by her mother, who seemed still young, and a somewhat older man. As I left the dining room, I asked the headwaiter who my neighbors were. He
told me they were French, they were Madame and Mademoiselle Malet. Their companion, an Italian general, was not staying in our hotel. At lunchtime the following day their table was empty.

I had letters of recommendation for several inhabitants of Florence including one for Professor Angelo Guardi, the art critic whose publisher was a customer of mine. I had the letter delivered to him and the very same day received an invitation to take tea with him. There, in the gardens of a villa in Fiesole, I discovered some twenty people among whom were my two neighbors. Beneath a wide straw hat and wearing an unbleached linen dress with a blue sailor collar, the young lady looked as lovely as she had the day before. All at once I felt shy and moved away from the group she was in, to go and talk to Guardi. Below us there was a pergola covered in roses.

“I made my garden myself,” Guardi said. “Ten years ago all the land you can see was a meadow. Over there …”

As I looked to where he was pointing, my eyes met those of Mademoiselle Malet, and I was surprised and delighted to find that hers looked directly into mine. An infinitely brief glance, but that was
the minute grain of pollen loaded with unknown forces from which my greatest love blossomed. This look told me without a word that she gave me permission to behave naturally, and as soon as I could I went over to her.