Nausea (18 page)

"The premature death of his son Octave, who had entered the Ecole Poly'technique at a very early age and of whom he wanted to 'make a leader' was a terrible blow to Olivier Blevigne. He was never to recover from it and died two years later, in February, 1908.

"Collected speeches: Moral Forces (1894: out of print), The Duty to Punish (1900: all speeches in this collection were given a propos of the Dreyfus Case: out of print), Will-power (1902: out of print). After his death, his last speeches and a few letters to intimate friends were collected under the title Labour Im-probus (Plon, 1910). Iconography: there is an excellent portrait of him, by Bordurin, at the Bouville museum."

An excellent portrait, granted. Olivier Blevigne had a small black moustache, and his olive-tinted face somewhat resembled Maurice Barres. The two men had surely met each other: they used to sit on the same benches. But the deputy from Bouville did not have the nonchalance of the President of the League of Patriots. He was stiff as a poker and sprang at you from his canvas like a jack-in-the-box. His eyes sparkled: the pupil was black, the cornea reddish. He pursed up his fleshy little mouth and held his right hand against his breast.

How this portrait annoyed me! Sometimes Blevigne seemed too large or too small to me. But today I knew what to look for.

I had learned the truth turning over the pages of the Satirique Bouvillois. The issue of 6 November, 1905 was devoted entirely to Blevigne. He was pictured on the cover, tiny, hanging on to the mane of old Combes, and the caption read: "The

Lion's Louse." Everything was explained from the first page on: Olivier Blevigne was only five feet tall. They mocked his small stature and squeaking voice which more than once threw the whole Chamber into hysterics. They accused him of putting rubber lifts in his shoes. On the other hand, Mme Blevigne, nee Pacome, was a horse. "Here we can well say," the paper added, "that his other half is his double."

Five feet tall! Yes, Bordurin, with jealous care, had surrounded him with objects which ran no risk of diminishing him; a hassock, a low armchair, a shelf with a few little books, a small Persian table. Only he had given him the same stature as his neighbour Jean Parrottin and both canvases had the same dimensions. The result was that the small table, in one picture, was almost as large as the immense table in the other, and that the hassock would have almost reached Parrottin's shoulder. The eye instinctively made a comparison between the two: my discomfort had come from that.

Now I wanted to laugh. Five feet tall! If I had wanted to talk to Blevigne I would have had to lean over or bend my knees. I was no longer surprised that he held up his nose so impetuously: the destiny of these small men is always working itself out a few inches above their head.

Admirable power of art. From this shrill-voiced mannikin, nothing would pass on to posterity save a threatening face, a superb gesture and the bloodshot eyes of a bull. The student terrorised by the Commune, the deputy, a bad-tempered midget; that was what death had taken. But, thanks to Bordurin, the President of the Club de l'Ordre, the orator of "Moral Forces," was immortal.

"Oh, poor little Pipo!"

The woman gave a stifled cry: under the portrait of Octave Blevigne "son of the late ..." a pious hand had traced these words:

"Died at the Ecole Poly technique in 1904." "He's dead! Just like the Arondel boy. He looked intelligent. How hard it must have been for his poor mother! They make them work too hard in those big schools. The brain works, while you're asleep. I like those two-cornered hats, it looks so stylish. Is that what you call a 'cassowary?'"

"No. They have cassowaries at Saint-Cyr." In my turn I studied the prematurely dead polytechnician. His wax complexion and well-groomed moustache would havebeen enough to turn one's idea to approaching death. He had foreseen his fate as well: a certain resignation could be read in his clear, far-seeing eyes. But at the same time he carried his head high; in this uniform he represented the French Army.

Tu Marcellus erisl Manibus date lilia flenis . . .

A cut rose, a dead poly technician: what could be sadder?

I quietly followed the long gallery, greeting in passing, without stopping, the distinguished faces which peered from the shadows: M. Bossoire, President of the Board of Trade; M. Faby, President of the Board of Directors of the Autonomous Port of Bouville; M. Boulange, businessman, with his family; M. Ranne-quin, Mayor of Bouville; M. de Lucien, born in Bouville, French Ambassador to the United States and a poet as well; an unknown dressed like a prefect; Mother Sainte-Marie-Louise, Mother Superior of the Orphan Asylum; M. and Mme Thereson; M. Thi-boust-Gouron, General President of the Trades Council; M. Bo-bot, principle administrator of the Inscription Maritime; Messrs. Brion, Minette, Grelot, Lefebvre, Dr. and Mme Pain, Bordurin himself, painted by his son, Pierre Bordurin. Clear, cold looks, fine features, thin lips, M. Boulange was economical and patient, Mother Sainte-Marie-Louise of an industrious piety, M. Thiboust-Gouron was as hard on himself as on others. Mme Thereson struggled without weakening against deep illness. Her infinitely weary mouth told unceasingly of her suffering. But this pious woman had never said: "It hurts." She took the upper hand: she made up bills of fare and presided over welfare societies. Sometimes, she would slowly close her eyes in the middle of a sentence and all traces of life would leave her face. This fainting spell lasted hardly more than a second; shortly afterward, Mme Thereson would re-open her eyes and finish her sentence. And in the work room they whispered: "Poor Mme Thereson! She never complains."

I had crossed the whole length of the salon Bordurin-Renaudas. I turned back. Farewell, beautiful lilies, elegant in your painted little sanctuaries, good-bye, lovely lilies, our pride and reason for existing, good-bye you bastards!

Monday:

I'm not writing my book on Rollebon any more; it's finished, I can't write any more of it. What am I going to do with my life?

It was three o'clock. I was sitting at my table; I had set beside me the file of letters I stole in Moscow; I was writing:

"Care had been taken to spread the most sinister rumours. M. de Rollebon must have let himself be taken in by this manoeuvre since he wrote to his nephew on the 13 th of September that he had just made his will."

The Marquis was there: waiting for the moment when I should have definitively installed him in a niche in history, I had loaned him my life. I felt him like a glow in the pit of my stomach.

I studdenly realized an objection someone might raise: Rollebon was far from being frank with his nephew, whom he wanted to use, if the plot failed, as his defence witness with Paul I. It was only too possible that he had made up the story of the will to make himself appear completely innocent.

This was a minor objection; it wouldn't hold water. But it was enough to plunge me into a brown study. Suddenly I saw the fat waitress at "Camille's" again, the haggard face of M. Achille, the room in which I had so clearly felt I was forgotten, forsaken in the present. Wearily I told myself:

How can I, who have not the strength to hold to my own past, hope to save the past of someone else?

I picked up my pen and tried to get back to work; I was up to my neck in these reflections on the past, the present, the world. I asked only one thing: to be allowed to finish my book in peace.

But as my eyes fell on the pad of white sheets, I was struck by its look and I stayed, pen raised, studying this dazzling paper: so hard and far seeing, so present. The letters I had just inscribed on it were not even dry yet and already they belonged to the past.

"Care had been taken to spread the most sinister ru-

mours

I had thought out this sentence, at first it had been a small part of myself. Now it was inscribed on the paper, it took sides against me. I didn't recognize it any more. I couldn't conceive it again. It was there, in front of me; in vain for me to trace some sign of its origin. Anyone could have written it. But I ... I wasn't sure I wrote it. The letters glistened no longer, they were dry. That had disappeared too; nothing was left but their ephemeral spark.

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirrorùand me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was notpresent did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to beùand behind them . . . there is nothing.

This thought absorbed me a few minutes longer. Then I violently moved my shoulders to free myself and pulled the pad of paper towards me.

". . . that he had just made his will."

An immense sickness flooded over me suddenly and the pen fell from my hand, spluttering ink. What happened? Did I have the Nausea? No, it wasn't that, the room had its paternal, everyday look. The table hardly seemed heavier and more solid to me, nor my pen more compact. Only M. de Rollebon had just died for the second time.

He was still there inside me a little while ago, quiet and warm, and I could feel him stir from time to time. He was quite alive, more alive to me than the Self-Taught Man or the woman at the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous." He undoubtedly had his whims, he could stay several days without showing himself; but often, on a mysteriously fine day, like a weather prophet, he put his nose out and I could see his pale face and bluish cheeks. And even when he didn't show himself, he was a weight on my heart and I felt full up.

Nothing more was left now. No more than, on these traces of dry ink, is left the memory of their freshness. It was my fault: I had spoken the only words I should not have said: I had said that the past did not exist. And suddenly, noiseless, M. de Rollebon had returned to his nothingness.

I held his letters in my hands, felt them with a kind of despair:

He is the one, I said, he is the one who made these marks, one by one. He leaned on this paper, he put his hand against the sheets to prevent them from turning under his pen.

Too late: these words had no more sense. Nothing existed but a bundle of yellow pages which I clasped in my hands. It is true there was that complicated affair. Rollebon's nephew assassi-

nated by the Czar's police in 1810, his papers confiscated and taken to the Secret Archives, then, a hundred and ten years later, deposited by the Soviets who acted for him, in the State Library where I stole them in 1923. But that didn't seem true, and I had no real memory of a theft I had committed myself. It would not have been difficult to find a hundred more credible stories to explain the presence of these papers in my room: all would seem hollow and ephemeral in face of these scored sheets. Rather than count on them to put me in communication with Rollebon, I would do better to take up spirit rapping. Rollebon was no more. No more at all. If there were still a few bones left of him, they existed for themselves, independently, they were nothing more than a little phosphate and calcium carbonate with salts and water.

I made one last attempt; I repeated the words of Mme de Genlis by which I usually evoked the Marquis: "His small, wrinkled countenance, clean and sharp, all pitted with smallpox, in which there was a singular malice which struck the eye, no matter what effort he made to dissemble it."

His face appeared to me with docility, his pointed nose, his bluish cheeks, his smile. I could shape his features at will, perhaps with even greater ease than before. Only it was nothing more than an image in me, a fiction. I sighed, let myself lean back against the chair, with an intolerable sense of loss.

Four o'clock strikes. I've been sitting here an hour, my arms hanging. It's beginning to get dark. Apart from that, nothing in this room has changed: the white paper is still on the table, next to the pen and inkwell. But I shall never write again on this page already started. Never again, following the Rue des Mutiles and the Boulevard de la Redoute, shall I turn into the library to look through their archives.

I want to get up and go out, do anythingùno matter whatù to stupefy myself. But if I move one finger, if I don't stay absolutely still, I know what will happen. I don't want that to happen to me yet. It will happen too soon as it is. I don't move; mechanically I read the paragraph I left unfinished on the pad of paper: "Care had been taken to spread the most sinister rumours. M. de Rollebon must have let himself be caught by this manoeuvre since he wrote to his nephew on the 13th of September that he had just made his will."

The great Rollebon affair was over, like a great passion. I must find something else. A few years ago, in Shanghai, inMercier's office, I suddenly woke from a dream. Then I had another dream, I lived in the Czar's court, in old palaces so cold that the icicles formed above the doors in winter. Today I wake up in front of a pad of white paper. The torches, the ice carnivals, the uniforms, the lovely cool shoulders have disappeared. Something has stayed behind in this warm room, something I don't want to see.

M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence. I furnished the raw material, the material I had to re-sell, which I didn't know what to do with: existence, my existence. His part was to have an imposing appearance. He stood in front of me, took up my life to lay hare his own to me. I did not notice that I existed any more, I no longer existed in myself, but in him; I ate for him, breathed for him, each of my movements had its sense outside, there, just in front of me, in him; I no longer saw my hand writing letters on the paper, not even the sentence I had writtenùbut behind, beyond the paper, I saw the Marquis who had claimed the gesture as his own, the gesture which prolonged, consolidated his existence. I was only a means of making him live, he was my reason for living, he had delivered me from myself. What shall I do now?