The Bachelors (16 page)

People were drinking yellow, green, and orange liquids, which looked extremely good. M. de Coantré had never been a drinker, and moreover for twenty years had tasted nothing but table wine. He did not even know the names of these prettily-coloured drinks. Caught off his guard, he ordered a
café au lait.

When he looked at the woman, she held his gaze. When she looked at him, he turned his head away. He had no doubt that she had taken the cue, and frowned a little in order to give himself a more virile look.

However, when, after a time, she got up to go, he remained seated. Hadn't he the whole evening in front of him! He thought she looked disappointed, and felt flattered.

Faces passed by, matt female faces, shining male faces. The men had fountain-pens in their breast pockets, and sometimes propelling pencils. Only in Paris do you see this: the French are all intellectuals. Saint-Cyrians in their plumed helmets passed by, followed, like priests, by a wash of malevolence, and women whose youth and gay clothes gave them the appearance of living cakes, and pale adolescents with slender calves, blonde girlish hair, and sickly, acquiescent faces. There was a neatly dressed old man (bearing a certain resemblance to M. de Coantré) carrying a basketful of blessed medals and pictures of Sister Thérèse which he was ostensibly selling, and perhaps
was
selling, to the café customers. All these people, silhouetted against the pale gold light from the setting sun, presented a not unpleasing spectacle. A large number of them gave the impression of being alert, almost intelligent. Most of these faces had a certain character: these people had their own ideas about the world, their own individuality. Only one expression was common to them all: an absence of pride.

In the mind of M. de Coantré, now far from being his usual self, a sensational plan was forming, which was to dine in a restaurant and then to go to Montmartre — Montmartre, whose basilica, seen through the side-streets, seemed strangely close, almost within hand's reach. Oh! no more than a stroll! He would go no farther than the boulevard Rochechouart, and would be home by ten o'clock. He got up, and at the first post office sent an express letter to M. Élie, saying that he had met an old Catholic College friend, Max de Bastaud, who was a 'grass widower' for the month of July and had asked him to dinner in a restaurant. M. de Coëtquidan should not wait up for him. (White lies always came easily to Léon de Coantré.)

Then he took a bus in the direction of Montmartre, got off after two or three stops, and walked northwards through sombre streets. In Paris everything is black, but it is not a deliberate black, the true black of Spain, but the grey-black of dirt: grey houses, grey clothes, grey faces, grey blood. It was half past seven. Now that the sun had gone down, waiters pushed back the awnings in front of the cafés. People enjoying the cool of the evening stood framed in their open windows against the dark background of their rooms, like figures against the dark background of old paintings. The evening meal sent up above each roof a little wisp of smoke which fluttered in a sky as colourless as these faces.

M. de Coantré found himself in the place d'Anvers. The people sitting there were glued to one another like flies on a sore. Faced with this swarming crowd, he hesitated; then he went in and sat down on a bench in front of a name scrawled on the gravel with the point of a walking-stick: Gaston. O Gaston, bring luck to our noble count! On the neighbouring bench a young woman was sitting, a charming female field-mouse. She was reading a book that was either indecent or silly, and probably both, for from time to time she laughed to herself — and at these times she could have been easily aroused. Beside her on the bench was an old Jew in a bowler hat and slippers. M. de Coantré thought that when the man had gone he would go and sit beside her.

On the other benches, sempstresses sat and sewed, showing off the kiss-marks on the inside of their arms (but they had made them themselves — for fun, of course) and continually raising their heads from their handiwork, convinced that people were watching them. The mothers, too, raised their heads from their knitting to see where their children had got to. M. de Coantré's next-door neighbour was a handsome little girl, knitting away with hands pink and shiny as prawns. She was eating a croissant, and he could smell the aroma of munched bread. From time to time she crossed her legs or heaved a sigh. And other little girls revolved round her, shrieking and swooping like September swallows. The air was quite still, but the leaves of the plane-trees, more sensitive, stirred continuously, like spectators seen from a distance moving on the tiers of an arena. And there was a smell of children, in other words a kitten smell.

M. de Coantré would have liked to speak to the little girl — with the most honourable intentions — ask her what stitch she was using, how old she was, whether her father had been killed in the war. But he did not dare. He had to admit that he no longer enjoyed that famous 'Coantré ease of manner' which, in his youth, had so annoyed the Coëtquidans. 'I'm like a racing cyclist,' he said to himself. 'Once I'm started it's all right. But I need someone to give me a shove-off.' Earlier, on the boulevards, he had had the feeling that dusk would bring him the self-confidence he lacked in the sun. Now that dusk had fallen, his excuse was all these people cluttering up the square; in half an hour, with the light nearly gone and the square cleared, he would recover his faculties.

The sparrows wriggled, twittering, in the dust, as though experiencing the same pleasure as human beings in water. They were capitalist sparrows, so fat that their chests, on which a watch-chain would not have been out of place, nearly touched the ground. An apprentice with grimy hands was taking his little brother round the square for the tenth time so that he would sleep tonight like a log and not wake Mum and Dad at two in the morning to ask them to buy him a scooter. And still, around the benches, the poor children were a constant prey to the live wires they had the misfortune to have as mothers. 'Don't touch!' — 'Why?' — 'Mustn't touch anything.' The child (wearing trousers so short for him that his 'little dickie' was peeping out from one leg) would try something else. 'Will you stop running!' — 'Why?' — 'Because.' The child would try something else again. 'Play, stupid! You didn't come here to stand around like an idiot!' The child would try something else. 'What sort of a game is that? Come on, you can find something better to do.' The child would try again. 'René, do you hear what I say! Play at once, or else! . . .'

Suddenly the old Jew who was sitting beside the field-mouse got up and left. 'I must wait a moment,' M. de Coantré said to himself. 'To change benches like that, suddenly, would look odd. ...' After a while he thought, 'Come on, otherwise someone will take the seat.' But it seemed to him as though the eyes of all the people on the other benches were focused on him, and this change of benches would look suspect and ridiculous. So he decided to walk half-way round the square, and if the seat was free when he came back, that would be a sign of destiny. (In other words, he wanted to provide himself with the possibility of not having to act.)

He walked half-way round the square, during which time the seat remained free. Returning, on his little legs, to within ten yards of the bench, he swooped. Too late. A workman with a haggard face had just sat down beside the field-mouse.

M. de Coantré sat down in a chair a few feet away from them. He had to acknowledge that he was not at his best. In twenty years the machine had grown rusty, his tongue paralysed by long silence, his will deadened by disuse.

The light, its task completed, had retreated to the sky, and now touched only the roof-tops. And the statue of Victory, at the top of its tall column in the middle of the square, retained the sun only on its nobler features, its forehead, its helmet and its wings. The square was emptying. Big rats, encouraged by the solitude, trotted from one flower-bed to the next. On the bench where M. de Coantré had been sitting earlier, only the little girl remained, playing alone like a cat playing with its tail (no doubt she could not return home because her mother was out with the key; it was her mother she was waiting for). An old woman was nibbling at a small loaf of bread, breaking off the pieces inside her bag so that no one could see she was eating, for this was her entire dinner. Beside the young woman, the workman smoked and smoked, as a man smokes when he has nothing to eat, or a consumptive pauper who smokes 'to prevent himself from coughing'. Any normal man would have longed to stab this body that had interposed itself between him and the coveted one, and see it collapse like a bundle of rags, but M. de Coantré never dreamed of doing so, he merely thought, 'What a brute!' At last the young woman got up and went off. M. de Coantré followed her at a distance, having buttoned his jacket to make himself look slimmer and more elegant. How terribly fast she walked! M. de Coantré had no idea what he would say if he caught up with her, or even whether he wanted to catch up with her. It looked rather as if he did not want to. When he had persuaded himself that there was no hope, that she was walking too fast for him, he went into top gear, certain of being spared his ordeal by circumstances beyond his control. As the distance between them continued to increase in spite of his efforts, he finally gave up. 'Is it my fault? After all, I haven't got wings.'

Then, having unbuttoned his coat, he told himself with a feeling of gratification that it was time for dinner. All this had' made him ravenous.

But no sooner had he entered a ten-franc restaurant than he was captivated by a charming waitress. Without bothering to examine her in detail, he booked his table and went to wash his hands, which he had had no intention of doing on arrival. What natural grace! Blonde, with a slightly turned-up nose, a touch of powder, scarcely any lipstick, and serving all these frightful dwarfs with the same happy look as if she had been dancing a ballet, smiling at the slightest word, half opening her mouth each time she bent down towards a customer, as though it was the act of leaning forward that opened her mouth by inflating her a little. But perhaps the real secret of her charm lay in the tradition it represented, for it was a face from eighteenth-century France; through it one could see, with a thrill of emotion, the continuity of the race; she could not be called anything else but Manon. And with it all, with that exquisite face and body, these hands which she stretched towards you as she served you! Hands? No, paws, red, swollen, chapped, with black nails, hands that were used for scouring dishes, fingering sordid scraps, unravelling strings of intestines, terrifying hands. M. de Coantré never took his eyes off her. But, charming as she was to everyone, she was no more so to him than to anyone else. M. de Coantré left the restaurant without even having tried to enter into conversation with her. Sure of being able to find her whenever he wanted to, since he knew where she worked, he could surrender with a clear conscience to the luxury of abstinence.

He had even cut short his dinner, because the restaurant was so full that people stood waiting for tables. M. Élie would deliberately have ordered an extra course. M. de Coantré, partly out of good nature, partly out of annoyance, went without his coffee.

If M. de Coantré, instead of a light dinner, had eaten a more lavish meal than usual — we can discuss even the hypothesis of his having drunk more than usual — it is possible that everything that happened after dinner would have been different. Everyone knows that our life can be altered by an act committed in a state of intoxication. But few people realize that a man who is accustomed, say, to eat in six-franc restaurants is drunk after a twenty-franc meal.

How reluctantly the day was dying! It was after nine o'clock and night had not yet fallen; for three hours it had been dragging on. Shop-windows and street lamps were lit up in the dusk, touching lights which seemed to be telling the night to hurry, that everywhere there were dainty feet nervously tapping the floor or the ground, the feet of women waiting for the night to bring them happiness. Soon M. de Coantré emerged into the boulevard Rochechouart, and at once found it just as he had left it nineteen years before; the little, brackish pool of Parisian 'pleasure' was still stagnating there.

A leprous crust of dirt covered the houses, the absurd, out-of-date façades of the 'cabarets ', the stunted trees, the flabby, anaemic faces, the lifeless, wizened hands, dry as dead leaves, which must have smelt of obscurity and toil, the mouths with their discoloured teeth, 'blind mouths' assuredly. It was as if everything had been steeped in filth, or in the soot that fell from these skies. Radio this, that or the other poured out a sort of musical vomit, as though the diners in all the restaurants had started to throw up in 'concert', a sort of anonymous blancmange, sexless and ageless, the music of limbo, fit for a ghostly dance in slow motion in the fields beyond the grave. There was not a single vital impulse either towards good or evil in this crowd in which not even youth was young, nothing vigorous or instinctive or even natural in this crowd with girls' faces, where the malest of the males themselves wielded women's weapons against each other. This bloodless mass was like a nest of swarming maggots. Seeing the spectacle, any healthy man could have had only one reaction: either asceticism or wild indulgence, but not this! Balzac called Paris 'a great ulcer'. The impression here was rather of a great pustule. And the red neon lights reflected on the pavements might have been the blood of these people that had flowed from their bodies, leaving them pale as death. Crossing the Avenue Rachel, one was struck by a breath of tree-borne air from the cemetery of Montmartre, as though the only life among these living beings came to them from the dead.

And it was because of the ugliness and unhealthiness of these beings that pleasure and love itself here assumed the aspect of vice — if it can be said that vice resides not in any act in itself but in a desire of which we are ashamed because we think the object of it is unworthy — and this is the only acceptable definition of the word 'vice'.