The Bachelors (5 page)

Mme de Coantré let him be. She was worn out. Having fought with her husband, fought with her son, fought with her family, fought with the creditors, she did not want to have to fight again to persuade her son to wash himself. For the moment he was harmless, and he made himself as useful as he could, poor boy. She could still see the scar on Léon's throat ... A single misplaced word, she told herself, and there might be a recurrence of such dramas; Léon was someone not to be roused.

Occasionally, indeed, he treated her in an almost loathsome way. Léon had the good nature, the cheerfulness, the superficial kindliness of the Coantrés. But when a man has only a grain of malevolence in him, he is liable to store it up for his aged father or mother. Sometimes it was only out of nervous exasperation that Léon fumed at his mother — whenever he heard the faint clicking of her rosary beads, or when her face was more lugubrious than usual. This, in particular, was a matter of course; as soon as he saw her suffer, it was as though, like a hen when it sees another wounded, he flung himself at her, climbed on top of her, trampled her down, pecked at her skull until he drew blood. But most often it was, theoretically, for her own good that he abused her. For example, if she had refused to see the doctor, or if, contrary to the latter's orders, she had not eaten enough at meal-times (concealing in her napkin, with the pathetic childishness of the old, a few pieces of the raw meat prescribed for her).

Needless to say, these tirades did far more damage to Mme de Coantré's health than she herself had done by getting rid of a little of her raw meat. Afterwards Léon, impulsive but tenderhearted, would ask her forgiveness with tears in his eyes; but the damage had been done. The crowning absurdity of Léon's behaviour in doing harm to his mother out of love or so-called love for her, showed itself in a scene that frequently recurred. Mme de Coantré was liable to fall asleep in her armchair in the middle of the day. Léon could not bear to see the old lady's ravaged face, eyes closed, mouth open, either because it brought to mind what she would soon be like in death, or because, in his feeble-minded way, he thought the worst had happened, that she
was
dead, so he would wake her with an anguished cry of 'Mother!' and if she did not wake up at once he would shake her roughly. It so happened that Mme de Coantré was racked night after night by the most appalling insomnia, and these snatches of day-time sleep should have been piously respected. But that would have been too much to expect of Léon, who was incapable of controlling his imagination and his nerves.

And what of M. Élie, that other paragon? Well, M. Élie was still living with his sister and Léon. And we shall see what had become of him.

What is one to think of the kind of hoodoo that seemed to bewitch these two men? Was it the shade of old Coëtquidan that hovered over them? Was it the fact that both lived under Mme de Coantré's wing, cut off from everything human, in conditions that would only be suitable for great thinkers or creators (and for very few of these)? We shall see the uncle's life take the same course as was later to be followed by that of his nephew. Surely there must have been some flaw in the machine that propelled these two lives?

Taken in from the age of twenty by his sister, in accordance with their father's wishes, Élie ceased to take an interest in anything whatsoever except his old papers. The family were dazzled by the extent of his knowledge. They were incapable of making the distinction between intelligence and education and thus realizing that Élie was an imbecile endowed with a good memory. That sort of animal goes far in society, and Élie might have become as important as his brother had not his Coëtquidan extremism, finding no counterbalance in reality, since he lived cut off from reality, rapidly eaten up the little merit he possessed. After the birth of Léon, the Coantrés, in order to have more room, moved house from the rue de Bellechasse, where they were then living, to the rue de Lisbonne. One morning, Mme de Coantré noticed that her brother had stayed at home instead of going to his political science class. On being questioned, Élie explained that he could not continue his studies because the rue Saint-Guillaume was too far from the Parc Monceau. 'I can't spend an hour and a half in a bus every day.' His sister, his brother-in-law, and finally his brother all tried to persuade him of the folly of destroying his future for such a childish reason; but he refused to budge. (There was no question of renting him a room near the rue Saint-Guillaume, since Mme de Coantré had made a solemn promise to her father to keep him with her until he got married.) Thus Élie's eccentricities foreshadowed, twenty years ahead, those by which Léon was to ruin
his
life, down to the lunatic reasons he gave for his behaviour.

As to that, of course, the pundits who always find high-sounding motives to explain men's actions will tell you this is impossible, that the reason given by Élie was an excuse, that there must have been some ulterior motive. But there was not. M. de Coëtquidan gave up the idea of ever being a man of consequence simply because he did not want to do an hour's bus journey every day.

From that moment, almost overnight, Élie began to do nothing. It was in 1903 that Léon, at Chatenay, settled down to this pursuit. But already, in 1880, Élie had shown him the way. And this is how this paragon organized his empty life.

He woke up at nine, and stayed in bed until half past ten reading, playing with the cats and picking his nose. At eleven he went for a stroll in the neighbourhood, returning home for lunch. After lunch he read for a while, then walked round Paris from three till seven, browsing in second-hand book-shops and going from café to café. He never had a meal in a restaurant, although he often longed to do so, because his board was paid for at home. He never went away even for a week. He never went out in the evening, and was never invited. Out of moroseness and a horror of putting himself out, he had abandoned social life, no longer calling on people except when he knew he would not find them in. As a result, not surprisingly, society abandoned him, and whereas at first he avoided it solely out of caprice, a time came when there was an additional reason — the fear of being snubbed.

His conversation was a tissue of inanities. Nevertheless — and this is the serious part of it — for every four or five inanities there was one strikingly accurate judgement. Almost invariably he took the opposite view to the majority, and since the latter is more than likely to be astray, it was inevitable that from time to time he should accidentally hit on a truth which anyone but an 'eccentric' would have missed. He had a kind of genius for dressing in an outlandish way, but he was aware of this, and persisted in it out of a taste for the sordid. At family weddings and funerals, he stayed near the back of the church, saying that in his get-up nobody would want him even as a door-keeper. The pathetic life of Léon de Coantré — the army, servant girls, enlargers, creditors, the jungle of Chatenay-sous-Bois – was an epic of heroic romance compared to M. de Coëtquidan's, in which nothing ever happened at all. For four years M. de Coëtquidan got up at half past ten, played with the cats, read the newspapers, and probed the mysteries of vermouth in the course of innumerable meditations at Scossa's, Perroncel's or Weber's. His normal disposition was of the kind we feel when we are waiting our turn at the post office and find some young whippersnapper in front of us who has brought a dozen parcels to be registered for his boss; this disposition was rage, and the urge to insult.

For M. Élie, like his father, was vicious. When he saw a notice saying 'Sale by order of the court' he was pleased; when he read in his newspaper an account of some disaster he would say: 'Another few useless bastards out of the way!' The hatred of this idler for people who were taking a holiday! The hatred of this failure for people who were unsuccessful! He would pinch children on the sly in crowded shops, or, sitting on a bench in a square, would let them brush past him as they ran, and then suddenly trip them up. But this unemployed knight-errant put on lordly airs only when he could do so with impunity; he tyrannized over waiters and cats, who cannot answer, back; he insulted people in letters, and would have insulted them over the telephone, had he tried this machine, but not once in his life did he do so. His perpetual spleen was attenuated by a congenital Coëtquidan timidity, which old Coëtquidan curbed by dint of malice, and M. Octave by dint of money, but which, far from being curbed by anything at all in M. Élie, was aggravated in his case by two of the most crippling sentiments imaginable: the consciousness of being badly dressed, and the consciousness of being sexually null.

From the latter point of view, all the Coëtquidans were rather cold. M. Élie was not exactly cold — in fact he had a ribald imagination — only he did not take things to their logical conclusion. However, as with Léon, we shall examine later M. Élie's attitude towards the fair sex.

Her husband dead and her daughter married and living in her own home, Mme de Coantré thus found herself living with her brother and her son when the war came. M. de Bauret was killed almost at once, and his wife did not long survive him: a heavy blow for Mme de Coantré. To have provided a home for her brother and her son was enough: she offered to take in her granddaughter. But Simone de Bauret, who was then seventeen, and gave signs of becoming a real post-war girl (need I say more?) refused point-blank to bury herself alive with 'Gog and Magog' as she called them, and went to live in Brittany with an old but rich cousin who had taken a fancy to her.

M. Élie was too old to be conscripted. Léon, for some obscure reason, was rejected as unfit. His heroism was of the unassuming kind: he offered his services to an auxiliary hospital in Paris. But it would be no exaggeration to say that to drag himself out of his Arago shell cost him more than it cost many combatants to drag themselves out of their trenches, which is why we may talk of heroism. M. de Coantré's feelings about the hospital can be summed up as follows: deep friendship and absolute devotion towards the wounded, because they were men of the people, and hatred for the nurses, the management, the visitors — in short for anyone belonging to the well-to-do classes. The odd thing is that, in spite of all they might have thought of this man in good health and out of the firing fine, titled, poor, madly incompetent, looked down on by the rest of the staff, and on the whole rather ridiculous, the soldiers liked him well enough.

Eager, painstaking, and still fairly good with his hands (though a good deal less than of old), Léon carried out menial jobs as an assistant medical orderly for three weeks. Then, after committing several blunders, he was condemned to a sort of Chinese torture, which consisted in giving him nothing to do at all, but literally nothing. He wandered from ward to ward, his arms dangling, feeling himself a burden to everyone, trying to make himself as small as possible as though to weigh less, like a man in an overloaded boat, not daring even to raise his eyes, sensing the gibes behind his back, seeing the faces suddenly straighten when he appeared, but nevertheless telling himself that this was his war effort, that it wasn't a hard one, and that he must grin and bear it.

This situation gave rise to a rather splendid scene. One of the patients, a corporal who in more respects than one was far removed from M. de Coantré — he was a school-teacher, of the humblest origin — said to him one day while they were alone on the terrace: 'Monsieur de Coantré, will you allow me to give you a word of advice? Don't stay here. You count for nothing in this hospital. All the bigwigs are against you. One of these days they're going to do you down. So go while the going's good.' Léon thought this over and, the next day, asked the matron if he could be given some work to do, otherwise he would ask for his freedom. 'Certainly we'll give you some work to do,' said Mlle Kahn with her most gracious smile. A few moments later, the youngest nurse (aged seventeen) handed Léon a broom and told him to sweep the ward. He did so, then went to say good-bye to each of the patients, and left for good. But he sold (dirt cheap) a rather fine silver paperweight and had some cigarettes sent round to the hospital with the proceeds.

Mme de Coantré had spent twenty years flapping her wings like a frightened bird over which the hawks are hovering. The hawks were her creditors. She grew pale when the door-bell rang, and put letters away unopened in a drawer for days. 'One must play safe,' the poor woman would sometimes be heard to say, or 'One must strike while the iron's hot.' Such remarks are typical of victims; Mme de Coantré had no more defence against the unbelievable malice of the world than has the surface of the water against a stone that is thrown into it. She had known ill-shaven lawyers who spoke to her with cigarettes dangling from their lips; all that frightful legal gibberish, a disgrace to a civilized nation; solicitors' bills demanding up to forty francs for 'correspondence charges' and fifty francs for 'stationery', whereas the 'findings' and the 'settlements' cost only a franc or two; lawyer-relations who look after you gratis for three years and then in the fourth year, dissatisfied with the imitation Sèvres you have sent them as a token of gratitude, leave you in the lurch with your affairs in a hopeless and inextricable tangle; 'opinions' requested from arch-pettifoggers in the hope that they will support you in the course you have already taken, and when they advise against it you none the less continue on this course out of reluctance to start again from scratch; decisions on which your whole livelihood depends that have to be taken in a quarter of an hour, not because there is any real necessity but because counsel cannot be kept waiting, he has other people to think of besides you. All this she had known, as well as the Calvary of being continually on the verge of bankruptcy, the indifference and the appalling frivolity, comparable only to that of the medical profession, of the men to whom one entrusts one's fortune and with it one's health and one's life. The whole thing tore her to pieces.

When the doctors told Léon that his mother's days were numbered, he softened towards her and looked after her perfectly. However, her death was partly eclipsed for him by the struggle he had to wage with the nurse they had engaged. The latter ate continually — a trait peculiar to all those who are paid to look after the dying — asked for more wine, was impatient because Mme de Coantré took such a long time to die. The doctors had decided that Mme de Coantré would not last beyond the 14th, and when the 17th arrived and she was still alive, the nurse made a rather splendid remark, 'Poor Mme de Coantré! What
is
she up to?' (meaning: what does she mean by it? Can't she see that she's keeping us waiting?) The nurse thought she could do what she liked because she was an old friend of the family, and M. de Coantre's hatred for her was aggravated by violent jealousy because in these last hours his mother spoke more often to the nurse than to him. In a word, although one could not go so far as to say that Mme de Coantré's death passed unnoticed in the struggle between Léon and the nurse, at least it lost some of its sting.