The Mandarins

‘But it never was!’ Henri said, surprised.

‘How can I get it through your thick skull?’ Dubreuilh said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Being on the side of the Resistance doesn’t constitute a political programme nowadays.’

‘No, I don’t have a programme,’ Henri admitted. ‘But whenever the occasion demands it, L’Espoir does choose sides.’

‘No, it doesn’t, not any more so than all the other papers. You argue about trifles, but when it comes to the big things, all of you somehow manage to agree on covering up the truth.’ There was anger in Dubreuilh’s voice. ‘From Figaro to L’Humanité, you’re all nothing but a bunch of humbugs. You say yes to de Gaulle, yes to Yalta, yes to everything; you act as if you believe there’s still a Resistance and that we’re heading steadily towards socialism. Your friend Luc has really been going to town with that hogwash in his recent editorials. All we’re doing, really, is marking time; in fact, we’re even beginning to retreat. And not a one of you has the guts to tell the truth!’

‘I always thought you agreed with L’Espoir,’ Henri said. He was stunned; his heart began beating rapidly. During the past four days, he had meshed with that paper as one meshes with one’s own life. And then all of a sudden L’Espoir was being indicted. And by Dubreuilh!

‘Agree with what?’ Dubreuilh asked. ‘L’Espoir has no line. You’re constantly complaining that nothing’s been nationalized. And what do you do about it? Nothing. Now what would be interesting would be to tell who’s putting on the brakes, and why.’

‘I don’t want to take a stand for or against any particular class,’ Henri said. ‘Reforms will come about when public opinion demands them, and what I’m trying to do is arouse opinion. I can’t very well do that if I’m going to set half my readers against me, can I?’

‘You can’t possibly believe that the class struggle is outmoded, can you?’ Dubreuilh asked suspiciously.

‘No.’

‘Then don’t come telling me about public opinion,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘On one side, you have the proletariat which wants reforms, and on the other, the bourgeoisie which doesn’t. The middle classes are treading water because they don’t know where their true interests lie any more. But don’t get the idea you can influence them; it’s the situation that will do the deciding.’

Henri hesitated. No, the class struggle wasn’t outmoded. All right. But did that automatically doom any appeal to people’s good intentions, to their common sense? ‘Their interests are quite complex,’ he replied. ‘I’m not at all convinced you can’t influence them.’

Dubreuilh was about to say something, but Henri cut him off. ‘Another thing,’ he said spiritedly. ‘The workers who read L’Espoir read it because it gives them a change from L’Humanité; it gives them a breath of fresh air. If I take a class stand, I’ll either repeat what the Communist papers are saying, or I’ll take issue with them. And either way, the workers will drop me.’ In a conciliatory voice, he added, ‘I reach a lot more people than you do, you know. That means I have to have a much broader platform.’

‘Yes, you do reach a lot of people,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘But you yourself just gave the reason why. If your paper pleases everybody, it’s because it disturbs nobody. It attacks nothing, defends nothing, evades every problem. It simply makes for pleasant reading, like a local sheet.’

Dubreuilh’s outburst was followed by a brief silence. Paula had returned to the table and was sitting next to Anne; she seemed outraged, and even Anne was quite embarrassed. Julien had disappeared. Scriassine, awakened from his meditations, looked back and forth from Henri to Dubreuilh, as if he were watching a tennis match. But it was a strictly one-sided match; Henri had been overwhelmed by the sudden violence of the attack.

‘What are you getting at?’ he asked.

‘Stop shilly-shallying,’ Dubreuilh answered. ‘Take the bit in your teeth and define your position in relation to the Communist Party.’

Henri looked at Dubreuilh suspiciously. It often happened that Dubreuilh would heatedly involve himself in the affairs of others, and, just as often, you came to realize that he had in fact made them his own affairs. ‘In short, what you’re proposing is that I accept the SRL’s entire programme.’

‘Yes,’ Dubreuilh replied.

‘But you don’t really expect L’Espoir to become the official organ of the movement, do you?’

‘It would be perfectly natural,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘L’Espoir’s weakness stems from the fact that it doesn’t represent anything. Besides, without a newspaper the movement has almost no chance of getting anywhere. Since our goals are the same …’

‘Our goals, but not our methods,’ Henri interrupted. Regretfully, he thought, ‘So that’s why Dubreuilh was so impatient to see me!’ The good spirits with which he began the evening had, in the course of the last few minutes, completely deserted him. ‘Isn’t it ever possible to spend an evening among friends without talking politics?’ he asked himself. There was nothing in their conversation so terribly urgent that Dubreuilh couldn’t have put it off for another day or two. He had become as much a crank as Scriassine.

‘Precisely. And take my word for it, it would be to your advantage to change your methods,’ Dubreuilh said.

Henri shook his head. ‘I’ll show you letters I receive every day, letters from intellectuals especially – teachers, students. What they all like about L’Espoir is its fairness. If I tack on a programme, I lose their trust.’

‘Of course. Intellectuals are delighted when you encourage them to be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl,’ Dubreuilh replied. ‘Their trust? Who needs it?’

‘Give me two or three years and I’ll lead them by the hand to the SRL.’

‘If you really believe that, then all I can say is you’re a starry-eyed idealist!’ Dubreuilh said.

‘Possibly,’ Henri replied with a slight show of annoyance. ‘But in ’41 they branded me an idealist too.’ Firmly, he added, ‘I have my own ideas about what a newspaper should be.’

Dubreuilh gestured evasively We’ll talk about it again. But believe me, six months from now either L’Espoir aligns itself with our politics or it’s all washed up.’

‘All right, we’ll talk about it again in six months,’ Henri said.

Suddenly, he felt tired and at a loss. Dubreuilh’s proposition had taken him by surprise, but he was absolutely resolved to do nothing about it. He felt a desperate need to be alone in order to clear his mind. ‘I have to be getting home,’ he said.

Paula remained silent on the way home, but they were no sooner in the apartment than she began her attack. ‘Are you going to give him the paper?’

‘Of course not,’ Henri said.

‘Are you really sure?’ she asked. ‘Dubreuilh wants it, and he is stubborn.’

‘I’m pretty stubborn myself.’

‘But you always end up by giving in to him,’ Paula said, her voice suddenly exploding. ‘Why did you ever agree to join the SRL? As if you didn’t have enough to do already! You’ve been back for four days now, and we haven’t had five minutes together. And you haven’t written a line of your novel!’

‘I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Things are beginning to settle down at the paper.’

‘That’s no reason to burden yourself with new loads,’ Paula said, her voice rising. ‘Dubreuilh did you a favour ten years ago; he can’t expect you to repay him for it for the rest of your life.’

‘But I’m not working with him simply to repay a favour, Paula. The thing interests me.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Don’t give me that!’

‘I mean it,’ he said.

‘Do you believe all that talk about a new war?’ she asked with a worried look.

‘No,’ Henri replied. ‘There may be a few firebrands in America, but they don’t like war over there. One thing you can be sure of – there’s going to be a radical change in the world for better or for worse. What we’ve got to do is to try to make it a change for the better.’

‘The world is always changing. But before the war you let it change without getting yourself involved,’ Paula said.

Henri started up the stairway. ‘It isn’t before the war any more,’ he replied, yawning.

‘But why can’t we go back to living like we did then?’

‘Circumstances are different – and so am I.’ He yawned again. ‘I’m tired.’

Yes, he was tired, but when he lay down in bed beside Paula he couldn’t sleep. The champagne, the vodka, Dubreuilh, all conspired to keep him awake. No, he wouldn’t give him L’Espoir. That was so clear to him that it needed no justifying. Nevertheless, he wished he could find a few good reasons for his stand. Was he really an idealist? And exactly what did that mean? Naturally, and to a certain extent, he believed in people’s freedom, in their basic good will, in the power of ideas. You can’t possibly believe that the class struggle is outmoded, can you? No, he couldn’t believe it, but what, after all, did that mean? He turned over on his back. He felt like lighting a cigarette, but he was afraid of awakening Paula, who would have been only too happy to distract him in his sleeplessness. He didn’t move. ‘My God!’ he said to himself with a sharp feeling of anxiety. ‘How ignorant we really are!’ He read a great deal, but he had little real knowledge excepting in the field of literature. And even in literature … Until now it hadn’t bothered him – no need for any specialized knowledge to fight in the Resistance or to found a clandestine newspaper. He had believed that that was the way it would continue to be. Obviously he had been wrong. What is an opinion? What is an idea? What power do words have? On whom? And under what circumstances? If you publish a newspaper, you have to be able to answer those questions. And what with one thing leading to another, you eventually question everything. ‘You have to decide in ignorance,’ Henri said to himself. ‘Even Dubreuilh often acts blindly – Dubreuilh, with all his learning.’ Henri sighed; he was unable to resign himself to this defeat. There are degrees of ignorance, and the simple fact was that he was particularly ill-equipped for the political life. ‘Well, I’ll just have to start working at it,’ he said to himself. But if he really wanted to extend his knowledge, it would require years of study. Economics, history, philosophy – he would never be done with it! What a job! And all that just to come to terms with Marxism! Writing would be completely out of the question, and he wanted to write. Well? Whatever happened, one thing was sure: he wasn’t going to let L’Espoir fail simply because he wasn’t an expert on all the fine points of historical materialism. He closed his eyes. There was something unfair in this whole thing. He felt obliged, like everyone else, to take an active interest in politics. That being the case, it shouldn’t require a specialized apprenticeship; if politics was a field reserved for technicians, then they shouldn’t be asking him to get mixed up in it.

‘What I need is time!’ Henri thought as he awakened the next morning. ‘The only problem is finding enough time.’ The living-room door opened and closed again. Paula had already gone out; now, back again, she was tiptoeing about the room. He threw back the covers. ‘If I lived alone, I’d save hours.’ No more idle conversations, no more formal meals. While drinking his coffee in the little Cafe Biard on the corner, he would read the morning papers, would work right up to the moment when he would have to leave for the office; a sandwich would do for lunch, and his day’s work over, he would have a quick dinner and read late into the night. That way, he would be able to keep everything going at once – L’Espoir, his novel, his reading. ‘I’ll speak to Paula this morning,’ he told himself firmly.

‘Did you sleep well?’ Paula asked cheerfully.

‘Very well.’