The Mandarins

She could never become a great star now, no doubt about that. But it would take only some small success to make her lower her sights. In any event, her life would certainly be less wretched if only she took an active interest in something. ‘And it would be ideal for me!’ he said to himself. He knew only too well that the problem concerned his own life even more than Paula’s.

‘Even if you can’t take the world by storm, it would still be worth it,’ he said. ‘You have your voice, your special talent. Don’t you think it would be interesting to try to get all you can out of it? I’m certain you’d find life a lot more satisfying.’

‘But I find it satisfying enough as it is,’ she replied, a look of exaltation brightening her face. ‘You don’t seem to understand what my love for you means to me.’

‘I do understand! But,’ he continued cuttingly, ‘you won’t do, for love of me, what I ask you to do.’

‘If you had good reasons for asking, I’d do it,’ she said gravely.

‘Actually, of course, you prefer your reasons to mine.’

‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘Because they’re better. You’ve been giving me a purely superficial point of view, worldly reasons that aren’t really your own.’

‘Well, as for your point of view, I honestly don’t see what it is!’ he said peevishly. He stood up; it was useless to continue the discussion. He would try instead to confront her with a fait accompli – bring her songs, make appointments for her. ‘All right, let’s drop it. But I’m telling you, you’re wrong.’

She hesitated a moment, smiled, and then asked, ‘Are you going to go to work now?’

‘Yes.’

‘On your novel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said.

He climbed the stairs. He was anxious to get back to his writing, and he was happy at the thought that his novel, at least, wasn’t going to be the slightest bit edifying. He still had no exact idea of what he was going to do; the only assignment he had set himself was to enjoy himself fully in being sincere. He spread his notes in front of him – almost a hundred pages. It was good to have put them away for a month; now he would be able to reread them with a fresh eye. He plunged into them joyfully, happy to rediscover memories and impressions formed into careful and smooth-flowing sentences. But after a while he began to worry. What was he going to do with all this stuff? These scribblings had neither head nor tail, even though they did have something in common – a certain feeling, a climate, the climate of the pre-war era. And that suddenly bothered him. He had thought vaguely, ‘I shall try to give the flavour of my life.’ As if such a thing were a perfume, labelled, trade-mark-registered, always the same, year after year. But the things he had to say about travelling, for example, were all in terms of a young man of twenty-five, the young man he had been in 1935; they had nothing at all to do with what he had experienced in Portugal. The story of his affair with Paula was equally dated; neither Lambert, not Vincent, nor any of the boys he knew would have any similar reactions today. And besides, with five years of living under the German occupation behind her, a young woman of twenty-seven would be very different from Paula. There was one solution: deliberately to place the book around 1935. But he had no desire to write a ‘period’ novel recreating a world that no longer was. On the contrary, what he had hoped for in jotting down those lines was to throw himself life and whole on to paper. Well then, he would have to write the story in the present, transposing the characters and events. ‘Transpose – what an annoying word! what a stupid word!’ he said to himself. ‘It’s preposterous, the liberties one takes with the characters in a novel. They’re transported from one century to the next, pulled out of one country and pushed into another, the present of one person is glued to the past of a second. And all of it is larded with personal fantasies. If you look closely enough, every character in a novel is a monster, and all art consists in preventing the reader from looking too closely. All right then, let’s not transpose. Let’s make up characters out of whole cloth, characters who have nothing at all in common with Paula, with Louis, with myself. I’ve done it before. Only this time it was the truth about my own experiences that I wanted to tell …’ He pushed aside the stack of notes. Yes, it was a bad idea, this setting things down haphazardly. The best way was to proceed as usual, to begin with an outline, with a precise purpose. ‘But what purpose? What truth do I want to express? My truth. But what does that really mean?’ He looked dully at the blank page. ‘It’s frightening, plunging into empty space with nothing to clutch at. Maybe I have nothing more to say,’ he thought. But instead it seemed to him that he had never really said anything at all. He had everything to say, like everyone else, always. But everything is too much. He remembered an old couplet painted on a plate: ‘We enter, we cry, and that is life; we cry, we leave, and that is death.’ What more was there to add? ‘We all live on the same planet, we are born from a womb, and one day we’ll serve to fatten worms. Yes, we all have the same story. Why then should I consider it mine alone and decide that it’s up to me to tell it?’ He yawned; he had had too little sleep, and that blank page made him feel dizzy. He was sunk in apathy. You can’t write anything apathetically; you’ve got to climb back to the surface of life where the moments and individuals count, individually. But if he shook off that torpor all he would find was worry. ‘L’Espoir – a local sheet. Was it true? When I try to influence opinion, am I simply being an idealist? Instead of sitting here dreaming in front of this piece of paper, I’d do a lot better to start studying Marx seriously.’ Yes, it had become urgent now. He had to set up a schedule and stick to it. He should really have done it long ago. His excuse to himself had been that he was caught up in the tide of events and was forced to give his attention to more pressing problems. But he had also wasted time; ever since the liberation he had been in a state of euphoria, a totally unjustified euphoria. He got up. He was incapable of concentrating on anything at all this morning; his conversation with Dubreuilh the night before had shaken him too much. Besides, he had correspondence to catch up on; he was anxious to find out from Sézenac whether Preston would be able to get them the paper they wanted; and he still hadn’t gone to the Quai d’Orsay to deliver das Viernas’ letter. ‘I’ll take care of that straight away,’ he decided.

‘May I see Monsieur Tournelle for a moment? My name is Henri Perron. I have a message for him.’

The secretary handed Henri a printed form. ‘Please write your name and address and the reason for your visit,’ she said.

He took out his fountain pen. What possible reason could he give? Interest in a wild dream? He knew how futile the whole business was. He wrote: ‘Confidential’.

‘There you are,’ he said.

With an indulgent air, the secretary took the form and walked towards the door. Her smile and her dignified walk made it very clear that the administrative assistant to a cabinet minister was a person much too important to barge in on without an appointment. Henri looked pityingly at the thick white envelope he was holding in his hand. He had played out the comedy, and now it was no longer possible to escape reality. Poor das Viernas would soon find himself the victim of a cruel reply, or of silence.

The secretary reappeared. ‘Monsieur Tournelle will be happy to see you as soon as he has a moment. In the meantime you can leave your message with me and I’ll see that he gets it at once!’

‘Thank you,’ Henri said, handing her the envelope. Never had it seemed more absurd to him than in the hands of that competent young woman. All right, that was it. He had done what he had been asked to do; whatever happened after that no longer concerned him. He decided to stop off at the Bar Rouge. It was a few minutes past noon and Lachaume would surely be there; Henri wanted to thank him for his review. Opening the door, he caught sight of Nadine seated with Lachaume and Vincent.

‘Where have you been hiding?’ she said in a sulky voice.

‘I’ve been working.’ He sat down beside her and ordered a drink.

‘We were just talking about you,’ Lachaume said cheerfully. ‘About your interview in Lendemain. You did right in bringing things out in the open. I mean about allied policy in Spain.’

‘Why don’t you do it?’ Vincent asked.

‘We can’t. At least not just now. But it’s good someone did it.’

‘That’s really funny!’ Vincent said.

‘You just don’t want to understand anything,’ Lachaume said.

‘I understand only too damned well.’

‘No, you don’t, not at all.’

Henri sipped his drink and listened idly. Lachaume never let an opportunity slip by to explain the present, the past, and the future as reviewed and revised by the Party. But this couldn’t be held against him. At twenty, in the Maquis, he had discovered adventure, comradeship, and Communism. And that was excuse enough for his fanaticism. ‘I like him because I did him a favour,’ Henri thought ironically. He had hidden him in Paula’s studio for three months, had obtained false papers for him, and in parting had made him a present of his only overcoat.

‘By the way,’ Henri said abruptly, ‘I’d like to thank you for your review. It was really wonderful.’

‘I said exactly what I thought,’ Lachaume replied. ‘Besides, everyone agrees with me – it’s one hell of a book.’

‘Yes, it’s funny,’ Nadine said. ‘For once all the critics agree. It’s as if they were burying someone or awarding a prize for virtue.’

‘You might have something there!’ Henri said. ‘The little viper,’ he thought with amused bitterness, ‘she found just the words I didn’t want to say, not even to myself.’ He smiled at Lachaume. ‘You’re dead wrong on one point, though. My man will never become a Communist.’

‘What else do you expect him to become?’

Henri laughed. ‘Just what I’ve become!’ he said.

Lachaume laughed in turn. ‘Precisely!’ He looked Henri in the eyes. ‘In less than six months, the SRL will no longer exist and you’ll have realized that individualism doesn’t pay. You’ll join the Communist Party.’

Henri shook his head. ‘But I do more for you as I am. You’re delighted I brought the Spanish thing out in the open instead of your having to do it. And what good would it do if L’Espoir rehashed the same stuff L’Humanité prints? I’m doing much more useful work trying to make people think, asking questions that you don’t ask, telling certain truths that you don’t tell.’

‘But you ought to be doing that work as a Communist,’ Lachaume said.

‘They wouldn’t let me!’

‘Of course they would. It’s true there’s too much factionalism in the Party just now, but that’s because of circumstances. It won’t last forever.’ Lachaume paused a moment and then said, ‘Don’t repeat this, but some of my friends and I are hoping to start a magazine of our own pretty soon, a magazine with a little scope, in which everything will be discussed with complete freedom.’

‘First of all, a magazine isn’t a daily,’ Henri said. ‘And as for being free, I’d have to see it to believe it.’ He gave Lachaume a friendly look. ‘Anyhow, it would be a good thing if you could have a magazine of your own. Do you think it’ll go through?’

‘There’s a good chance of it.’

Vincent leaned forward and looked at Henri defiantly. ‘If you get your sheet I hope you’ll make sure that you’ll explain to the comrades what a lousy stinking thing it is to open your arms wide to all those so-called “repentant” sons-of-bitches.’

‘We? Accepting collaborators with open arms? Tell that to the readers of Figaro. It’ll cheer them up a little.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re not quietly clearing a lot of those lousy bastards.’

‘Don’t confuse the issue,’ Lachaume said. ‘When we decide to clear one of them, it means we think he can be regenerated.’

‘Well, if that’s the way you look at it, how do you know the guys we shot down couldn’t be regenerated?’

‘At the time it was out of the question; they had to be shot.’