The Mandarins

‘It’s just a question of speaking as our consciences dictate!’ Lambert said.

‘Did you ever stop to think what that means?’ Henri asked. ‘Every morning I tell a hundred thousand people how they ought to think. And what do I guide myself by? The voice of my conscience!’ He poured himself a glass of wine. ‘It’s a gigantic swindle!’

Lambert smiled. ‘Show me a journalist who’s more scrupulous than you,’ he said affectionately. ‘You personally open every telegram, you keep your eyes on everything.’

‘I always try to be honest,’ Henri said. ‘But that’s the trouble; it doesn’t give me the time to really study the things I talk about.’

‘Nonsense! Your readers are more than happy with what you give them,’ Lambert said. ‘I know a hell of a lot of students who swear by L’Espoir.’

‘That only makes me feel more guilty!’ Henri replied.

Lambert gave him a worried look. ‘You’re not going to start studying statistics all day long, I hope.’

‘That’s just what I ought to do.’ There was a brief silence and then suddenly Henri decided the moment had come to unburden himself. ‘I brought back your stories,’ he said. He smiled at Lambert. ‘It’s funny, you’ve had lots of interesting experiences, you’ve lived them hard, and I’ve often been fascinated hearing you tell about them. Your articles are always full of meat. And yet in these stories nothing seems to happen. I’ve been wondering why.’

‘You don’t think they’re any good, do you?’ Lambert said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I warned you.’

‘The trouble is you haven’t put anything of yourself into them,’ Henri said.

Lambert hesitated. ‘The things that really affect me wouldn’t be interesting to anyone else.’

Henri smiled. ‘But it’s all too obvious that the ones you do talk about don’t affect you at all. You get the feeling that you wrote these stories as if you were writing a hundred lines for punishment.’

‘I never really did believe I had any talent,’ Lambert said.

The forced smile which Lambert somehow managed only confirmed Henri’s feeling that these stories were actually very important to him. ‘Who’s talented and who isn’t?’ he said. ‘It’s hard to say what that really means. No, you simply made a mistake in picking subjects that mean so little to you. That’s all. Next time try putting more of yourself into your writing.’

‘I wouldn’t know how,’ Lambert said. He laughed. ‘I’m the perfect example of the poor little intellectual who’s utterly incapable of ever being creative.’

‘Don’t be an ass!’ Henri said. ‘These stories don’t prove a thing. It’s natural to miss the target the first time.’

Lambert shook his head. ‘I know myself. I’ll never accomplish anything worth while. And an intellectual who accomplishes nothing is pretty pitiful.’

‘You’ll do something if you’re really determined to. And besides, being an intellectual is no disgrace!’

‘It’s nothing much to be proud of either,’ Lambert replied.

‘Well, I’m one, and you seem to have a pretty high opinion of me.’

‘With you, it’s different,’ Lambert said.

‘Not at all. I’m an intellectual, period. And it annoys hell out of me when they make that word an insult.’

He sought Lambert’s eyes, but Lambert was looking obstinately at his plate. ‘I wonder what I’ll do when the war’s over,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to stay in journalism?’

‘Being a war correspondent is more or less defensible. But a “peace” correspondent – I can’t see it,’ Lambert said, adding spiritedly, ‘Yes, it’s well worth it, being the kind of journalist you are; it’s a real adventure. But being an editor, even with L’Espoir, wouldn’t mean anything to me unless I had to earn my living by it. On the other hand, living off my income would give me a bad conscience.’ He hesitated and then continued, ‘My mother left me too damned much money; no matter what, I’ll have a bad conscience.’

‘And so does everyone else,’ Henri said.

‘But everything you have, you earn. There’s no question about that.’

‘No one ever has a perfectly clear conscience,’ Henri said. ‘For example, it’s utterly childish for me to be eating here when I refuse to go to black-market restaurants. All of us have our little tricks. Dubreuilh pretends to look upon money as a natural element. He has a hell of a lot of it, but he does nothing to earn it, never refuses anyone a loan, and leaves it up to Anne to manage it. And as for Anne, she puts her mind at rest by not considering it as her own; she tells herself she’s spending it for her husband and her daughter, making a comfortable life for them which she, by chance, happens to profit from. The thing that helps me is that I have a devil of a time balancing my budget; it gives me the feeling that I don’t have anything to spare. But that’s just another way of cheating, too.’

‘Still there’s a difference.’

Henri shook his head. ‘When conditions are unfair, you can’t very well live a blameless life. And that’s the real reason for going into politics – to try to change conditions.’

‘I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t give away that money’, Lambert said. ‘But what good would that do?’ He hesitated. ‘Besides, I have to admit that the prospect of being poor frightens me.’

‘Why don’t you try to use it effectively?’

‘That’s just it! How? What can I do with it?’

‘There must be some things that interest you?’

‘I wonder …’ Lambert replied.

‘There are things you enjoy, aren’t there? Don’t tell me there isn’t anything in the world you enjoy!’ Henri said a trifle impatiently.

‘Yes, I enjoy having friends, but ever since the liberation we do nothing but argue. Women? Either they’re idiots or they’re unbearable. Books? I’ve got so many now I don’t know what to do with them. And as for travelling, the world is too sad. And then, for some time now, I’ve not been able to distinguish good from evil,’ he concluded.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘A year ago, everything seemed as simple as a kid’s painting book. But now you begin to realize that the Americans are beasts as racialist as the Nazis, and that they don’t give a damn if people go on dying in concentration camps. And speaking of concentration camps, it seems as if they’ve got a few in Russia that aren’t very pretty, either. Here they shoot some of the collaborators. And some of the other bastards, who were just as bad, get garlanded with flowers.’

‘If you can get angry, that means you still do believe in certain things.’

‘No, frankly, when you begin asking yourself questions, nothing stands up. There are a lot of values you’re supposed to take as fundamental facts. In the name of what? When you get right down to it, why freedom? Why equality? Does justice have any meaning? Why give a damn about other people? A man who wants nothing else but to enjoy life, like my father, is he so wrong?’ Lambert gave Henri a worried look. ‘Am I shocking you?’

‘Not at all. Sometimes you have to ask yourself questions.’

‘More than that, there has to be someone to answer them,’ Lambert said, his voice growing heated. ‘They beat us over the head with politics, but why side with one party rather than another? First of all, we need a set of principles, an approach to life.’ With a trace of defiance in his eyes, Lambert looked steadily at Henri. ‘That’s what you ought to give us; it would be a damned sight more worthwhile than helping Dubreuilh write manifestos.’

‘A set of principles necessarily includes a political attitude,’ Henri said. ‘And on the other hand, politics is itself a living thing.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Lambert replied. ‘In politics, all you’re concerned with are abstract things that don’t exist – the future, masses of people. But what is really concrete is the actual present moment, and people as separate and single individuals.’

‘But each individual is affected by collective history,’ Henri said.

‘The trouble is that in politics you never come down from the high plateau of history to the problem of the lowly individual,’ Lambert said. ‘You get lost in generalities and no one gives a damn about particular cases.’

Lambert’s voice as he spoke these words was so determined that Henri looked at him curiously. ‘For example?’ he said.

‘Well, for example, take the question of guilt. Politically, abstractly, people who worked with the Germans are no-good bastards not fit to spit upon. No problem, right? But now, when you look at one of them all by himself, close up, it isn’t at all the same any more.’

‘You’re thinking of your father?’ Henri asked.