The Woman Destroyed

‘It disgusts you because it goes against your plans. But after all I’m not going to obey you all my life long. You’re too tyrannical. Fundamentally you have no heart, only a love of power.’ His voice was full of rage and tears. ‘All right! Good-bye. Despise me as much as you bloody well like—I shall get along without you very well.’

He stalked towards the door: slammed it behind him. I stood there in the hall, thinking, ‘He will come back.’ He always came back. I should no longer have had the strength to stand out against him; I should have burst into tears with him. After five minutes I went back to the library; I sat down, and I wept, alone. ‘My little boy …’ What is an adult? A child puffed with age. I plucked the years away from him and saw him at twelve again: impossible to hold anything against him. Yet now he was a man. There was not the slightest reason to judge him less severely than anyone else. Had I a hard heart? Are there people who can love without respect? Where does respect begin and end? And love? If he had failed in his university career, if he had led a common-place, unsuccessful life, my affection would never have failed him: because he would have needed it. If I had come to be of no use to him any longer, but had remained proud of him, I would cheerfully have gone on loving him. But now he escapes me, and at the same time I condemn him. What have I to do with him?

Sadness came down on me again, and it never left me. From that time on when I stayed late in bed it was because, unsupported, I was reluctant to come to a waling knowledge of thee world and of my life. Once I was up I was sometimes tempted to go back to bed again until the evening. I flung myself into my work. I stayed at my desk for hours and hours on end, keeping myself going with fruit-juice. When I stopped at the end of the afternoon my head was on fire and my bones hurt. Sometimes I would go so deeply to sleep on my divan that on waking I felt dazed and intensely distressed—it was as though my consciousness, rising up secretly from the darkness, was hesitating before taking flesh again. Or else I stared round at these familiar surroundings with unbelieving eyes—they were the illusory, shimmering other side of the void into which I had sunk. My gaze lingered with astonishment upon the things I had brought back from every part of Europe. Space had retained no mark of my journeys and my recollection would not trouble to call them to mind; and yet there they were, the dolls, the pots, the little ornaments. The merest trifles fascinated me and preoccupied my mind. The juxtaposition of a red scarf and a violet cushion: when did I last see fuchsias, with their bishop’s and their cardinal’s robes and their long frail penises? When the light-filled convolvulus, the simple dog-rose, the dishevelled honeysuckle, the narcissus with astonished, wide-open eyes in the midst of its whiteness—when? There might be none left on earth, and I should know nothing about it. Nor water-lilies on the lakes nor buckwheat in the fields. All around me the world lay like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verified.

I wrenched myself out of these dark clouds: J went down into the streets. I looked at the sky, the shabby houses. Nothing moved me at all. The moonlight and the sunset, the smell of showery spring and hot tar, the brilliance and the changing of the year: I have known moments that had the pure blaze of a diamond. But they have always come without being called for. They used to spring up unexpectedly, an unlooked-for truce, an unhoped-for promise, cutting across the activities that insisted upon my presence; I would enjoy them almost illicitly, coming out of the lycée, or the exit of a métro, or on my balcony between two sessions of work, or hurrying along the boulevard to meet André. Now I walked about Paris, free, receptive, and frigidly indifferent. My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed Venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me.

I went home: I telephoned André, or he would telephone me. His mother was more pugnacious than ever; he was seeing old school-fellows, walking, gardening. His cheerful friendliness depressed me. I told myself that we should meet again exactly where we had been before, with this wall of silence between us. The telephone—it is not a thing that brings people nearer: it underlines their remoteness. You are not together as you are in a conversation, for you do not see one another. You are not alone as you are in front of a piece of paper that allows you to talk inwardly while you are addressing the other—to seek out and find the truth. I felt like writing to him: but what? Anxiety began to mingle with my distress. The friends to whom I had sent my book ought to have written to tell me about it: not one had done so, not even Martine. The week after André left there were suddenly a great many articles dealing with it. I was disappointed by Monday’s, vexed by Wednesday’s, quite crushed by Thursday’s. The harshest spoke of wearisome repetition, the kindest of ‘an interesting restatement’. Not one had grasped the originality of my work. Had I not managed to make it clear? I telephoned Martine. The reviews were stupid, she said; I should take no notice of them. As for her own opinion, she wanted to wait until she had finished the book before letting me know it: she was going to finish it and think it over that very evening, and the next day she would be coming to Paris. I hung up with a bitter taste in my mouth. Martine had not wanted to talk to me over the telephone: so her opinion was unfavourable. I could not understand. I do not usually delude myself about my own work.

Three weeks had passed since our meeting in the Parc Montsouris—three weeks that counted among the most unpleasant I had ever known. Ordinarily I should have been delighted at the idea of seeing Martine again. But I felt more anxious than I had when I was waiting for the results of the agrégation. After the first quick civilities I plunged straight in. ‘Well? What do you think of it?’

She answered me in well-balanced phrases—I could sense that they had been carefully prepared. The book was an excellent synthesis, it clarified various obscurities; it was valuable in emphasizing what was new in my work.

‘But in itself, does it say anything new?’

‘That was not its intention.’

‘It was mine.’

She grew confused: I went on and on, I badgered her. As she saw it I had already, in my earlier books, applied the methods I was now putting forward; indeed, in many places I had spoken of them quite explicitly. No, I was producing nothing new. As Pélissier had said, the book was rather a well-based restatement and summing up.

‘I had meant to do something quite different.’

I was both stunned and unbelieving, as it often happens when a piece of bad news hits one. The unanimity of the verdict was overwhelming. And yet still I said to myself, ‘I cannot have been so wholly wrong as all that.’

We were having dinner in a garden just outside Paris, and I made a great effort to hide my mortification. In the end I said, ‘I wonder whether one’s not condemned to repetition once one has passed sixty.’

‘What a notion!’

‘There are plenty of painters, composers, and even philosophers who have done their very best work in their old age; but can you tell me of a single writer?’

‘Victor Hugo.’

‘All right. But who else? Montesquieu virtually came to an end at fifty-nine with L’Esprit des Lois, which he had had in his mind for years and years.’

‘There must be others.’

‘But not one of them springs to mind.’

‘Come! You mustn’t lose heart,’ said Martine reproachfully. ‘Any body of work has its ups and its downs. This time you have not fully succeeded in what you set out to do: you will have another go.’

‘Usually my failures spur me on. This time it’s different.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Because of my age. André says that scientists are finished well before they are fifty. In writing too no doubt there comes a stage at which one only marks time.’

‘In writing I’m sure that’s not so,’ said Martine.

‘And in science?’

‘There I’m not qualified to form an opinion.’

I could see André’s face again. Had he felt the same kind of disappointment that I was feeling? Once and for all? Or time after time? ‘You have scientists among your friends. What do they think of André?’

‘That he’s a great scientist.’

‘But what is their opinion of what he’s doing at present?’

‘That he has a fine team and that their work is very important.’

‘He says all the fresh ideas come from the men who work with him.’

’That may well be. It seems that scientists only make discoveries in the prime of life. Nearly all the Nobel prizes for science go to young men.’

I sighed. ‘So André was right, then. He’ll not discover anything any more.’

‘One has no right to make up one’s mind about the future in advance,’ said Martine, with an abrupt change of tone. ‘After all, nothing exists except for particular instances. Generalities do not prove anything.’

‘I should like to believe it,’ I said, and began to talk of other things.

As she left me, Martine said hesitantly, ‘I’m going back to your book. I read it too quickly.’

‘You read it, all right, and it doesn’t come off. But as you say, it’s not very important.’

‘Not at all important. I’m quite certain you will still write a great many very good books.’ I was almost certain that this was not the case, but I did not contradict her. ‘You are so young!’ she added.

People often tell me that and I feel flattered. All at once the remark irritated me. It is an equivocal compliment and one that foretells a disagreeable future. Remaining young means retaining lively energy, cheerfulness and vitality of mind. So the fate of old age is the dull daily round, gloom and dotage. I am not young: I am well preserved, which is quite different. Well preserved; and maybe finished and done with. I took some sleeping-pills and went to bed.

When I woke up I was in a very curious state—more feverish than anxious. I stopped telephone calls coming through and set about re-reading my Rousseau and Montesquieu. I read for ten hours on end, scarcely breaking off to eat a couple of hard-boiled eggs and a slice of ham. It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me—they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the manner- isms. These pages were soaked through and through with myself—there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long. I forced myself to go for a stroll and to dine at the little restaurant nearby: home again I gulped down very strong coffee and I opened this present book. It was all there in my mind, and I knew beforehand what the result of the comparison would be. Everything I had to say had been said in my two monographs. I was doing no more than repeating, in another form, those ideas that had given the monographs their interest. I had deceived myself when I thought I was going on to something new. And what was worse, when my methods were separated from the particular contexts to which I had applied them, they lost their acuity and suppleness. I had produced nothing new: absolutely nothing. And I knew that the second volume would only prolong this stagnation. There it was, then: I had spent three years writing a useless book. Not just a failure, like some others, in which in spite of awkwardness and blunders I did open up certain fresh views. Useless. Only fit for burning.

Do not make up your mind about the future in advance. Easy enough to say. I could see the future. It stretched away in front of me, flat, bare, running on out of sight. Never a plan, never a wish. I should write no more. Then what should I do? What an emptiness within me—all around me. Useless. The Greeks called their old people hornets. ‘Useless hornet,’ Hecuba called herself in The Trojan Women. That was my case. I was shattered. I wondered how people managed to go on living when there was nothing to be hoped for from within.

Out of pride I did not choose to leave any earlier than the fixed date and I did not say anything to André on the telephone. But how long those three days that followed seemed to me! Discs enclosed in their bright-coloured sleeves, books right-packed on their shelves: neither music nor words could do anything for me. Formerly I had looked to them for stimulus or relaxation. Now they were no more than a diversion whose irrelevance sickened me. See an exhibition, go back to the Louvre? I had so longed to have the leisure to do so in the days when I did not: possess it. But if ten days ago all I could see in the churches and chateaux was heaped-up stones, it would be even worse now. Nothing would come over from the canvas to me. For me the pictures would merely be cloth with colours squeezed on from a tube and spread with a brush. Walking bored me: I had already discovered that. My friends were away on holiday and in any case I wanted neither their sincerity nor their falsehoods. Philippe—how I regretted him, and how painfully! I thrust his image aside: it made my eyes fill with tears.

So I stayed at home, brooding. It was very hot, and even if I lowered the sun-blinds I stifled. Time stopped flowing. It is dreadful—I feel like saying it is unfair—that it should be able to go by both so quickly and so slow. I was walking through the gates of the lycée at Bourg, almost as young as my own pupils, gazing with pity at the old grey-haired teachers. Flash, and I was an old teacher myself; and then the lycée gates closed behind me. For years and years my pupils gave me the illusion that my age did not alter: at the beginning of each school year I found them there again, as young as ever; and I adapted myself to this unchanging state. In the great sea of time I was a rock beaten by waves that were continually renewed—a rock that neither moved nor crumbled. And all at once the tide was carrying me away, and would go on carrying me until I ran aground in death. My life was hurrying, racing tragically towards its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. Strange anomaly of these two rhythms. My days fly galloping from me; yet the long dragging out of each one makes me weary, weary.

There was only one hope left to me—André. But could he fill this emptiness within me? Where did our relationship stand? And in the first place what had we been for one another, all through this life that is called life together? I wanted to make up my mind about that without cheating. In order to do so, I should have to recapitulate the story of our life. I had always promised myself that I should do so. I tried. Deep in an armchair, staring at the ceiling, I told over our first meetings, our marriage, the birth of Philippe. I learnt nothing that I had not known already. What poverty! ‘The desert of time past,’ said Chateaubriand. He was right, alas! I had had a general sort of idea that the life I had behind me was a landscape in which I could wander as I pleased, gradually exploring its windings and its hidden valleys. No. I could repeat names and dates, just as a schoolboy can bring out a carefully-learnt lesson on a subject he knows nothing about. And at long intervals there arose worn, faded images, as abstract as those in my old French History: they stood out arbitrarily, against a white background. Throughout all this calling up of the past André’s face never changed. I stopped. What I had to do was to reflect. Had he loved me as I loved him? At the beginning I think he did; or rather the question never arose for either of us, for we were so happy together. But when his work no longer satisfied him, did he come to the conclusion that our love was not enough for him? Did it disappoint him? I think he looks upon me as a mathematical constant whose disappearance would take him very much aback without any way altering his destiny, since the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. In that case even my understanding is not much help to him. Would another woman have succeeded in giving him more? Who had set up the barrier between us? Had he? Had I? Both of us? Was there any possibility of doing away with it? I was tired of asking myself questions. The words came to pieces in my mind: love, understanding, disagreement—they were noises, devoid of meaning. Had they ever had any? When I stepped into the express, the Mistral, early in the afternoon, I had absolutely no idea of what I should find.

He was waiting for me on the platform. After all those mental images and words and that disincarnate voice, the sudden manifestation of a physical presence! Sunburnt, thinner, his hair cut, wearing cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, he was rather unlike the André I had said good-bye to, but it was he. My delight could not be false: it could not dwindle to nothing in a few moments. Or could it? He settled me into the car in the kindest way, and as we drove towards Villeneuve his smiles were full of affection. But we were so much in the habit of talking pleasantly to one another that neither the actions nor the smiles meant much. Was he really pleased to see me again?