O 'orges BATAILLE

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

Copley Square
Boston, MA 02116
L’ABBE C
 ) )

Also by Georges Bataille

Blue of Noon {fiction)

Literature and Evil (

criticism

Story of the Eye (

philosophy
Eroticism ( fiction

My Mother, Madame Edwarda

and The Dead Man ( fiction )
 L’ABBE C
Georges Bataille

Translated from the French by

Philip A Facey

MARION BOYARS
LONDON • NEW YORK
Paperback edition first published in Great Britain
and the United States in 1988
by MARION BOYARS PUBLISHERS LTD
24 Lacy Road, London SW15 1NL
1489 Lincoln Avenue, St Paul, MN 55105
Reprinted 1989, 1994, 1995, 2001

www.marionboyars.co.uk

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Peribo Pty Ltd,

58 Beamount Road, Kuring-gai, NSW 2080
Paperback reprinted in 2001
10 987654321
Originally published in France as L’Abbé C
© Les Editions de Minuit, 1950
© This translation Marion Boyars Publishers, 1983, 1988, 1989,
1994, 1995, 2001

All rights reserved

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the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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is available from the British Library

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ISBN 0-7145-2848-X Paperback

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Itchen Printers Ltd, Southampton

 . 1

CONTENTS

PART ONE
The Editor’s Preface 1

PART TWO
The Narrative Written by Charles C . .

I Eponine 33
II The Tower 41
III Robert 46
IVThe Visitation 52
V The Promise 55
VI Simplicity 58
VII The Butcher 63
VIII The Mountain 69
IX High Mass 72
X Grace 77
XI Sleep 82
XII The Separation 86
XIIIThe Anisette 91
XIV The Filth 95
XV The Screams 99
XVI The Threat 104
XVII The Wait 107
XVIII The Evidence 112

PART THREE
Epilogue to the Narrative Written by Charles C . . . 119
 .

PART FOUR
Robert’s Notes 125
Foreword by Charles C . .
127
The Diary of Chianine 134
What it is like to be Chianine 138
Conscience
Memorable Imagination
Rosie’s First Speech 140
Rosie’s Second Speech 142
Joy Abounding 143
144
PART FIVE
The Editor’s Postscript 149
‘Then my pen dishonour, my pictures despise,
I

My person degrade and my temper chastise;

And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame;
And my talents bury, and dead is my Fame.’
I

William Blake
letter to Thomas Butts of 16th August 1803
(Geoffrey Keynes The Complete Writings of William Blake,
pp. 828-9)
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2011

http://www.archive.org/details/labbecgeorOOgeor
PART ONE
THE EDITOR’S PREFACE
 . ,

I remember it precisely: the first time I saw Robert C . .

.
I was in

a painful state of anguish. There are times when the cruelty of the
jungle proves to be the law that governs us. I went out after

lunch . .

In the yard of a factory, under the crushing heat of the sun, a

labourer was shovelling coal. Perspiration glued the dust to his skin

A financial setback was the cause of my anguish. All at once I

saw that I would have to work; the world no longer offered its

divinity to my whims, and, in order to eat, I had to submit to its

laws.

I thought of Charles, of his face, where fear itself seemed light,

and even gay, where I still hoped that day to find an answer to

the problem created by the loss of my capital. I rang at the door,

and a low-pitched bell, sounding in the furthest reaches of the

garden, gave me a painful sensation. A kind of solemnity
emanated from the old dwelling. But was excluded from that world I

where the height of the trees endows torment with the most tranquil
dignity.

Robert was the twin brother of Charles.

I was unaware that Charles was ill: he was in fact so ill that, in

response to a call from the doctor, Robert had come over from

11
the neighbouring town. Robert greeted me at the door and it

wasn’t just the news of Charles’s illness that left me disconcerted:

Robert was the image of Charles, yet his long cassock and woeful
smile gave him an air of despondency.
A despondency that I today am sure Charles often knew as

well but, at the moment, Robert evinced quite plainly what Charles’s
volatile disposition kept concealed.

‘My brother is rather ill, Monsieur,’ he said to me. ‘He will have
to forego the pleasure of seeing you today. I’ve been asked to

inform you of that and to give you his apologies.’

Despite the smile that marked the end of his exquisite

sentence, he was visibly wrought with anxiety. The conversation

that followed, inside the house, was confined to Charles’s
sudden illness and to the pessimism of which it was the cause.
The fact that Charles was ill should have been enough to
account for Robert’s depression. Yet it seemed to me that his

despair was like the dust from the coal in the factory: something
was oppressing him and I had the feeling that nothing could help

him. I sometimes say to myself that his drawn features, guilty look

and inability to breathe freely were then the effects of the strained
relations between the two brothers: it was possible that Robert did

not feel entirely innocent with regard to Charles’s illness.

It seemed to me, in particular, that Robert had sensed my

discomfort and that the expression on his face was saying to me:
‘Look, it’s the same impotence everywhere. In this world,
we’re all like criminals: and you can be sure that the law is on our
heels.’

Those last words indicated the meaning of his smile.

I saw him several times later on: but that was the only time he
betrayed himself. He wasn’t ordinarily prone to shame, and I

never again saw him have that look of a hunted man. As a matter
of fact he was usually quite jovial and Charles, whom he irritated,

12
spoke of him cruelly as a fraud. Charles would play at treating

him badly, rarely calling him ‘Robert’, and more often ‘the abbé’,

‘the curé’. He would smile to accentuate this irreverence which,

while addressed to his brother, was nevertheless aimed at the
solemnity symbolized by his cassock. Charles could be blithe to a
fault and acted the part of a frivolous person. It is certain,

however, that he never ceased to love Robert, to be more

attached to him than to his mistresses, and to suffer, if not from
his piety, then from the pretence of conviviality under which he
masked his distress. If it was easy for someone to be mistaken
about that, it’s because Robert, in order to defend himself, played
a game with Charles, the object of which was to exasperate him.

But on that particular day Robert was in such anguish that he

appeared to be losing his head: his eyes seemed to open, timidly,

only to acknowledge his fear of some unknown torture. His

exquisite phraseology was then the only nuance that, consistent

with his cassock, recalled the ecclesiastical state; but it was

followed by awkward moments of silence. In the sitting room,

where the furniture was all covered over and the shutters closed,
perspiration streamed down his face. He made me think of a sort
of maenad of anguish, immobilized by a secret fear (but he

retained, even in his distress, that affected courtesy that gives

ecclesiastics a slight and deceptive resemblance to elderly ladies).

He wore the same helpless, disconsolate look that I had just

seen on the face of the labourer at the factory and that I myself

no doubt displayed as well ... I had come to offer my car to

Charles, who had agreed to buy it if I ever needed money: selling

it hastily to the garage wouldn’t have given me enough to pay my
debts ... A misfortune that Robert’s perspiration served to

emphasize added an element of deceit, of dishonesty to that

hopeless situation.

Robert fascinated me: he was the comic double of Charles:

13
Charles broken down, disguised under a cassock. A piece of
work so thoroughly defective, it was like something out of a
dream. Leo XlII’s squirrel face! The divergent ears of a rodent, a

ruddy complection, but flesh that was thick, clammy and limp
with shame. His melodious sentence constituted the final touch

that, by way of contrast, gave an air of vulgarity to features that

were incongruous, very delicate, but decidely slack. A child

caught in the act and cowering ... I suppose that, being in the
habit of pretending, he was then pretending to be ashamed.
I suppose that now. I even think today that, in his anguish, he
derived a hidden pleasure from his prostration. But, on the day
in question, I didn’t know what a monster he was. His dejection
and his resemblance to myself had taken hold of me to such an
extent that I just had the sensation of being, in his presence,
under a magic spell. When I left, I felt oppressed. I was afraid of

resembling that fascinating but pitiable man. Was I not ashamed

of my new situation? had I to dodge my creditors and keep out of
sight. I was headed for the bottom, but that in itself would have
been nothing if I hadn’t had the insidious feeling of being the
sole cause of my ruin.
I should have avoided talking about myself, but before present-
ing the book formed by Charles’s narrative and Robert’s notes, I

wanted to give an account of what I remember about the two

brothers. I would like to forestall the surprise of readers who
might be disarmed by the inconsequential nature of the facts. I

am, in a sense, being overly scrupulous, but I must in any case

give an account of the circumstances under which I submit to the
public a manuscript whose author was my friend.

From 1930 until last year, I was in almost constant touch with
Charles; I would often call him on the telephone, but he only
rarely called me first; or he would call to cancel an appointment. I

eventually grew tired of that, and we went for two or three years
without seeing each other. Then he admitted that he was silly,

14
and he seemed to me to be tired of himself; he had as much
affection for me as he had for those of his friends whom he was
still seeing, but I, he said, was guilty of making him think, and he
couldn’t quite forgive me for my sobriety which was distasteful to

him or, on the other hand, for not having shown much courage
when I lost my funds. (But he had kept his own, to which had
been added a share relinquished to him by Robert.)

The thing about him that irritated, but at the same time attracted
me, was his nonchalant and, in a manner of speaking, effete
stolidity which gave him all the charm of a bad dream. Indifferent

to the world, to other men, without friends or love, he would

attach himself only equivocally, and always precariously, to

people who were not sincere. He had a poorly developed sense

of right and wrong and, if one excepts his devotion to Robert, no
sense of loyalty. His conscience was so poorly developed in fact

that he was afraid he might cause scandal. He avoided the worst

and made annual visits to distant relatives. I saw that he was, on
those occasions, pleasant and bored but a C . . . like the others,
attentive to gossip and to the family’s favourite topics of conversa-

tion. He had at first been quite successful in business and had,

after the death of his father, amassed a considerable sum of

money in just a few years. And since he had, at that time, helped
some rich uncles to make good investments, the black sheep was
Robert. As a well-established branch of the bourgeoisie, the

family was radical. Charles had some impious aunts who were
flattered by his ‘romantic conquests’; and they laughed somewhat
disdainfully at the innocence of Robert, the virgin.

The day he entrusted to me the manuscript of this book, we

had not seen each other for a long time. I had received a letter in

which he asked me to meet him in the mountains of the Jura, at

R . .
.,
where he was spending the summer. The invitation was
pressing and even had the tone of a summons. I am myself a

15
native of R . .
., where I have returned from time to time since my
childhood. Charles had known that I intended to be there:
otherwise he would come to see me in Paris.

Charles had at that time been married for a month (to be

exact, his family had arranged a marriage). His wife was a disturb-

ingly beautiful young woman. She could, ostensibly, think only of

what she unenthusiastically referred to as ‘trivialities’; of dresses

and of going out in society. I believe she had for me the sort of
impersonal contempt that is ingrained in certain people like the
obligation, perhaps annoying, to obey the rules of a game.
The three of us had lunch together. I spent the afternoon with
Charles. He gave me the manuscript and a letter authorizing me
to publish it. It was, he said, a tale about the death of Robert.
With a gesture that expressed at once both lassitude and
insistence and which me with an impression of resolute
left

despondency, he asked me to write the preface of this book: he

wouldn’t read it and left to me the task of editing the text.
He was apprehensive because he had introduced thinly-drawn
characters who moved about in a demented world and could
never be convincing. The first thing I was supposed to do was to

save Robert from a caricature, without which the book wouldn’t

make any sense but which made of it a ‘vague provocation’. He
also found his portrait of himself unacceptable: it lacked vulgarity
and thereby obscured the meaning of the book. He spoke
rapidly, with the precision that he brought to almost everything.
He went on to say that we should in the future get together often,
thatwe could continue to collaborate on other projects: why
couldn’t I do long prefaces for books that he would write, which
would surely need what I alone could supply. It was foolish, he
continued, to neglect the only friendship that mattered to him.
He had spoken throughout with great simplicity, as one does
when one’s ideas are the product of mature consideration. (As

we shall see, he was probably lying to me on at least one count.

16
without any reason and just to suit his fancy. For he must have
known for months that he was soon to die.)

His proposition was disconcerting to me and I did not at first

accept it without reservations. I would have to read the

manuscript ... At that point he asked me not to do anything
about it until after I had taken leave of him. Then he told me
about the notes left by Robert, which are given here following the
narrative. An account of what he revealed to me on that occasion

appears at the end of the book: it was so astonishing to me that I

could no longer have any reservations.

Even so, publication of the book remained suspended for four

years. When I read the manuscript I was horrified: it was foul and
ludicrous, and I had never read anything that had made me more
uneasy. Charles, moreover, left me in such a way that a nervous
breakdown and a complete inhibition prevented me for a longtime
from putting my hand to the strange history of Robert.

Late in the afternoon, Charles proposed that we rejoin his

wife.

He signaled to her at the door of her room. She told us to

enter, she was seated at her make-up table and took her time
closing her dressing gown, under which she was naked. Charles
showed no reaction, and I made the mistake of blithely pretend-

ing that I hadn’t noticed: the mild contempt she had for me
changed to irritation. I was not to be forgiven, especially because
she was so beautiful that no one could ever forget it. I appeared,
despite myself, to have contempt for a life of ease which I was not
invited to share. I’m afraid may even have had the
I look of
someone declining an invitation when he hasn’t been invited.

Germaine, who was very rich, had married Charles knowing that

she would have with him the kind of dissolute existence that she
wanted.
We went to sit down in the terrace of a café. Charles met
someone he knew, a florid, hirsute dwarf of a man, with a face as

17
small as a fist and ringed by a halo of long, half-frizzled hair: he

went to talk to him at his table. I was disturbed to find myself

alone with Germaine who, fortunately, refusing to relent, chatted

with the waitress.

Eventually, Charles invited his friend over to our table: he was
an itinerant conjurer and was giving a performance that very
evening in the He was an amusing man who
back room of a café.

had the knack of enthralling the simple men who listened to him.
But we soon grew bored with his rambling stories. Fm sure it was
just out of courtesy that Germaine challenged him. He was boast-

ing that he could make anyone choose, from among those he

held out to him, the card that he wanted.

Without being too emphatic, I myself expressed some doubt;
but Germaine insisted:
‘No,’ she told him, ‘you won’t succeed with me.’
‘Even with you!’ he replied. ‘Come to the performance
tonight’

‘I just want to know how you do it’

‘No. We’re sworn to secrecy in our profession. I told you that

there’s nothing mysterious about our procedures. Come tonight

and you’ll see.’

I spoke of a young man with a beard who used to entertain the

public in Switzerland by stripping to the waist and having a

partner run a sword through his chest. Some technicians from a
hospital had made an X-ray showing the sword across his bones.
‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I know all the tricks, Monsieur, they’re
right on the tips of my fingers. I’m the heir to the repertoires of

. .
.
(he mentioned some strange-sounding names). Unfortu-
nately, I don’t have the equipment. An X-ray indeed, Monsieur!
I’d like to see that X-ray!’

He was definitely getting on my nerves: I didn’t even bother to

add that, one day, a blade inserted in the wrong place killed the

young prodigy.

18
 Charles’s friend had the burnt-out look of someone who
would always be in need of money, he was no more complacent
than the next man but, despite my desire to give him his due, he
annoyed me.
I got up and proposed to Germaine and Charles that we take
our dinner in the restaurant.
Germaine was laughing rather loudly, she was obviously
drunk. She had had five or six drinks and when she stood up I

thought she would stagger (but she belonged to a class that has
been too readily assumed to have fallen).

Just then, an elderly woman dressed in black came across the

square. Germaine, Charles and I all stopped (Charles and I knew
her; nevertheless, she surprised us, leaving us slightly stunned).
She wore old white canvas shoes, had a sort of irregular gait, and
her hair was sparse and grey. It was a fairly warm evening but she
gave the impression of having a chill in her bones. She seemed
to be all knotted up, as if she had the hiccups, but that wasn’t it:

she was walking; as if a mechanism would release her, then take

hold again at the same instant so that, unless you paid attention, you
might think she was slowly changing direction.

‘The ghost of Robert!’ cried Germaine.

She did it in a tone of voice that showed she found the idea
amusing. At that time Robert had been dead for two years. But
that didn’t make what she said any less objectionable. I thought
of the violent emotions that Charles must have been feeling. Her
tactless remark was upsetting to me as well, but for a different

reason: she had expressed aloud the very same discomforting

thought that had just occurred to me. I believed, rightly or not
that such transference implied a compatibility between two
people. But here my most private, unspeakable thoughts were
voiced by a woman disliked. Nothing could have been more
I

annoying. And the connection between us resulted from the

19
grotesque walk of a phantom who had just crossed the square. I

imagined the anger that Charles had not expressed and I felt it

would be directed at me: had I not had, did I not still have the
thoughts that made me, despite myself, Germaine’s accomplice?

I had not protested; I had tacitly agreed! The pink light of the

declining sun, as it filtered through the linden trees, gave the

scene an otherworldly air; it enlarged the figure of the woman in

black and gave to her ashen features, to her stilted manner, a sort

of preternatural animality. The erratic course of her long passage

had kept Germaine transfixed in the light. Without saying a word,
Charles moved away and we waited for him, helplessly, in front

of the house he had entered.

During this time an extremely unpleasant odour emerged from
a nearby sewer: Germaine had stopped laughing and her face
was becoming distorted. I thought how coarse she would look at

sixty. Within myself, impalpably, and before me, the world was
falling apart, in the same way that a servant declines to attend a

parade and, the master having departed, spits in the room.

Feeling like a swimmer whom the tide is bearing away from the
shore, I was fighting a losing battle against my debts, against the
wear on the soles of my shoes and against my aching feet. In the
eyes of one another, Germaine and I were insignificant, but we
each divined the guilt felt by the other and remained depressed
by it. Charles’s disappearance was equally humiliating. We waited
silently and avoided looking at each other. She could have said,

or I could have said: ‘Where the devil has Charles gone?’ I think
the same awareness of being indecorous would have prevented us
both from doing so.
Finally, Charles came out of the house. Acting as if nothing
had happened, and far from explaining his prolonged
disappearance, he simply mumbled a weak excuse, maintaining
the silence that corresponded to his impotent exasperation. We
walked slowly and awkwardly, as if, having no objective, we were

20
merely waiting, going back and forth. The silence was truly
funereal . . . But there was no reconciliation of the heavy-hearted
mourners.
I’ve often noticed since then that hate or misunderstanding

would arise from such ambiguous situations, about which no one

could speak with any accuracy. Just as on a summer day the air,

having suddenly become impossible to breathe, makes a person

want to die or run away, a blind hostility insidiously ordains the

attitude, the utterances or the silence of every human being. I

read Charles’s manuscript that very night, and then the scene
had a meaning that was all too clear. I shivered at the memory of
the old woman’s passage and of the disquiet that came in its

wake.
I saw, once we were seated in the restaurant, that Germaine
was red in the face, and her tired eyes expressed despondency. We
were, she and I, equally uneasy in front of Charles, whom a feigned
indifference left very much relaxed.

I should have ordered dinner but Charles practically tore the

menu out of my hands. I was so depressed that I didn’t react at

all. I was humiliated, not only with respect to Charles, but with

respect to the insignificant Germaine. Never had anyone looked

me up and down with as much contempt as Charles did that day.
I wanted to talk, regardless of the consequences. I spoke again of
the man whose assistant used to run a sword through his chest; I

mentioned the photographs that had greatly impressed me and

the faintings in the audience after the demonstration. Germaine
listened without saying a word and appeared to be interested but
anguish, in a sense, was holding her back. Her blouse was so
open in front that she gave the impression of being naked. She
seemed to be at once both offering herself and withdrawing the
offer. Looking harried, she nevertheless seemed resolved to take

advantage of this awkward state of affairs. She maintained an

intolerable silence that seemed to weigh just as heavily on her as

21
 .

it did on me. Charles, whom this subtle by-play was surely not

eluding, made no effort to alleviate the situation.

The worst of it was that, being obliged to travel for some

months outside of France, I couldn’t bring myself to take leave of
my friend under such circumstances. I think now that I should
have done so, but I imagined that everything would be all right.

All I had was the opportunity to gain some time. I proposed to

my ‘friends’ that we go to see the conjurer put on his act Ger-

maine would find out if he could really make her draw the card
he wanted; the performance might even, at the very least, be a
diversion. I imagined, not without reason, that in the café it would
be easier than it would be elsewhere for us to stay together

without talking. Perhaps by the time we came out we would feel

more comfortable.
Charles smiled, gazing off into space and said to me
sarcastically:

‘After all, why not? .

As he said it he shrugged his shoulders.

Germaine must have grasped what had I in mind and she said

in a lazy voice:
‘Oh yes, that’s a good idea.’

Charles filled her glass with red wine which she drank down
slowly without a single pause; and she held the glass so tightly in

her hand that she broke off the stem against the table.
I understood then that the malaise and the intoxication to
which she was subject were, while real, only secondary; it was her
way of keeping herself in an unhealthy state of excitement. She
pressed her leg against mine under the tablecloth and, lowering
her head, stared at the broken glass as if its debris were the sign
of a certain impotence. Something in her gave way. She undid
the top button on the jacket of her tailored suit, gently, and with a
feigned lack of grace as if, on the contrary, she had wanted to
button it.

22
 .

Charles had another glass brought to the table and filled it up.
But he almost immediately appeared to become completely pre-
occupied with his breast of chicken .

If he had looked at Germaine, the little game would have

ended - or would have taken another direction - but the
anguish, joined under those circumstances to the most futile

desire, became acutely painful.

Prevented by the demon of timidity (?) from following my
initial impulse, I didn’t withdraw my leg. Germaine had irritated

me, I couldn’t take to her, I despised her. But an irrational notion

held me back. I imagined that to move my leg would be an insult!

There was in her conduct an absurdity that I cursed. Yet she

fascinated me: I felt more and more annihilated. I no longer saw
any way of escaping from the ridiculous fate that decreed that I

should moment be consumed with contradictory emotions

at that

Icould not express through my acts. Charles, as absent to us as a

blind man and chewing away on large mouthfuls of food, made

the strain on my nerves complete. If he had been really absent, I

could have assuaged a brutal lust . . . But I reflected: Germaine

would not have provoked me if she had herself been able to
quench the thirst she gave to me. I drank a glass of wine: I was
scandalized by such shameless behaviour . . . She was playing the

game as much with herself as she was with me. If she was offer-

ing herself to me, but with an offer withdrawn in advance, she

couldn’t satisfy her own desire, and she must herself have been
suffocating under the burden of emotions she couldn’t express.
She slid her leg over against mine voluptuously and, losing all

prudence, put her hand on my thigh, so far up that . .

I was sure that Charles could see what she was doing; if a

storm builds up, it may as well break out. He didn’t say anything,

or he pretended not to see anything, but that prolonged the

agony, which only an explosion would have had the power to
end. It seemed to me that he was eating more attentively and
filling his mouth with bigger pieces of food. He had ordered

23
more chicken and some wine. He ate and drank like someone
hard at work: it offered the possibility of relief. I ate more and
more rapidly and tossed down some wine. I knew that, not being
in the habit, I wouldn’t be able to keep it up. At first Germaine
removed her hand and started to follow my example: so all three

of us ate and drank in silence. Germaine maintained as well as

she could her willfully provocative attitude. As time went by it was

becoming difficult to believe that Charles had not seen anything,
but the wine soon gave me, along with a dreamy exhilaration, a
sort of pervasive torpor. From that point on I had to struggle

against sleep, terrified by the idea that I might give way despite
myself and end up looking foolish.

The fascination of sleep, which pits the lure of the void against
the obstinacy of an impotent will, is an obstacle that life has
perhaps never surmounted. What escapes if, as is usually the

case, we simply seek to get to sleep, is the affinity of a person to

that which he is not: that absence, that subsidence. But some-
times involuntary sleep is stronger than all the desire to live, and
night dispatches hope and apprehension. I was watching Ger-
maine and Charles and, as I succumbed, it seemed to me that, if

not sleep, then death could put an end to the misunderstanding

that gave to that subsidence the quality of a fall from grace.

I didn’t actually fall asleep. Just as a swimmer on the brink of

exhaustion resists the temptation of the waters, I persevered. I

remember having heard the voice of Charles asking severely:

‘Are you going to have a cup of coffee?’
I answered rather slowly, confident nevertheless of being to the

point:

‘Yes, if he’s gone out.’

Suddenly became aware of

I my absurdity.
I asked Germaine, who was laughing but seemed to be
embarrassed by it:

24
 ‘Was I asleep?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know why you brought up Saint-
.’
Simon . .

‘I wasn’t listening,’ Charles cut in.

He got up and, in the same brusque tone of voice, said:

‘I’ll order our coffee in the kitchen.’
Germaine took my hand: she was trembling and I saw that she
was afraid:

‘Whatever you do, don’t talk about Robert again in front of

.’
Charles . .

I started, dismayed:
‘What did I do?’
‘You were falling asleep. You called Robert a clown . . . and
you put your hand on my legs.’

But Charles was coming back. I had never imagined that a

look could be worse than an insult. He looked me up and down,

and it was clear that he was fuming with rage. He didn’t shout:

‘You stupid fool!’ but, without saying a word, he gave free rein to
a sort of cold fury. I couldn’t even explain myself, make excuses. I

hadn’t really slept; I was speaking under the influence of the

wine; I had fought against sleep and it had won. I had talked in

order to stay awake and the sentences had escaped me, the fruits

of a dreamy stupor. I had struggled right to the end and suddenly

I was getting hold of myself again; but disaster alone had allowed
me to do so.

I had invited Charles and Germaine, so I asked for the bill.

‘It’s been paid,’ said Charles.

I looked at Germaine, who appeared to be preoccupied: she

was drinking coffee. I was silently soliciting her disapproval of
Charles’s conduct. I had now thoroughly debased myself in my
own eyes. I was feeling the effects of the wine quite strongly, in

the form of an abulia that exasperated me to the point of

25
madness but submerged the madness in even greater impotence.
Germaine, Charles and I were collectively seized by the sort of
cramp that occurs during an interlude of silence between two
nervous lovers.

We were no longer capable even of deciding not to attend the

conjurer’s performance; it was so dull that it eased our tension.
We were relatively separated from one another and the perfor-
mance was so devoid of even comic interest that it succeeded in

turning our hostility towards a different object. I thought that the

episode would end that way: coldly, but without incident, we
would say good-bye. At the end of our dinner, that would have
been as harsh as an exchange of blows; during the course of the
performance, depression would have time to get the upper hand.
It didn’t happen like that at all.

After a long series of exercises appropriate for an audience of

very simple people out for a good time, the conjurer asked each
person (the room, when filled, held only a tiny crowd) to draw a
card. He gave out a dozen of them and named each of the cards

drawn before turning it over. He came towards us and I had to

choose first. If he hadn’t challenged us, I wouldn’t have paid any

attention to the pack of cards and would no doubt have taken
the card he had selected. I saw it, as a matter of fact, but decided
to take another one. I put out my hand; just then the pack shifted
slightly and the card he wanted came under my fingertips. I

stopped and focused on the one I had chosen; I got ready to

draw it; then, in a flash, I saw in the eyes of the conjurer - instead
of a cold determination to have his way - a sort of anxious

supplication. I gave in and took the card he wanted.

Germaine was next. Since the beginning of the demonstration
I hadn’t once glanced in her direction, but I watched her make
her choice; at that point I got a good look at her; she was the
incarnation of pure malevolence. For a moment the conjurer,
holding back the cards, tried to dictate her choice; she saw

26
through that and drew the card she wanted. She did it without
smiling, with ruthless dexterity. I heard the conjurer hiss between
his teeth: ‘Bitch!’ Charles must have heard him as well. He got up
and slapped the poor man across the face. There was a stir in the
room. Charles took Germaine and left. Many of the spectators
rose from their seats. The conjurer maintained an attitude of

incontestable dignity.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘please be calm and take

your seats. The man is obviously deranged. He’s undoubtedly
having a fit.’

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said somewhat pitifully as he finished

speaking. ‘I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.’

I immediately tried to leave but, in the confusion, it took me a

rather long time.

I found myself out on a pitch-dark street. I heard voices a few

steps away; Charles and Germaine were literally screaming. I

drew near. Charles slapped Germaine so hard that she fell to the

ground. He helped her up. Then he put his arm around her
affectionately and led her away. I could hear Germaine weeping.
I went home with parched lips.

I remembered the manuscript that I had put in the pocket of

my overcoat. I threw myself on a bed, read for part of the night
and went to sleep.

I woke up fully dressed. Slowly and painfully my memory

returned. The sun had risen. I didn’t know whether to laugh or

cry. The memory of my ineptitude the night before depressed

me, but without effect. Then I vividly recalled the death of my

mother: I didn’t cry, yet I was certain that I was going to cry. I

couldn’t accept the abominable nature of the book had I read.

(Similarly, when I saw my mother dead, I couldn’t bear the

thought of no longer being able to talk to her).

In the end, everything fell apart: an impotent desire to laugh

took hold of me; a lifeless, incontrollable laughter invaded and

27
prostrated me. I thought I was nauseous but it was more serious.

I returned to Paris that very morning. I was very ill and had to

delay my departure.
Two days later received I the following letter from Charles:
‘You understand, of course, that nothing has changed. I

expect that you will see to the publication of the book I’ve

entrusted to you. I consider you a weakling, obviously, and I

never want to hear anything about you again. About you, or

about anything or anyone, for that matter. I hope that my wishes
will soon be fulfilled.’

Two months later I learned that Charles had committed

suicide.

I thought I would go mad, so much so that I went to see a

doctor. He advised me without any hesitation to publish the

manuscript. There was, he said, no way I could avoid it. I had to

draft the preface and generally report what Charles had told me
about the death of Robert but had not had the strength to write.

The doctor declined to comment on the literary aspects, being,

he said, totally unqualified; but from the medical point of view it

was one of the most interesting ... I interrupted to say that

perhaps he was right, but that when I thought of how irritated

Charles would be if he could hear him, I felt very uneasy. Seeing

how upset I was, he didn’t continue. From that point on, he was
also kinder.

He proposed that return on a regular basis.

I I agreed. I would
write my portion of the book and would bring the pages I had
written to each appointment. That was the essential element of a
psychotherapeutic treatment without which I would find it hard to
get back to normal. He seemed reasonable, and he was
sweetness itself. I accepted: I was the child with a bib tied
around his neck, getting ready for a nice quiet drool. I told him
that and he laughed; then he thoroughly surprised me:

28
 ‘You see,’ he said, ‘all this is childish; it’s that way from one
end to the other and even in the strictest sense of the word. But
our science is effective only insofar as it avoids humiliating those
who are ill.’

I don’t know if, in am cured. wasn’t on the

the final analysis, I I

day when I interrupted my literary treatment. resumed the task a

I

little later but, as negligible as was, took me four years to finish.

it it

29
 .

PART TWO
THE NARRATIVE WRITTEN BY
CHARLES C . .
 . .

EPONINE

At the point where this account begins, the curse of urbanity had
almost completely warped my brother. No one ever worked
harder to offend a desire for silence. One day I tried to tell him
how I felt: with a gentle smile, he gave an absurd reply:
‘You’re wrong there,’ he said, ‘dead wrong; that’s all we think
about. The truth is ... we deceive all our friends: outwardly we’re
lively, good-natured, even a bit too casual, but deep down inside

we’re miserable.’
As he spoke there was a mischievous gleam in his eye.

‘The love of God,’ he added, ‘is the most deceptive of all. For
that we should have saved the popular slogan which, used in that
way, would almost imperceptibly be transformed from a clever
phrase into one that no one ever uses .

Then, as his smile slowly faded away, he let these words fall

from his lips (he was smoking a pipe):

‘Say it with flowers!’

I looked up and stared at him contemptuously; I couldn’t

believe he had dared to . .

To this day I have no idea what he was getting at.

He appeared at the time to be preoccupied with being frank

and benevolent, rather than prudent.

It was his ardent Catholicism, his amiable temerity that no

33
doubt made him openly rebel against the bonds of friendship we
had maintained between us.

I took a long look at this false, pompous and charming man I

once considered my alter ego. His status as a priest gave him the
power to deceive not other people but himself: it was impossible
for anyone who wasn’t labouring under some kind of illusion to

have such joie de vivre to be always on the go, preaching the

,

triumph of virtue in every village and town. There are women

who excel at such orgies of faith, but a man (a priest) proclaiming

the benevolence of God looks a bit foolish, as if he were showing

off.

During the summer of 1942, Robert, Eponine and I found

ourselves, for various reasons, together in the small town where
we were bom.
One fine Sunday had spent the afternoon drinking with
I

Eponine. made an appointment to meet her in the tower of the

I

church. I stopped by the rectory to ask my brother to go with me.

I took him by the arm and, using my rather obvious state as a
pretext, said in a tone that was just as polite as his:

‘Come with me. Tonight I thirst for the infinite.’

And, facing him with open arms:

‘Do you have any reason to refuse?’
‘You see,’ I continued, bowing my head, ‘my thirst is so great
.’
right now . .

Robert broke into a merry, amiable laugh.

I pretended to be annoyed, and protested:
‘You’ve got me all wrong.’
I groaned, playing my role to the hilt.

‘You don’t understand me: there’s nothing I won’t do now, no

line I won’t cross. What a terrible feeling! I need you; you, the
man of God.’

34
 I begged him.
‘Don’t leave me helpless like this. You can see I’m under the
influence of alcohol. Take me up in the tower. I’m supposed to
meet someone there.’

Robert simply replied:

‘I’ll go with you.’

But he added, smiling:

‘I have a rendez -vous up there myself.’

I pretended to be disturbed; then I asked him meekly whom

he was going to meet.
He looked down and said inanely:

‘The infinite mercy of the Lord.’

Beside the church stands a tall rectangular tower. That day there
was an extremely strong wind. Inside, the wooden staircase is

almost a ladder and it seemed to me that the wind was making

the tower sway. I stopped halfway up, with a poor foothold on
one of the rungs. I imagined what it would be like if I slipped: the

world swallowed up by a void, the depths suddenly opened. I

thought of the kind of scream I would let out, and of a final

silence. Robert, below me, was holding my leg.

‘Don’t go killing yourself in the church,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be
funny if I had to say the Office of the Dead for you.’

He tried to swell his voice against the noise of the wind, but all

he could get out was a falsetto version of the first few words of
the Dies Irae.

It was so painful that I felt faint again. Why had I brought him
along? He was insipid.

. . . All of a sudden I saw him from where I was: lying helplessly

on a slag heap which disfigured the grass and wild flowers

35
 .

... I was suspended over the open stairwell on the ladder. I saw
my brother in agony, surrounded by torturers in uniforms: fury

and suffocation intermingled, a boundless immodesty of screams,

excrement and pus . . . Pain made ten times greater by the
anticipation of brutalities yet to come But in this chaos of
. . .

emotions, it was my pity for Robert that stood out: I was suffocat-

ing myself, striking out, and my fall in the tower was making the
universe a vertiginous chasm . .

I had, as a matter of fact, actually started to fall, but Robert,

despite being in a rather precarious position, had with great
difficulty managed to catch me in his arms.

‘We almost fell,’ he said.

I could have dragged him down in my fall, but I was so much

at ease in his arms that I was able to believe myself happy. His

stupidity was comforting to me: in a world of voids, of sudden

shifts and deliberate horrors, there is nothing that is not annulled
by a simple thought: that of the inevitable outcome. From being
suspended on the very brink of the open stairwell, from having
escaped death only by chance, I experienced as joy a feeling of
impotence. I let myself go completely and my limbs hung
lifelessly, but in the end it was like the crowing of a rooster.
Just then I heard Eponine, in her low-pitched voice, call down
gaily from the top of the tower:
‘Are you dead?’

‘Wait, we’re coming up,’ said l’abbé with his squeaky voice.

My body, thoroughly relaxed, was still hanging limply but shaking

under a wave of gentle laughter.
‘Now,’ I said softly, ‘I’ll start up the ladder again.’

Nevertheless, I didn’t budge.

36
 Night slowly descended; outside, the wind howled in lengthy
gusts: the impotence of such a moment had something genial
about it, and wished
I it would last.

Only a few years earlier, my twin brother was, like me, just one of
the young men of the village: as a boy he had been the object of
Eponine’s affections and she went around with him for a long
time; later on, she openly went astray, and he pretended, out on
the streets, that he didn’t know her.

We were half-way up the tower and, there in the shadows, only

my brother’s arm was keeping me from my death.
I was amazed by the malevolence I felt toward him.
But the idea of death, only slightly different from the pre-
carious state I was in at the time, represented for me nothing
more than a private scruple: before anything else, I had to satisfy

the wishes of Eponine.

Eponine was just as drunk as I when, in response to a cruel

whim, I went to get Robert; all afternoon we had made love and I

had laughed. But I was now so weak that thinking about the top

of the tower, about what it meant, caused me to feel, instead of

desire - better, like a desire - a great uneasiness. Now

Robert’s face was perspiring, his eyes were seeking mine. They
had a look that was dull, alien, full of cold determination.
I reflected: what I should have done was to seize Robert’s
lifeless body in my arms, carry it to the top and, in the freedom of

the wind, offer it, as if to an evil goddess, to the deranged mood

of my friend. But my malevolence wasn’t that strong: it eluded
me, as it might in a dream, and I was nothing but jovial kindness,
destined for insignificance.

I heard (I could see Eponine’s head leaning out over the top of
the ladder) some vulgar, angry shouting. I saw Robert’s eyes grow

37
 .

narrow and fill with hate. Eponine’s insults were waking him up
to what was going on: now he realized the trap into which
friendship had made him fall.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked.

There was, in the tone of his voice, more lassitude than

hostility.

I made a deliberately graceless reply:

‘You’re afraid to go up there?’

He laughed, but he was angry.

‘You should talk: you’re so drunk that you can’t hold on, and
I’m the one who is afraid to go up!’

I was amused and, to tease him, I said:

‘You have such a tiny little voice .

I was reacting passively but, in a way, apathy was leaving me

free: as if I was no longer going to keep from laughing. I

screamed as loud as I could:

‘Eponine!’
I heard her shout:
‘Idiot!’

And other more insulting names.

Then:
‘I’m coming down.’
She was beside herself with anger.

‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘we’re coming up.’

But I still didn’t move. Robert did all he could to keep me, with
the help of one knee and an elbow, propped up against the
ladder. It makes me dizzy to think of it today, but at the time a
vague feeling of well-being and happiness prevented me from
seeing things as they really were.
Eponine came down and, as she drew near, said to Robert:
‘That’s enough! Let’s go down.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ he said. ‘I can hold him up all

right, but I can’t carry him and go down the ladder.’

38
 Eponine didn’t answer, but I saw her all of a sudden clinging
to the rungs of the ladder.

‘Call for help,’ she shouted. ‘I feel dizzy.’

Robert answered weakly:

‘That’s about all we can do.’

At that moment Irealized that we were going to go down, that it

was all over, that we would never get to the top.

I remained inert and, just as a paralysis really immobilizes a

person only when he makes a concerted effort, it seemed to me

that suicide alone would have the power to counter my
nervousness: death was the only punishment commensurate with
my failure. We were all three of us huddled up against the ladder

and the silence was all the more oppressive because could hear I

in advance Robert’s call for help: with his squeaky voice he would
try to attract attention in the growing darkness: it would be laugh-
able, intolerable and, from that time on, through my fault

everything would be definitively beyond repair. At that point I

made an attempt to get free: it was only a mild attempt, but I

wished I could throw myself into the stairwell and take Robert
down with me. The only way I could escape from him was to go
up: he had to hold tight to the rungs of the ladder and couldn’t
prevent me from advancing toward the top.

Eponine cried out excitedly:

‘Hold him, he’s going to kill himself.’

‘I can’t,’ said Robert.

Then, speaking firmly, I told Eponine:

‘Let me go up. I’m going to the top of the tower.’

She flattened herself against the side of the stairway and I

slowly climbed all the way to the top, followed by my brother and
my friend.

39
I got out into the open air, dazed by the wind. To the west a vast
field of brilliant light was marbled with blackened clouds. The sky
was already dark. Robert, as he stood before me, his face

wrought with tension and his hair blowing all about, was speak-
ing to me, but all I could hear in the noise of the wind was a
series of garbled words. Behind him I saw Eponine wearing a
smile: she looked overjoyed, overwhelmed.

40
II

THE TOWER

Having recognized Eponine, who was the scandal of the town

and who never failed, in passing, to make advances to him (if she
saw him on the street she would laugh and, like someone gaily

whistling for his dog, click her tongue and call out to him:
‘Virgin!’), Robert had shrunk back, but it was too late to leave; and
when he got to the top of the tower, he decided he ought to take
up such a conspicuous challenge.
But he had a moment’s hesitation: in that idiotic situation his

angelic sweetness and knowing smile of comprehension couldn’t

help him. He had to resort, after catching his breath, to the

strength of his nerves and his passion for reason and spiritual

purity. Eponine and I, there before him, had the vague power, at

once both anguished and derisive, of evil. Even in our disarray

we knew that, morally, we were monsters! There was nothing
inside of us to control our passions: in heaven we were as black
as the devil. How sweet and somehow reassuring it was, in the

face of Robert’s angry tension, to feel emancipation in a dizzy fall.

She and I were both in a stupor, totally drunk; lulled by my faint-

ing on the ladder, my brother had been caught in the trap we

had set for him.

Raging, breathless and, on a narrow platform, isolated from the

rest of the world, shut up, in a sense, in the limitless void of the

41
skies,we stood confronting each other like dogs frozen by a
sudden spell. The hostility that united us was static, confused, like
the laugh of someone who has missed a good thing. At that
point I imagine that in a flash my brother felt it himself. When
Madame Hanusse, with a look of astonishment on her face,

appeared at the door to the stairway, a hideous smile furtively

distorted his morbidly tautened features.

‘Eponine! You tramp!’ shouted Madame Hanusse.

She had a voice like a fishwife’s, with a touch of the country that
made it almost painful to hear, and it rose well above the noise of the
wind. As she came out of the doorway, she was impeded
momentarily by the wind: she stood straight up, struggling to hold
down her cloak (the grey austerity of her outward appearance
suggested a past spent in the cold air of the sacristy, but her speech
was coarse and vulgar).

She descended on her daughter, shouting furiously:

The filthy slut, she got herself drunk and went out naked
under her coat.’

Eponine retreated towards the balustrade, apparently petrified by

her mother who was about to reveal just how ignominious she was.
She had the look of a cowering dog, and she wasalready, down

inside, electrified with fear.

But Robert, even more violent and determined than Madame

Hanusse, rushed forward.
His reedy voice, fortified by the shame he felt welling up
inside, no longer broke: it exploded in an order:
‘Madame Hanusse,’ he demanded, ‘where do you think you
are?’

The old woman was huge and she stopped short, staring in

disbelief.

42
 .

This is a consecrated place!’ he said.

Now Madame Hanusse was hesitant, subdued.
Eponine, a bit disappointed, forced a smile.

There was, in the lethargy and feigned inanity of Eponine, a kind

of perplexity. Drunk and silent, she was there atop the tower of
the church, all docility and, yet, menace itself. Her hands held
tightly to her coat, presumably to keep it firmly closed, but they could

have been there just to open it.

She was thus at the same time both dressed and naked,
modest and immodest. The violent outbursts by Robert and
Madame Hanusse, suddenly neutralizing each other, had merely
put her back into a state of indecisive immobility. It seemed as if the
sole purpose of the anger and fright was that very state of paralysis

which instantaneously made her nudity, as we waited, an object of

anxiety.

In that tense moment of calm through the haze of my drunken-

ness it seemed to me that the wind was dying down and a long
silence emanated from the immensity of the sky. L’Abbé gently

knelt: he signalled to Madame Hanusse and she knelt down

beside him. He bowed his head and extended his arms to form a
cross; Madame Hanusse, seeing this, bowed her head, but didn’t
put out her arms. After a few minutes he began to chant, slowly
and lugubriously, as if he were calling to the dead:

Miserere mei Deus,

Secundam magnam misericordiam tuam . .

It was a ravishingly melodious lament but so ambiguous! Such a

bizarre profession of horror before the delights of nudity! Robert was

going to conquer us by self-denial and his very effort to escape made

this more obvious; the beauty of his chant in the silence of the
heavens enveloped him in the solitude of a pious ecstasy: that

43
 .

extraordinary beauty, in the night, was no longer anything more than

a tribute to vice, the only object of that whole little scene.

Without showing any emotion, he continued:

Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum,
dele iniquitatem meam . .

Madame Hanusse looked up: he was perfectly still and he kept

his arms extended as his piercing voice intoned the notes of the
chant in a wonderfully systematic way (‘misera-ti-o-num’, in

particular, seemed as if it would never end). Totally bemused,

Madame Hanusse furtively pouted and bowed her head again.
Eponine was at first completely oblivious to Robert’s odd
behaviour. With both hands holding down her coat, her hair
blowing in the wind and her lips slightly pursed, she was so
beautiful and licentious that I wished, in my drunkenness, that I

could reply to Robert’s mournful chant with some joyous refrain.

As I looked at Eponine it was the music of the accordion that

came to mind, but the squalor of the dance hall or of the music
halls where she used to sing (as one of the naked dancers) was, it

seemed to me, ridiculous in the context of such a decisive

triumph. It would have taken a whole church thundering with the
sound of an organ and the soaring voices of the choir to duly

celebrate her glory. This was surely not the time or place for the

song I had liked to hear her sing, the one with the silly tune and
words that went:

She’s the girl the boys adore,

Eleanor, Eleanor ... .

I was imagining the clamour of a Te Deuml A light, a smile of

ravished malice ends a movement that was as brusque as death:
it is its symbol and its culmination. I was stirred that way, in my
tenderness, by a happy acclamation that was infinite but already

The minute she saw Robert, Eponine, visibly

close to neglect.

emerging from her dreamy stupor, broke into laughter so abruptly

that she lost her balance: she turned around and, leaning over

44
the balustrade, appeared to shake like a little child. She was
laughing with her face in her hands and Robert, interrupted by a
cackle she couldn’t suppress, looked up, with his arms out-
stretched, only to behold her naked bottom: the wind had lifted

up her coat which, when she was seized by laughter, she had
been unable to keep closed.

The next day, Robert, by his silence (I questioned him just as a

joke and he, not wanting to lie, said nothing), admitted to me

that he had had a . . . Eponine had closed her coat so quickly
that Madame Hanusse, who was slow to straighten up, missed
her chance to see exactly what it means to look truly amazed:
l’abbé had his arms up in the air and his mouth was hanging
open!

45
Ill

ROBERT

After the episode in the tower, my brother’s personality suddenly

changed. Most people thought he was even losing his mind. That
was a superficial judgement. But he was so often lax and so often
behaved irrationally that it became difficult for those who didn’t

know him to doubt it. That explanation was too simplistic.

Otherwise, the Church and the faithful would have been forced
to complain. There was also his support of the Resistance ,
in which
he would accept without a word, and perhaps in a sense
indifferently, the most dangerous assignments. The next day got I

up good and early: I was in a hurry to see him again.

I had no fixed plan. I wanted Robert to give in to the wishes of

Eponine; but the malice with which I pursued that goal did not
clearly outweigh my need to maintain between us a sort of
mocking friendship in which the only thing to be mocked would
be my failure.
I had thoroughly mixed emotions, in addition to a slight
feeling of nausea from the alcohol I had consumed the night
before and the jangled nerves that went with it. At ten o’clock in

the morning, in the midst of an early rain, the streets of the little

town were like dead souls whose memory the silence of the

shuttered windows had but vainly preserved. It was depressing

but unavoidable. A September morning at ten o’clock, in R . . .:

46
that, drawn from the vast range of possibilities, was my lot, and I

considered it an insult that God, out of his whole eternity,

couldn't spare me anything better than this fleeting moment in

the rain on a bleak provincial street.

1 went across the garden of the rectory: there, offering me the

irony of its unjustifiable reality, durable but transient, stood the

house where my brother was confined and where I was to be

confined as well.

In the dim light of that hazy morning, Robert sat in his room,
dressed in a pair of white cotton trousers and a black woollen
undershirt.

He sat in silence in a big stuffed chair, and his prostration

corresponded to and accentuated the amount of energy he had

expended inviting me to enter.

It took me a while to comprehend that, this time, he was

genuinely upset; I wondered what, in addition to the things I

could imagine, had ultimately made him angry. I hadn’t opened

my mouth: the hand he had held out to me slid down the arm of

his chair and fell to his side as if it belonged to a puppet: coming

from him, that was theatrical. He was no doubt aware of it. He
looked up and said to me, almost playfully:

‘Really, it’s silly.’

But he must have felt the need to act as if he believed in my

innocence. He smiled and, after a pause that seemed to be long,
concluded:
‘But I guess it’s just as well.’

I didn’t understand at the time and would not truly understand

until subsequent events had given a clear meaning to his words.

I felt a sort of nausea, so acute that I threw open the window.

The humidity of the house, the rectory, caused the disorderly state of
the covers on my brother’s bed, the half-open bedside table and
especially an odor that made the room smell as if it were inhabited by

47
an old man - all this made me want to leave.

‘You didn’t get much sleep,’ my brother said to me. ‘I didn’t

get very much myself.’

He continued to be evasive.
Neither of us dared to touch upon what was really on our
minds: a local girl on vacation who was running wild in Paris.

How he had changed since the night before!

It seemed that he wanted to obliterate the impression that he
had created by pretending to faint. His evasive amiability

disguised what his prostration had at first made quite evident. All

that showed through was a change, an indecision which, coming

from him, disturbed me. I believed, at least I tried to believe: ‘I’ve

come to trap him in his own home and he’s already trapped!’ I

didn’t know yet how true that was. But I was depressed: I felt

trapped myself and, no longer able to understand a state of

affairs that was more complicated than I had thought it would be,

I suffered from the knowledge that I had to cater to the wishes of

Eponine who childishly insisted that I deliver the priest to her and
who had, that very morning, given me an ultimatum.

My inner turmoil didn’t amount to very much; I felt the lines of a

classic moral debate forming in my mind but it petered out before
taking any definite shape; there was no way I could have put into
words the strength of the feelings that bound me to my brother
and to Eponine. I was on the most intimate terms with Eponine; I

had no objection to her vices and of all her wishes, that of having
l’abbé seemed to me both the purest and the cruelest. But my
brother wouldn’t survive the joy she wanted to give him. That joy,
which was even stronger than that which Eponine brought to me,
would, I thought, be all that was necessary to complete the
destruction of the priest.

48
I ended up sitting down and, in the dark, airless room, talking at
considerable length: the silence maintained by Robert, who made
no reply except for a rare pitiful smile, made me feel as if I were
talking nonsense.

‘I’ve come to ask you, Robert, to sleep with Eponine. I’m sure
my request won’t surprise you but perhaps you’ll think it’s just a

challenge. But is it really only a futile provocation that you’ll

pretend to see there? Or isn’t it, rather, a summons to fulfill an
obligation that you’ve never wanted to recognize?’

Robert feebly protested:

.’
‘I’m surprised . . he began.
‘Shouldn’t you first be surprised that you’ve never realized that
your resistance, however determined it may have seemed, was
useless from the start? Because, as you know, “you’re done for!”

- it’s too late and there’s no way you can avoid giving in to her.’

I expected to see him laugh and amiably shrug his shoulders; he

did in the end break into a smile, but it was so awkward . . . The
tentative light that passed through the rain gave his features a

sort of ravaged beauty. I was amazed: each thing said made himI

more withdrawn.
Alarmed by such a perfect transformation, I was determined to

break the spell I had cast.

I told him, with a bit more authority in my voice, as if such a

patent absurdity would wake him up:
‘There is, above all, one thing you should know: she won’t
come here to you. She refuses!’
‘Did I ask her to come?’ he replied somewhat sheepishly.
‘You have nothing to ask of her?’
I »

‘Why don’t you wake up! You’ve been toying with her for the

last ten years!’

49
 .

I had pointed this out to him from time to time. When Eponine
had started making love with the local boys, he hadn’t just kept
away: she began, at the age of thirteen, to sleep around as much
as she could. Robert, who had up to that time shared all her
secrets, pretended that he no longer knew her when he saw her
in the streets. The falsity of his attitude was aggravated by the fact

that, as twins, we often wore each other’s clothes. I had, in the

meantime, come back from Savoy where I had made a long visit

for the sake of my health. I immediately became Eponine’s most

diligent lover. Under those circumstances, she couldn’t help but
recognize Robert by his absent look, which made her laugh until

her throat was sore. His cassock made the situation even more
farcical. That disguise was, to Eponine, the most irritating of
provocations: the comments she made in passing became more
derisive, masking a resentment that her morbid sensuality and
physical relations with me made more intense. She encouraged
the other girls to laugh and, since the only way she could answer
Robert’s insolence was by a greater insolence (she had, very
early, adopted all the worst habits), she spotted him one day at

dusk and ran out ahead of him; she knew from the silly, vacant
look on his face that it wasn’t I: turning her back on him, she
raised her skirt and stuck her behind up in the air:

‘There, you bastard,’ she muttered, ‘you don’t want to see my

. •
. ,
but you’re going to see it anyway!’
Robert had finally decided that he wouldn’t come to R. . any
longer, or as seldom as possible. But, one after the other, our
parents died and, during the war, illness as well as friendship
brought him home again.
I went there to be with him as he had hoped I would, but when
Eponine found out she decided to join me. Her reappearance,
that time, was even more full of repercussions in view of the fact
that Robert had agreed to replace for two months the recently
deceased parish priest.

50
 I ended up scolding my brother: he never should have come
back to R ... I said; once Eponine knew he was there, nothing

could keep her away; he couldn’t continue to ignore her: for her,
the attitude he had taken toward her had become an obsession;
it was slowly driving her crazy; in short, she was, in her own way,
in love with him - she, for whom interest in a man was
improvised every night.
‘You look down on Eponine because she sells herself, but
even when she went with boys just for fun, you refused to recog-

nize her on the street!’

I continued in a lower voice, spitting out the words:

‘That’s been going on for ten years now, and I’m fed up with
it!’

I got up and started walking back and forth; the rain streamed
down the windowpanes; it was cooler and I was perspiring. I

wasn’t well. Robert hadn’t made any response: he just sat there
looking like an old man. It was particularly annoying to me that,

instead of the witty, self-confident retorts I had come to expect

from him, he was confronting me with this listless hesitation. I

finished what I had to say with just a hint of anger in my voice:

‘How dare you look down on her? She can’t stand it: in fact, I

can say without exaggeration that it’s making her sick; it’s making
her sick for the very good reason that you’re wrong! You’re
wrong and, what’s more, you’re finished: you make her laugh,
but there’s so much anger towards you building up inside her that it

won’t be long before you get sick yourself from the contempt you’ve
seen fit to heap on her.’

I stopped and quickly left the room, slamming the door behind
me. He didn’t move or say a word.

Outside, I felt I had so surpassed myself by my own words that I

couldn’t laugh or do anything.

51
IV
THE VISITATION

Madame Hanusse really had no objection to the immorality of

her daughter. As a matter of fact, it provided her with a living: she

had been concerned the night before about Robert (everyone in

town - amused, but shocked - knew that Eponine was after him).
But it was only her fear of inordinate scandal - and my brother’s
obvious lack of money - that had made her blow her top. As
soon as it began to get dark, I went to see Eponine. I told her all

about my interview with my brother.

We were in her room at nine o’clock in the evening. Night had

fallen. The street outside her mother’s house is rarely used, and
we were taking a little air at the second-storey window; but
Eponine, who had her head out the window, suddenly pulled
back and signalled to me to be quiet.

‘It’s Robert,’ she whispered.

We concealed ourselves with the aid of a curtain behind one

of the shutters and watched as my brother arrived in front of the
house. We were amazed that he should be passing through that
little street which, of all streets, he had good reasons to avoid. We
even speculated for a moment, keeping our voices down, that he
might be coming to see Eponine.
If that was his intention, he changed his mind. He slowly
passed in front of the house, watching the window on the second

52
floor. He stopped further on and, turning around, came back to

give the window another look. Then he went away again; the

sight of his grey silhouette made me wince, and disappeared in the

it

darkness.
‘Stay here,’ said Eponine.

She wanted to talk to him, but, out in the dark of the streets,

she couldn’t find him. She came right back and, visibly concer-
ned, asked me a dozen times what I thought of Robert’s totally

unexpected appearance.
We imagined all sorts of explanations. He might just have
been looking for me and, finding no one, could have come back
in the hope of running into me on a street that led from the
house to the rectory. In any case, it was obvious just from his pre-

sence there that something had definitely changed. The night

before, Robert would never have gone down that little street

unless it was unavoidable.

Robert’s silent intervention left Eponine and me quite disturbed.

We had no idea how to interpret it. Eponine saw reason to think

that she was finally going to reach my brother and break the
silence that she found so humiliating. But she couldn’t be sure of
that, and the hope of obtaining what she so ardently desired
could only, from that moment
make her more anxious to
on,
have She was so nervous that it made her tremble; she would
it.

periodically break into almost uncontrollable laughter and when

we made love, her slender body writhed against mine. She

wriggled about like a chicken under the knife, and her body was
as taut as a sail in the wind.
Suddenly, at the open window, she let out a scream, and then
a string of half-articulated curses. She called Robert every name
in the book. Then she quieted down and all I heard was the
sound of running feet, as a band of frightened youngsters, who
had been watching us make love, took off down the empty street.

53
I had been so horrified to see my brother pass by outside

Eponine’s house that it had left me disconcerted. Robert had

been getting on my nerves for a long time with his smiling ver-
bosity which was a front he stubbornly maintained in order to
exclude any possible intimacy. For that reason, I shared
Eponine’s resentment. Since then Robert’s attitude toward my
mistress had changed the course of what had been the closest of

friendships. That counted even more than the beliefs or the

narrow life of the seminarian. The Christian faith and all its con-
sequences were distasteful to me, but I would have been glad to

discuss the matter with Robert, and without hiding my feelings,

either, because men can reach an understanding about such

things. They can be on opposite sides of a question and still be
friends. But Robert’s frigid response to Eponine’s desire for me had
eliminated any interest I might have had in an irony of that sort.

54
V
THE PROMISE

Robert’s attitude was, it seemed to me, not only cowardly but a

self-abnegation that did more than simply make him an impostor:
by acting towards Eponine as if he were a corpse, he was leaving
me with one foot in the grave because, except for his clothing, he

was like my reflection in a mirror.

Ultimately, his refusal to recognize the existence of Eponine

exacerbated her desire for me, or mine for her; that was, no
doubt, what made our relationship endure. But it had another
result as well: it reduced communication between Robert and me
to nothing but mockery. We hadn’t by any means stopped seeing
each other, but with both of us being obliged to adopt the same
sarcastic attitude, we were foolishly and hopelessly mired in the

complete negation of each other. If one of us spoke, it was only to

irritate the other. The occasion of my visit to the rectory was, in that
sense, the first in which I had finally said what I really thought.

Now, as it might in a play, everything had suddenly changed. I

had seen him that very morning as he really was, when he wasn’t
putting up a man in a stupor, who left himself wide open
front: a
and no longer my attacks with anything but apathy. But
resisted

those attacks, far from representing what wanted, put me in the I

position of someone who breaks down an open door and falls

55
 flat on his face. When, that night, I had seen my brother pass by

on the street, I should have been delighted to see him, finally at

my mercy, giving up his ridiculous pose. His long, slow walk in

the night had had the power to unveil the anguish he had con-
cealed. But that unexpected result was not enough for me.

In my effort to recapture Robert, I didn’t want to do anything

underhanded. My brother had always been, was still, my alter

ego; when I made fun of him it hurt me as much as his cruelty to

me, and the false gaiety with which he tried to keep me at a
distance made me feel impotent - it degraded me. That night I

had a long talk with Eponine, and I found myself so much in

agreement with her that it surprised me.

Eponine, for her part, wasn’t satisfied with the apparent
unhappiness of my brother. What did she care if he suffered,

when, in his suffering, he continued to deny her existence!

Furious and tired of laughing about it, she wanted Robert to
recognize her, to let her at last be a part of his life; and since she
knew that her immorality was the only thing about her that was
authentic, she would never be content until she had seduced
him. She was right: in bed, the contempt that goes with being a
prostitute changes to a feeling of delight, which is the measure of
its purity.

She spoke softly and rapidly, with an eloquence that left her
out of breath.
‘It’s obvious,’ she said, ‘that Robert doesn’t know a thing. I

want him to know, you see. He’s never had to deal with a hot-
blooded woman like me.’
Eponine was naked, and she talked on and on. The rigid

posture she assumed in order to keep herself going made her

look as if she were having a sort of convulsion.

I had to promise her a dozen times that I would call on Robert

56
the following day and wouldn’t leave him alone until he had
promised that he would come to her that night. I wasn’t to
deceive him: he was to be warned that she would be waiting for
him, naked, in her room. He wouldn’t have to say a word to her;
she was a whore, and you don’t have to sweet-talk a whore. She
had once worked in a brothel: she wanted Robert’s education to
be complete, so he was to come to her - to her mother’s house -
as if he were going to a brothel. Her mother would send him up,
and he would give her some money if he wanted to (I used to

pay her myself in the same way). Every priest went to a whore at

one time or another. Needless to say, Robert wouldn’t be the first

one she’d ‘done’.

That was the language of a prostitute, but it was infused with

such fanatical determination, with such intense emotion, that it

was impossible for anyone to be misled by its undeniable crudity:

it was, at the same time, the language of passion, which put on

that vulgar face in order to eliminate not only any obstacle, but

any delay that might have been set up against it. It was the
plenitude of audacity which took the whole world for its own,
measuring its violence on an infinite scale, and no longer
admitting to any appeasement. After everything else, she asked
me:
‘Do you think he’ll smell of bumed-out candles?’
I could sense, in the darkness, that her nostrils were open.

57
VI
SIMPLICITY

My absurdity imagined, as I lay somnolent, a clear way to define

the problem with which literature is confronted. I pictured its

object, perfect happiness, as a car speeding down a highway. I

would first pull up alongside the car, on the left, and, speeding
like a bullet, try to pass it. It would accelerate and, little by little,

start to escape, tearing away from me with all the power its

engine could provide. It is that very moment, when the car is on

the verge of getting away, making me realize that I’ll never be able
to pass it or even follow it, that is the image of the object pursued
by the writer: in order for that object to be attained, it is necessary
not that it should be seized, but that it should, at the height of
the chase, escape from the axis of an impossible tension. I had,
by virtue of being outrun by a faster car, at least enjoyed the
happiness that would have in essence eluded me if the car hadn’t
seemed to pass me. The more powerful car garners nothing,
while the weaker car, which follows it, knows true happiness at
the moment when the faster one makes it feel as if it were
backing up. To be truthful, it was only while dreaming that I

acceded to that ultimate moment of lucidity: once I had emerged

from my slumber, I returned to the vague oblivion of the waking
state.

Early the next morning I went to call on Robert. He seemed to be

58
just as depressed as he had been before But he had had time to
think about his decision: avoiding the usual irony, he proposed
to explain his situation.

He spoke from his bed and his voice was weak.

He was, he informed me, seriously He had another ill. fever.

At that point it became obvious, despite his efforts to conceal

it, that he couldn’t stay up on his feet. He had called the bishop’s

residence on the telephone and had reluctantly promised to say

Mass the following Sunday; that would undoubtedly be the final

act of his life as a priest.

Without raising my voice above his, I asked him:

‘I’m sorry to say that I now feel I’ll no longer be able to talk to

you without losing my temper. we say to each other is

Everything
necessarily false. I wish I could, but know and you know that it
I

wouldn’t be long before I would, despite myself, become artful. It

would be a waste of time to talk quietly to you; I’d like to get back
what’s been destroyed, but it’s too late: I’m so callous now that I’m
sure it’s useless to question you. Did you mean to say that you’re

leaving the priesthood, or life itself?’

Tve become rather callous myself,’ he said, ‘which is why I

didn’t hear a question I refuse to answer. We’ve stopped

mocking each other, and I don’t know why I haven’t, for the last

two days, maintained my customary pose; now, tell me frankly,

not artfully, what you want to ask me.’

‘Tonight, at nine o’clock, Eponine will be in her room. You will

join her there, but she won’t tolerate the least bit of hesitation.

She’ll be undressed, and you won’t have to speak to her.’

For a moment his face took on the look of a corpse, but he

answered right away, as if he had foreseen what I was going to

propose.
‘You could take my cassock,’ he said.
Without raising my voice at all, protested: I

‘I won’t do it and I’m offended that you should even think of it.

59
Fm surprised to see you suggest such a farcical solution. Fm sure

you realize that, as much for your own sake as for hers, you have
to find a way to repair the damage you’ve done. You thought it
amusing because, for ten years, we had been reduced to making
fun of each other. As a matter of fact, everything has been false

between us since the day you ignored her out on the street.

Today is the first time we’ve spoken without any pretense. And I

shouldn’t even say that, because your proposal, if I accepted it,

would take us right back where we started.’

Robert sat up a bit and smiled, but helplessly, then he simply

said:
.’
‘That’s true . .

I continued, trying as hard as I possibly could to finish what I

had to say and to restore ‘simplicity’ between my brother and me.

‘You know quite well,’ I said slowly, ‘that, as far as Fm concer-
ned, there’s no longer any difference between a mask and a
cassock. There isn’t anything you’ve said to me for a long time

that hasn’t seemed a sham, but that hasn’t been the same with
me; I didn’t hide the truth when I spoke at great length about
Eponine: you must know and from now on you’ll no longer be
able to doubt that so many strange things said about her were I

true. They must have seemed far-fetched to you, because they

showed a great deal of admiration. But those vices, those sudden
passions, that cold, deliberate cruelty and that resolute
debauchery, everything about her that is out of the ordinary is

simply true. There is, however, something to be inferred from

that. I don’t know why Eponine, who should have despised you a
thousand times over, has never done so. Perhaps she had the
inclination, as a girl, to know and love you. I’m not sure she ever
had a chance to forget you: haven’t I, for the past ten years, been
her most ardent lover? Sometimes I think that our physical
identity, even though your moral stance is diametrically opposed
to mine, is literally tearing her apart, as if the world inside of her

60
or before her were broken in two, but the two pieces couldn’t be

matched.’
‘Isn’t it the same for all the others?’

‘But, for others, it’s always something remote that remains an

indefinable malaise, while for her, it is there present each time
,

she sees you. I don’t suppose you’ve ever given any thought to
the consequences of such a perfect identity? You can easily see,

I’m sure, that the immediate effect of your attitude was to

accentuate it. People don’t ordinarily pay much attention to it, but
if a woman is physically loved by a man and someone who is the
very image of that man treats her with the utmost disdain, that
love and that disdain combined can intensify the emotions that
correspond to them. No doubt that wouldn’t affect the type of

person who is inclined to be timid, but Eponine is quite the con-

trary, eager to be put to the test and she accordingly threw herself, for
better or worse, into the trap that fate had set for her. You’ll know
who she really is if you can comprehend that. Having been
challenged by fate, she answered it with a stronger challenge, and
you must appreciate that her whole being is in that challenge. I

should think you could see, at this point, what is irremediable in a

passion so necessarily cruel - because Eponine will never give
herself a minute of peace until she has destroyed you. If you
were, nevertheless, to persist in seeing only the vulgar aspects of
this whole affair, you could consider yourself justified, for those
aspects are, in effect, the most apparent; but you know very well

that by so doing you would be continuing to run away from

yourself.’

Robert was quick to reply, impersonally, as if he were counting

aloud, and without trace of hostility in his voice:

‘I know you’re perceptive enough to realize that if I were to

speak right now, I would be speaking without saying anything,
which I want to avoid out of respect for you and for myself.

You’re not surprised to see that I’ve finally come to the point

61
 where I can’t go on with my masquerade. But that doesn’t mean I

have to tell you what is happening to me today. It’s enough for

you that I’ve stopped pretending. Perhaps I want you to guess,

but I’m determined or, if you prefer, condemned to say nothing.

That’s painful to me, and even more so because we’re getting to

the stage where we couldn’t go on talking about things that don’t

really matter; so, just when I’m about to rejoice at being reunited

with you, we have to avoid each other. It’s too late, and there’s

nothing we can do.’

Robert was pale, and I was sure that I was pale as well. He smiled
at me. I got up, took his hand without shaking it and held it for a

moment in mine.
‘I’m happy,’ I said, ‘that it’s like that between us, but don’t be
shocked: I’m also very unhappy.’
He resumed:
‘Of course! unhappy ... so, thank God, everything is simple.
Don’t ask me anything more, all right? It’s better this way.’
I shook his hand and said (I believe that my words, which were
uttered somewhat evasively, sounded as if they were meant to
indicate definitive agreement):

‘Yes, it’s better this way.’

I was grateful to my brother for having disconcerted me by giving

me the only answer he could give. But outside, I felt all the worse
because I had nothing to tell Eponine.

62
 .

VII

THE BUTCHER

That visit left me completely alone, for it created a rift between

Eponine and myself. Her denunciation of my conduct, in reply to

which I was quickly reduced to an embarrassing silence, was all

the more difficult to endure because, while she ordinarily had a

way of characterizing people in the foulest terms which were

exceptionally apt, she now in her anger attributed to my brother

and me motives of which the most admissible was cowardice. Her
disappointment had apparently caused her to lose her self-

control and affected her judgment. A woman who lashes out at

random, blaming other people for her own misfortunes, is close

to being odious. Each of us, moreover, in his own mind accused

the other of deliberately bringing an end to the pleasant little

orgies we would both equally miss. Each of us was thus, in any

event, diminished through the fault of the other, and we each
inevitably felt that the other, being the cause of that diminution,
was hostile. At least that was the way Eponine felt about it; for I,

while afflicted with the same remorse, couldn’t help repeating to

myself, with a lamentable sort of gaiety: ‘It’s better this way: the

moment has come, and it’s time for everything to go! .

Eponine was more adamant. She considered it the height of

perfidy that I should have co-operated with Robert to make such
a fool of her. She resented being made to feel that she was
exuding violence and that she had been wrong to place her con-

63
 .

fidence in me. She was a laughingstock, she screamed; she was

ashamed to be caught sprawled in a trap set for her by a half-wit.

‘You’re just like your brother,’ she said, ‘

a cleric (that was what
she liked to call anyone who was a member of the clergy) . . . You
make me sick with your pompous voice and your fancy, polished

language!’

She left, slamming the door behind her, and I remained in my

chair, alone, feeling out of place in that paradoxical room where
lingerie, perfume and dresses from Paris, strewn all about, were

juxtaposed with the decrepitude of provincial life.

I began to feel angry and dispossessed, as if fate were suddenly

striving to dispossess and destroy me. I was hopelessly isolated;

with Eponine going the way of my brother, was I the rotted trunk
from which the branches systematically detach themselves. That
kind of solitude could be desirable, and it wasn’t as if I had never
looked forward to it or dreamed of it; but now that it was becom-
ing a reality, I already no longer wanted to know anything about
it.

I heard footsteps on the stairs. I thought it might be Eponine

coming to get something in her room: she would come in and
pretend she didn’t see me. But the stream of life is always quick
to carry one along, so my heart leapt to my throat just as
Madame Hanusse opened the door.
She came in without knocking.
I stood up, furious at being obliged to speak to her. She tried
to act as if she were full of provincial benevolence, which at least
had the merit of being absurd.
‘So you’ve had a quarrel,’ she said. ‘Poor man, you look all

upset .

She continued:
But talk about being angry, you should have seen Eponine.

64
Do you know what she said, the little tramp?
‘What?
‘She left without giving me time to answer her. “Go take out
the garbage I left up there.” That’s what she said.’

I remained silent and cold, on the point of a nasty laugh and

disgust, not knowing what to say or do, but anxious to get away
from the old shrew with my dignity intact.
Madame Hanusse moved back towards the door, listened
attentively and, hearing nothing, assumed a conspiratorial air

that, under other circumstances, would have forced me to laugh.

She murmured furtively:

‘You go along now and when she calms down I’ll let you
know.’
I put some money under a bottle of perfume and when, as I

left, I said to her very softly: ‘Thank you, Madame Hanusse’, we

both smiled knowingly. But when I saw my shadow on the street
and heard my heels on the pavement, there was something
repulsive about that ‘Thank you, Madame Hanusse’ for which no
amount of hope could compensate.
I headed for the bar where we usually drank, but I didn’t go in.

I knew that I had absolutely no intention of having a drink and

merely wanted to see if Eponine was there. Yet, I dreaded the
thought of running into her! It was utter idleness that led me to

pick at my open sore even as I felt the growing irritation you get
when you know you’re making things worse. I went to the

butcher shop for the very same reason: I tried the door and
wasn’t surprised to find it locked and the curtains drawn. It wasn’t
unusual at that time to find a butcher shop closed: I was sure,

nevertheless, that Eponine was behind the curtains and, having

heard me try the door, was listening, perfectly still, in what I

imagined to be a half-anxious, half-facetious state of expectation.

I was right. I went back to the shop, but didn’t try to open the

65
door: for a second I heard, from inside the shop, the faint sound

of laboured breathing. I no longer had any doubt. I was thirsty

and returned to the bar. I wasn’t jealous of Eponine, who liked

the butcher shop and was fascinated by the butcher’s broad

physique. She made no secret of her visits; quite the contrary (as

a matter of fact she used to tell me she never bought her meat
anywhere else). But at the time, I was deliberately trying to get

myself all worked up. I watched for Eponine from the bar and
saw her come out of the butcher shop. She was beautiful, impas-

sive, and I was pitiful; so perfectly and so quickly alone. I was

afraid she might come into the bar, so I paid my bill and
headed for the back, having made up my mind that, if she did
come in, I would go out by another door. I went into the men’s
room to urinate; it was so hot I could hardly breathe. I had to

keep wiping the perspiration off my face. I felt as if I were ‘in my

place’ and had wanted to suffocate like that. I could have
groaned, or shouted ‘Encore!’ During the time I spent in there, I

pictured Eponine at the bar with the butcher, trying to talk him
into starting a fight with me if I went to get a drink. He was a big,
strong man of thirty. As determined as was I - won’t say ‘beat’
to I

him (I hadn’t the slightest desire to do that), but, more modestly -

hold my own against him, I knew in advance that I would lose. I

decided right then and there that I would go back to the bar, but

that decision only made my humiliation complete: for hadn’t I

just seen Eponine come out of the butcher shop alone ?

I finally passed through the door of the café: Eponine wasn’t at

the bar.
I went to the butcher shop which, this time, was open. Behind
the curtains, the front room of the shop with its stone-tiled floor,
was invitingly cool. Two freshly slaughtered lambs, hanging by
their feet were still slowly leaking blood; on the chopping block
were some brains and large bones whose pearly protuberances

66
had an aggressive sort of nudity. The butcher was himself totally
bald. He emerged from the back of the shop. He was huge, calm,
and slow, clearly vigorous and brutal. His apparent (but perhaps
imaginary) irony amused me. I asked for a choice cut of meat,
expecting that he would, as usual, refuse. But much to my sur-

prise, he smiled and blandly replied that I could have whatever I

wanted. With a rapid movement, he drew out a long, shiny knife

and, without saying a word, began to sharpen the blade carefully.
The sound and brilliance of the steel, in the midst of all that

blood, had the resolute solidity of pleasure. It was strange to

imagine Eponine taking off her clothes and taunting that bald-
headed giant with a wretched smile. The cunning bestiality of life

was, in that particular framework, as simple as murder! The

butcher sensually prolonged the caress of the knife upon the
sharpener. It’s possible that he did so with a feeling of complicity,
but more probably, I surmised, in order to savour, along with
certain still vivid images, what was surely a monstrous physical
prowess.
The worst of it was to be at the point where, by a quirk of fate,

everything has been carried to the limit and to feel, at the same
time, abandoned by life. Fate was inviting me to a dance so
perfect that my inability to dance the steps produced in me a fit of

despondent fury. Unless to dance it was nothing but to ask the

butcher sheepishly, as he put the ‘filet’ in my hand: ‘How much do I

owe you?’ and to say as I paid: ‘But that’s too little, you must be mis-
taken!’ and to fail to shake a fist in response to that monster’s jovial
grin.

But even if I could have done it with the elegance of David, I

wouldn’t have cared to strike that false Goliath. Nor did I care to
consider that he had challenged and believed himself to have
humiliated me. I simply asked myself what I was going to do: I

was going to have a drink and eat the steak, the ‘filet’, which the
housekeeper would cook for me. I would drink some wine. But

67
after that? I had the vacuous immensity of time before me. I was
alone although I didn’t want to be. And my solitude was all the
more difficult to cope with because it was, nonetheless, the result
of my own demands. Had I hesitated to leave my brother once I

had understood? Hadn’t I, from that moment on, been sure that
Eponine would never forgive me for my failure to do what I had
promised?

68
VIII

THE MOUNTAIN

Back at home I watched over my steak: I wanted it cooked

properly but, together with my state of anguish, my brother’s

indifference to food - and the fact that on that day, I had felt him
closer to me than ever before - deprived me of more than half

the pleasure of eating (I drank all the faster). In the huge dining-
room where, on other days I liked to eat alone, because the
charm of a house is the best company, I had the leisure to

measure my solitude by the confusion of my thoughts. I had put

some books by my side. I had chosen them thinking that they

would bring me closer to my brother, but my brother didn’t want

to, couldn’t say anything to breach the perfect silence he had put up
against me. Saint Theresa? I preferred the smile of the butcher who

had the most lurid taste for death. That smile was such a perfect
symbol of my frustration that the course of the thoughts that were
racing through my mind turned toward the worst: some day might I

be tortured by a man who looked like that giant. But that was
nothing; only the suffocation experienced by those who get buried
alive was the measure of my own cruelty. That cruelty, however, was
more ironic than rigorous. It dictated above all that I should be
disgusted with myself but the end ;
and limit of that disgust was some
object with which I would never be disgusted. At that point, I lost the

train of my thought.

69
 .

I immediately decided to seek the solitude of the mountain, not

for the sake of enjoyment but ironically, because I thought that,

after I had exhausted myself with a long walk, I would find it a

good place to ‘search for God’ . .

Search for God? The same wine that was completely powerless
to put an end to the confusion of my thoughts suggested,
nevertheless, the stubborn idea of searching - like the ascetics,

whose sun seemed to be unremittingly drying my bones - for that

which, like death, puts an end to all mental confusion. Shouldn’t
I, since I was definitively shut up in my solitude, exhaust the remote
possibilities of solitude which love and friendship no doubt make
inaccessible? But when, on the road, the magic of panoramic

landscapes began to work on me, 1 forgot about my decision; I

wanted to live again and, on the contrary, it seemed to me that I

would never get tired of horizons like those; open to the promises of
a storm or the subtle variations of the light that indicate the time of
day in passing from one moment to that which follows. It was, in my
fever, an instant of fortuitous felicity, but didn’t mean a thing, and
it I

abruptly returned from the pleasure of living to a state of boredom.

The pleasure of living, in fact, pertained to the world that had

rejected me: that was the world of those who are, by incessant
change, alternately united and disjoined, separated and brought
together again in a process by which despair itself leads back at once
to hope. My heart leapt up and I felt distinctly alien to that infinite
landscape which proffered nothing except to the naiveté of those
before whom it extended.

What remained in me when it began to get dark, when there

descended on the world a hostile obscurity that left nothing to be
discerned?
It wouldn’t do any good, under those conditions, to continue
along a path that had only one meaning: which, at the end of the

70
walk, that last wait would lack; which maintained in me, in a
mechanical way, the ordinary movements of life. Even that was
not very important. I was walking at a steady pace, and my
anguish was still giving me the feeling of a lie; I wouldn’t have
that anguish any longer, I thought, if I were really as indifferent as

I supposed myself to be. At that point I began to go back to my

first idea. What was leftme to if I no longer, in my solitude, had
that anguish that bound me to the world? If I no longer derived
from a persistent taste for the world, a distaste for the one
enclosed by solitude? Couldn’t I, I won’t say ‘in a violent manner’,
but by the rigour of my indifference, find in the heart of solitude

the truth I had furtively glimpsed in the deterioration of my har-

monious relationship with my brother?

I understood then that I was entering, that I had entered, the
region that silence alone (since it is possible, in a sentence, to

introduce a momentary suspension) has the ridiculous power to

evoke. It was pleasantly, brightly comical, indifferent and, in the

long run, intolerable (but my last thoughts already implied a

return to the world).

That was so far from being the solution that I went right to the

end of the path. I thought of death which I imagined to be similar

to that aimless walk (but in death the walk along the road to
nowhere goes on ‘forever’).

71
 .

IX
HIGH MASS

The Mass that my brother was to celebrate that Sunday in the

enormous church became the focus of all my expectations. It

would be his last and already he was almost too weak to

celebrate it. I had no reason to think that there would be any

change. I had initially hoped that Robert, freed from his parish,

would come back home that very day. But he wrote to say that he
had decided not to do so: he wanted to leave R ... at once. So
the only way I could see him again was to go to the Sunday
service! I was reluctant to do that but Eponine would probably go:

I had spoken to her about it, and she had interrupted her tirade

long enough to ask me what time the service would begin.

I even imagined the possibility of incidents from which I was,

contrary to my previous insolence, determined to protect my
brother, if necessary. That was so logical that Madame Hanusse,
having learned of Eponine’s intentions in the morning, rushed
over to alert me. I told her that I had already decided to go to the
church. But I thanked her amiably: at that particular moment
despite everything, I was glad to see her.

‘I’ll come by for you,’ she said, ‘we’ll hide behind a column.’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I want to sit in the front row. You can hide if

you like.’

‘Well, she’s just as angry as she was before,’ said the old
woman rather coarsely . .

72
I

Those last words left me perplexed, which made me realize

that I was not so indifferent - and sensible - as I had been

pleased to think. I put some money in her greedy hand.
Nevertheless, the grimace that should have hollowed my cheeks
changed without any effort to an open smile.

I arrived fifteen minutes early. The church was still almost empty.
That emptiness made Eponine’s presence in the first row of seats

more conspicuous. But she wasn’t alone: she had brought along
two attractive women who were strangers to me. They were
apparently a couple of whores from Paris: winsome, elegant, and
skilled in the art of giving pleasure. When I came in, the two

strangers whispered to each other and then turned their heads in

my direction. The one nearest me quickly smiled rather

diffidently - was it ironic, or an invitation? She probably didn’t

know hersei' - but I had to acknowledge it The . . . other one

smiled as well: silently, furtively, as if we were back in school;

under the circumstances, I was far from comfortable myself.

Later on, Eponine told me that she had been seized with panic in

the church; it was too late to turn back (besides, nothing in the

world could have induced her to leave), but she knew that she
would be speechless, immobile, and petrified in front of Robert!

She saw herself annihilated before the majesty of the celebrant,

unable to open her mouth or make a move, when she should

have descended upon him in a flurry of dishevelled garments - and
with a stream of vulgar curses.

Her paralysis was complemented by the weariness of her

friends, which was itself a product of the silence and immobility

imposed by the circumstances. They kept to their seats and were
relatively quiet, except for an occasional brief exchange. But they
eventually broke out into stifled laughter, and the sort of suffoca-

tion that Eponine was struggling with was becoming increasingly

73
susceptible to the contagion of their puerile giggles. Eponine,

moreover, must have sensed the painfully ludicrous aspects of

the situation. I don’t know what the girl sitting next to her said

into her ear, but she laughed; then she did all she could to

make herself stop. I even saw her, a few minutes later, nervously

wringing her hands: as she did, she slowly turned towards me

with a troubled, quizzical look on her face. She had forgotten her

rancour and was looking for support. All this was bound to end
badly; it was so absurd to see but also, at that particular moment,
so soothing that I clenched my teeth and had to use my hands to
suppress the fit of laughter that took hold of me. Eponine
immediately did the same and was joined by her friends.

The very presence, there in the first row of seats, of that gaudy
trio whose eyes, languid posture and festive demeanour
suggested a sensual gaiety, was enough to put anyone on the
verge of laughter. It was hard to imagine for my brother a more
painful provocation, but my own reaction was a mixture of fear,

expectation and desire for the inevitable. The vivid, penetrating

colours of their dresses which, far from concealing the charms of
their plump, shapely bodies, actually advertised their secrets,

were scandalous in the confines of the church. The shock of

seeing Eponine and her friends sitting in their pew was
aggravated by the fact that they were themselves uncomfortable
with the knowledge that their presence was incongruous. The
parishioners were for the most part oblivious to the situation but
the three women still had the feeling that they were the object of
everyone’s attention. They told me later on of the idea that had
come to them and given rise to their jokes and muffled laughter:
it was as if they were in a brothel, waiting to be chosen but the
‘gentleman’ they were waiting for was the priest in his chasuble.
My brother whom I now knew to be subject to the influence of

74
Eponine, my brother, in the brilliance of his sacramental vest-

ments but who, starting from that very moment, was on the way
to new heights of anguish, was about to be drawn into a scandal:
he had defied Eponine, and she was responding with even more
defiance. The Mass he was about to say would be sung with the
failing breath of one whose life was now insoluble but the altar he
would ascend was already mined: already, there was a licentious

irony to correspond, like his corruption, to the divine irony that

he carried inside himself. Those lovely, shameless bodies and
those vulgar laughs had something healthy and disturbing
about them that was fascinating; something decadent and
triumphant that demonstrated the fraudulence of virtue. I was
convinced that, in the presence of Eponine, my brother wouldn’t
be able to carry on. But anguish tempered my certitude: was it

too simple, too neat: in the silence that preceded Robert’s

solemn entrance, I no longer had the strength to admit anything.

I was already far from the moment when I dreaded a scandal. A

scandal seemed to me at that point to be just as necessary as the
orderly completion of the service would seem to a person who
was deeply religious. But it was really too perfect: with the tension
at its peak, we were going to spoil everything; we were, as we
waited, right on the brink of laughter, and we might have broken
out in spite of ourselves: we could have been overcome by the

kind of uncontrollable laughter that is unleashed by the desire to

hold it back. That, no doubt, was what saved Eponine and me, so
much so that, in the end, our apprehension depressed us. It

eventually became so painful that Eponine’s two friends were

discountenanced. When the organ began to play and my brother,

preceded by the altarboys, slowly made his way towards the nave,

even they, despite their gaiety, felt a little twinge. With our hearts in

our mouths, Eponine and I saw Robert, who was exceedingly pale,
hesitate for a second; he glanced at us with the haggard look of a

75
sickly man but quickened his pace: he climbed the steps of the choir
and continued his ritual progress towards the altar.

In the midst of the noise created by the choir - a young woman

with a piercing voice was warbling the ‘Introit’ - I heard Eponine’s
companions whispering to each other. They were whispering, but
my brother’s passage had clearly intimidated them. I heard the
redhead, Rosie, say into the ear of Raymonde: ‘He’s cute!’ But
that merely pointed up the absurdity of the course that events

had taken.
At the time, my brother had his back turned to us and was
reduced to the silhouette of his sacred chasuble: I was both
fascinated and disappointed. The hidden, immobile dance of the
celebrant - at the foot, then on the steps of the altar - immobile,
but sustained by the wave of /eyries, by the thundering of the
organ, was, under the circumstances, as irritating as a traffic jam
(in which a chorus of horns expresses the impatience of the cars).

But then the organ fell silent and, amid the solemnity of that
silence, my brother, following the office, slowly turned around.
I knew that he was supposed to intone at that point, in a

prolonged, eerie wail, a simple, brief dominus uobiscum - and for

a time he made a palpable effort to do so - but nothing came out
of his mouth: he smiled almost imperceptibly and seemed to be
waking up but simultaneously lapsing into a coma, as he uttered
something totally unintelligible. Then he cast his eyes toward
Eponine and, since she was herself overcome with fear, he fell:

his body suddenly went limp, slid to the floor, and tumbled down
the steps of the altar. Eponine let out a shriek which was echoed
a few seconds later by the astonished congregation, and I had to
take a firm grip on the top of a prayer-stool.

76
X
GRACE

I had no idea at the time that what I had just seen might have
been an act; it didn’t look like one. I didn’t understand until later

what had, over the years, come to determine Robert’s behaviour.

His opinions changed so rapidly that he had long ago been

reduced to living a lie. Actually, he had always been like that: he
would readily commit himself and would profess to believe in

something without ever discussing it, because he was never truly

committed and never believed in anything. An ever-changing

irony had led him to piety. But he had trifled with piety to the

point of insanity; or, rather, all he had known of it was insanity. I

can see now that, we would have

without that ridiculous farce,
continued to be mindlessly dependent on each other. And we
would never have had any solitude. So it was the similarity, not
the contrast between our characters, that had led us to express

opinions that were incompatible and which were most likely to

disappoint and irritate the other person. We each found the

other insufferable because we both had the same kind of
irritability.

I would eventually learn that this absolute contrast was

tantamount to a perfect identity. But at the time when my brother
collapsed, I had only recently, on the occasion of his renuncia-

tion of the pretence that had existed between us, had the first

inkling of the idea.

77
 As soon as I regained my composure I rushed to help him. It

was a difficult moment: the bewildered members of the congrega-

tion crowded around to get a better look. With the help of the
sacristan I managed to clear everyone out of the choir which was
where my brother’s body had come to rest. Just two nuns and I

stayed to attend to him. Having returned to their seats, the

parishioners stood and waited, silent except for an occasional

whisper. Eponine, Rosie, and Raymonde were still in the first

row. I very quietly discussed the situation with the nuns, and one
of the altarboys came back with medicine, some water and a
towel. The classical architecture of the choir gave the scene a
theatrical gravity. Eponine told me later that she felt as if she had,
by some miracle, been transported to* another world. A more
excruciating kind of solemnity had supplanted that of the Mass:

despite the silence of the organ and the consternation of the

parishioners, some of whom had become intensely introspective

(the most devout among them knelt down and prayed almost
audibly), the whole spectacle retained a certain fascination. The
divine light of grace was shining rather faintly on my brother’s
face, and there was something supernatural about his deathly

pallor; it made him look like one of the figures in a stained-glass

window.

One of the nuns, as if she were posing for a piéta, gently

moistened Robert’s pale but holy lips . . . Even Raymonde, who
was more irreverent than Rosie, but more limited, thought for a
minute that she had returned to the innocent days of her
childhood when she would listen in awe to the dogmas of the
catechism.

Ihad knelt down myself, and we were waiting for the doctor (I
had asked one of the altarboys to summon him). remember I

precisely having been transported suspended , in the midst of a

78
mirage, where everything was unearthly. The casual amiability of
the doctor would undoubtedly bring an end to that sort of

‘presence’. 1 was excited, feverish and I naively wished that it

could go on; then, to my amazement, I felt something pinching

my wrist. I gulped and kept perfectly still; my brother lay there
totally lifeless with his mouth wide open and his head hanging
down, but he was pinching my wrist; he did it so discreetly that
no one noticed. Could I have imagined it? I was reluctant to

believe that I was being taken in like that. But I had to refrain

from showing any emotion; I had never had a more bizarre

sensation: it was a mixture of shame, delight and even vice. There

in the middle of the choir, I trembled on the very brink of what it

would be more precise to call the delectation rather than the

derangement of the senses. was I like a woman overwhelmed by an

unexpected caress that is more perverse than she would have
thought possible - but which, having affected her in a manner she
couldn’t foresee, literally drives her to distraction. In a way, I admired
my brother: he was humiliating and enchanting me (Eponine, up in
the tower, was only a child in comparison), but I was foolishly afraid
he was losing his mind.
Yielding to banality, I became impatient to get to the bottom of
this unseemly episode: I was relieved to see the doctor. The nuns
were primarily concerned about the Mass which, once begun,
was not supposed to be interrupted. Speaking just above a
whisper, they conferred with the doctor.

‘Couldn’t we carry him into the sacristy?’ asked the Mother

Superior.
The doctor, who was quite a bit older than she, replied rather

gruffly that the first thing they had to do was to get Robert out of

his vestments: they were so cumbersome that it had been

impossible to give him sufficient room to breathe.

‘With armour like that, it’s a wonder this sort of thing doesn’t

79
happen more often,’ he said with exaggerated vivacity. ‘We really

ought to cut them off. Yes, yes, know they’re much too expen- I

sive! But hurry, Sisters. The poor man may be dying, and there’s

no way can examine him

I all wrapped up like that!’

One of the nuns threw herself into the task of removing the
chasuble. The altarboy and I gave her a hand, and as we began
to loosen Robert’s clothes, the doctor, in response to a query
from the Mother Superior about the possibility of finishing the

Mass, declared rather loudly:

‘But Sister, you can’t ask a man who has just fainted to say
Mass. No, it’s inhumane . . . What are all those people doing? Are
they waiting?
‘What are you waiting for? There’s no use in waiting around.
Do you want him to go on with it, do the impossible, and
collapse again? That isn’t charitable; you can see for yourselves

that the man is tormented!’

I was disturbed to see what appeared to be an involuntary
smile take shape on my brother’s ashen face, despite his efforts

to suppress it; he was more truly tormented than the doctor

could imagine.

The process of divesting the lifeless form of Robert, there on the

steps of the altar, was reminiscent of a funeral. The members of
the congregation slowly and silently left the church. I saw
Eponine and her friends get up and go out; under the
circumstances, they looked rather silly. It was macabre to see

Robert’s cassock before the altar without the usual adornments:

the empty sanctuary seemed lugubrious. The nuns folded up the
vestments and went to put them away in the sacristy. It was all

over; the doctor, down on his knees, shook his head.

‘We’ll take him to the rectory in my car,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t

seem to be anything serious; nothing new at least.’

The sacristan and I carried my brother to the door of the

80
church where the doctor’s car was waiting. The parishioners were
all out in the square, but Eponine had left.

I asked the doctor to take Robert to my house. The nuns and the
sacristan, in his uniform, went with us.

81
XI
SLEEP

We had to get my brother undressed: he opened his eyes but

gave only vague replies to our questions. The nuns, perhaps

because they were afraid of the doctor, conducted themselves
rather timidly. To my surprise, they accepted without a word the
fact that my brother had been taken to my house. (One of them
suggested, however, thatwe should wait until Robert was fully
conscious before we moved his belongings, because that was a

decision he ought to make for himself). The doctor thought it

unlikely that there would be any further complications. He wasn’t

quite sure what had caused my brother to faint; probably just
fatigue and nervous tension. But he insisted that Robert had to

take a complete rest and look after his health. It wouldn’t do for
him to stay at the rectory which was very humid. He would be
better off at my house; it was infinitely more hospitable. Life at
the rectory, with the bilious nuns and slovenly maid, was like a
preview of the grave. Robert was seriously ill, and something had to
be done.

Robert’s collapse had caused a huge commotion around him as

he lay still on the altar; I was part of it, but I didn’t have to make
any decisions. That was the best way for me to wait until I could
speak to my brother. The whole incident had made such an
impression on me that I kept coming back to it, trying to figure

82
out what it meant, what its consequences and hidden motives
might be. I was anxious to have the company of another person;
to talk to Robert in private, or to be with Eponine. Although
everything was over now, I still felt compelled to review the events
of the day again and again, in order to be familiar with all the

different aspects. I despised myself and despised my ostensible

temerity which revealed its shabbyness just as I discovered this

immense void.
was on the
I coldest summit imaginable, and I was destined to

live there uncomfortably if not without pride. I had to struggle to

keep my brother from falling into the clutches of death or

madness! I was ashamed of being so obtuse, of not having
divined the tragedy in the comedy that Robert was acting out - or
the comedy in the tragedy. I was helpless, like someone in love.

But I was so incapable of loving (unless my friendship for Robert

could be called love) that that ordeal is the only one that gave me
the idea of involuntary and unfortunate delights. The feeling that

my brother had tricked me, that he was losing his mind, that he
was going to die, was making me both exceedingly happy and
exceedingly sad.
In my impatience, I wished I could speak to Robert right away
(I knew it would be long and complicated); I wished I could go to
Eponine (but that didn’t make the least bit of sense if I hadn’t first

spoken to my brother). I no longer had the unhealthy desire to

be silent, and I was looking all around for a way to escape. I

waited without saying a word, but my head was so full of ideas

that I drifted aimlessly in all directions, before I realized that I was

condemned to remain and endure the absurdity of an intolerable
situation.

In that state of excitation, I accompanied the nuns to the door

and came back into the room where the shutters were closed, to
sit in silence by my brother’s bed. I knew in advance that the

83
 . . .

discussion would be interminable, if it was possible to have one at

all; I would have to question Robert patiently. The fact that he

had pinched me meant that he was pretending, but he was,
nevertheless, truly ill, and he could go mad; I could very shortly

find myself confronted with a disaster.

In a feeble voice, he told me:

‘Go and have your lunch first.’

To which I quietly replied:

‘I’ll stay here. You don’t have to talk. I won’t say anything. You
ought to sleep.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Go and eat first. We have to talk, but first you
have to have your lunch.’
I went to eat but when I came back he was sleeping.

Late that afternoon, someone rang the doorbell: the maid

ushered in Madame Hanusse.
‘I heard your brother wasn’t well,’ she said. ‘I thought I was
going to be sick when I saw him fall. But tell me, is it anything
serious?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

Her visit intrigued me.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘he’ll be all right. Monsieur Robert is a
young man. But had I said I would let you know as soon as Eponine
. . . um .

‘That’s very kind of you, Madame Hanusse .

‘Yes. Well, now she needs you . . . she even said so . . . She
wants to know how your brother is doing. She wants to talk to
you about him. Especially since she’s angry with Henri .

‘Who’s Henri?’
The butcher . . . You mean you don’t know? You’re the only
one who doesn’t . . . She’s been practically living at the butcher
.’
shop. I’m so ashamed don’t dare go out on the
I street . .

She gave me a long, plaintive look. Her eyes filled up with

84
 .

tears that thoroughly betrayed the impudence of her distress.

‘Yesterday,’ she said, ‘he threw hei out ... on the street, like

an old trollop. But that isn’t the worst of it . .

‘Eponine started to scream. In the middle of the street! Henri

came out and lit into her. Right in front of everyone, he told her
.’
off! . .

I remained confused, and she observed a lengthy silence.

Generations of wretched harpies had personified that particular

kind of mortification.
She shook her head.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘She’s sunk about as low as anyone can
get!’

It’s hard for me to describe the feeling that overcame me: I

could hear my heart beating violently and it seemed to me that,

despite my anguish, I was falling prey to an inner excitement I

took the old woman’s hand and held it with compassion but
since I had put some money in it I looked her right in the eye
and gently made sure that she knew it was there.

‘We both certainly deserve to be pitied,’ I said.

A witness who had failed to notice this would have gone off in

dismay as he reflected on the misfortune that it was the lot of a

lover and mother to share. Unless he had heard, before he left

the mother’s last, barely audible words. Looking up at the sky,

she murmured:
‘You’re a good man, Monsieur.’
I had seldom penetrated quite so far into the foulest recesses
of the soul and, as I slowly made my way up the stairs to see
Robert, I laughed somewhat grimly at the horror they inspire.

85
XII

THE SEPARATION

I knocked very gently on the door, waited and, hearing no

response, tiptoed into the room. I settled into an armchair.
Robert’s eyes were gazing off into space; he gave the impression
that he was about to fall asleep - and that he was too weak to

make any kind of effort.

He wanted to talk to me, but he remained immersed in a

silence that he didn’t have the capacity to break. He was being
held back by a torpor similar to the inexplicable spells of
indolence that prevent us from lifting a finger when time is short

and failure to act means that all is lost.

At that particular time Robert probably had no reason to hurry. I

was the only one suffering from his inertia, which was opposed to
my own thirst to finally know. I was ashamed of having vulgarly

toyed with him, of having been blind and frivolous. Now our roles
were reversed and he, by his indifference, was toying with me
through my distress. But his cruelty didn’t have the fatuous
malice of mine; it resulted from the infinite weight of his derange-
ment which, paralyzing him, took away his desire to speak.

I was, at the same time, ashamed of thinking that he was going

mad. Wasn’t it possible for me to see, in that sleep which
appeared to oppress him and which was leaving him inert,

causing him to lose his countence and to silently withdraw from

86
himself, the derailment of his faculties? But shouldn’t I, on the
contrary, have been grateful to him for the fact that, as he was
utterly betraying the cause he had served, he didn’t attenuate it at

all and confined himself to giving me a pinch?

It seemed to me for an instant that his stupor incorporated a

sort of stifled love that was akin to licence; that was what the
melting ice of spring, the herald of swollen rivers, is to the frost of
a long, cold winter. He hadn’t tried to escape and he was
responding to our provocations in the same way that a wayward
young woman taking her lover to an orgy would respond to his

request for a kiss. Actually, he was provoking me and Eponine as

well to such an extent that we were overwhelmed by our own
emotions. In such a stupor, everything is ruin and corruption,

dissimulation or untruth: even silence had become nothing but a

ploy.

I began to detest the cruelty with which he was involving me in

his own destruction. He had acted out so many different parts -

from the jovial priest to the tragic hero dying in the church - that,
when thought I of his pinching me, I felt indignant. Yet, I couldn’t
fail to note that his ruse had enjoyed every chance of succeeding.
My melancholy disposition in itself rendered me susceptible to a

spurious fainting that made an hysterical inertia a triumph over

useful activity and a theatrical indifference a mastery of the emo-
tions. It seemed to me that Robert’s little hoax had, paradoxically,

the power to radiate falsehood and distress. As I sat by his side,

stretched out in the old stuffed chair, I hovered in the grey area
on the periphery of sleep: I was so uneasy it had me knotted up
to the point of paralysis, and I was descending into the realm of

death, into the realm of sleep where silence is a cloak for enor-
mous vanities. When I woke up in that state of emotional
disarray, with Robert still staring off into space, it seemed to me
that the world had never been so false: it commanded a silent

87
 . .

aberration, a descent into fraudulence. In an unfortunate, ironie

turn of events, I found myself with my inside out, and the inside,

compared to the outside, has the advantage, because it can never

appear to be real.

At that point, Robert asked in a perfectly natural voice:

‘What time is it?’

I had trouble grasping the meaning of what he had said. For a

long time I just stared out of the window; then I looked at my
wrist, at my watch:
‘It’s six o’clock,’ I said.

‘Is it really?’

I emerged from my reverie and asked him if he wanted some-

thing to drink.

There was a moment of silence; then he said rather dryly:

‘I wanted to tell you that I’m going to have dinner at the

rectory. If it’s six o’clock, I’d better get dressed because, if I’m late,

there won’t be anything left to eat.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘You could have dinner with me .

He looked at me attentively, as if he were up against some

insurmountable obstacle:
‘It’s very hard for me to talk.’
Then he suddenly became quite explicit, which surprised me:
‘I’ve been in the habit of lying, but now I couldn’t do that, and I

don’t have the strength to talk.’

I was so ridiculously annoyed that I replied:

‘You didn’t have the strength to say Mass, either.’

Then he continued:
‘I can’t talk any longer. I’d like to, but I don’t have the strength.
That appears to bother you, but it’s better this way.’
‘You had enough strength to pinch me .

88
 .

He smiled furtively, but, as if he couldn’t tolerate his own irony,

his features froze.

Then he spoke more forcefully:

‘I wish you wouldn’t take me seriously when I’m only pretend-

ing. I know that by doing so I’ve made my silence painful, but
that’s precisely why it isn’t necessary for me to talk.’

I didn’t say anything in reply which depressed me, but what

did I have to say?
My slowness seemed to irritate him, and he added:
‘Naturally, I’d like to tell you what’s happening to me, but I

wouldn’t be able to talk to you about anything that mattered.

That’s why we have to avoid each other. There’s hardly any
difference between us, and my affection for you is just as great as

your affection for me. If we were to talk about trivialities, would wind I

up mistaking you for someone else and now .

He smiled in such a way that it reminded me of the moment

when he pinched me.
‘In order to be sure of a complicity as great as that, I have to
keep quiet. I would deserve to lose it if I didn’t, in the first place,

resolve to stay away from you.’

Remembering my recent frivolity and sure, although I refused to

admit it, that he was right, I knew I couldn’t go on. If my brother
hadn’t said those few words to me, the stupor that his vacant
gaze had induced in me might have lasted. I would have
remained in the state of lethargy that followed the feeling of
displacement I had experienced in the choir. But he had spoken
to me without looking at me, as if he had wanted to get as far

away from me as he could - from that point on I felt the need to

run away, so that I wouldn’t have to see that distant look on his
face which was even hiding from my tears - which was hiding like
the only truth I wanted to find and had foolishly failed to recog-

89
nize. I felt an insurmountable need to run away, to run away from
him; and I understood that, ultimately, I was running away from
myself. I knew that what had been given to me to know had been
given only so that I might feel it definitively escape from me.
That agitation had the impotence of anger, but it continued to
destroy me, to make me vulnerable to remorse and anxiety. Did
Robert, being ill, have under the circumstances the slightest

chance to live? Wasn’t he, in fact, already giving in to death? I

sensed that he was already resigning himself to the corruption of

death - that he was living according to the dictates of an onerous
silence which would very soon become his definitive absence! I

hated to think about it, but I was clearly guilty of the most flagrant

complicity. It frightened me to think of the void into which I

would call out to him in vain. I was already stealthily savouring an

aroma of silk and humid leaves which was making me grow pale
and suddenly, as I went down the stairs, I began to weep. I had
left him, and I no longer had any doubt about the meaning of
those fascinating words: ‘Never again!’ Those chilling words sub-
verted my will like a vice, but it was in me, in Robert, that the cold
was penetrating and the me was
fear that had taken hold of
making me feel like a coward. As the inevitable demise of my if

brother were a duplication - and an elaboration - of my own. I

too was in a hurry to be alone, to lose myself in the banality of

solitude, to pull the covers up over my head and go to sleep in
my shame.

90
XIII

THE ANISETTE

The Mother Superior was waiting in the vestibule. I promptly

informed her that Robert was apparently feeling better and
intended to return to the rectory. Although she had just come
over to see how he was, she said she would be glad to escort
him. I ’phoned for a taxi. Robert dressed himself and wouldn’t let

me help him down the stairs. He had put on his cassock but
neglected to comb his hair: stealthy and reflective, he sat in the car
with the nun, the driver and me, looking like a man condemned to

die. He rode along in total silence, in the depths of a moral collapse

so palpable that it made me physically ill.

He left me at the door of the rectory. I didn’t think he would

even look at me. Just as he was leaving the car, however, he
turned to me and I could see the indifference in his eyes; but he
was delirious and they were the eyes of a man intoxicated by

liquor or drugs. He simply said ‘good-bye’ and, turning his back

to me, went in through the door. Even the Mother Superior was
embarrassed. She stayed behind and, taking my hand, promised
that she would look after him and call to let me know how he

was.

I wanted to see Eponine but I decided that before I did so, I

would stop at home: I was thirsty. I poured myself a huge glass of

brandy and, without bothering to sit down, drank it so fast that I

91
 coughed. Then I had another glass, filled right to the brim. I

began to feel euphoric. I took a second bottle into the kitchen

and asked the maid to take it over to the rectory for my brother.

Eponine was not alone. Through the window, I saw her sitting at

the table with Rosie, Raymonde, and her mother; they were
drinking a greenish anisette. When I knocked on the door, they
were all practically screaming at one another.
Eponine opened the door, vibrant with fury: when I saw her
that way, with her hair all in a mess, I said to myself that she

looked like a vulgar sort of witch, like a pythoness from ancient

Greece . . . She shouted hoarsely:

‘What did he say?’

I didn’t understand at first that she was talking about Robert.

Til see him,’ she continued, ‘he’ll tell me . . . and I’ll tell him
. . . Come on in, we’ve been drinking for hours.’
She introduced me to her friends, gave me a glass and filled it

up. All four of them were completely drunk, which was fine with

me. I could let myself go.

‘You’ll have a hard time catching up with us,’ said Raymonde.
‘He’s going to drink everything in sight,’ said Rosie as I tossed
down a whole glass, slowly but without a pause.
Madame Hanusse got up, went to the cupboard and took out
a bottle that was full; she opened it and slammed it down on the
table.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘Robert fainted when he saw her.’

‘Mama,’ said Eponine, ‘I’ve been telling you for an hour now
that he saw me as he went by.’

She groaned and looked weary.

Madame Hanusse, turning to me, demanded angrily
‘You, what do you think?’
But its obvious,’ said Rosie sarcastically, ‘if he fainted, it’s

because he loves her!’

‘Leave her alone,’ said Raymonde.

92
 .

Eponine got up, took a long drink from her glass and said:

‘If Robert fainted, then I’ll get him. If you two little weaklings
were in my shoes, you’d know what it is to want a man; but I’ll get

him. If he fainted, I’ll get him.’

Then she turned toward me:

‘If they were in my shoes, you know they wouldn’t wait; they
couldn’t stand it. But I’m not ashamed, not me. I’m never
ashamed. Ever since I saw Robert faint, I’ve felt like a queen. I

can’t wait any longer, so I’ve been drinking. And all the brandy in
the world wouldn’t cool me off.’

‘So far, all it’s done is heat you up,’ said Raymonde.
Eponine cried out:

‘He swooned for me .

Suddenly she was beside herself: her voice became distorted

and broke.
\ . . right at my feet!’
She laughed and sat down again.

Tve been drinking ever since he fainted.’

She held her head with both her hands in a vain attempt to
control her idiotic laughter.

I was well aware that I looked totally indifferent. 1 felt as if I hadn’t

any flesh on my bones; I had slept so little and wept so much that

I was completely unresponsive. In the presence of Eponine and

her exhilarated companions, I had the feeling that I was a pitiful

figure; a scarecrow or dusty skeleton consumed by a libidinous

obsession. Yet, in spite of that, I had an impulse that arose not

only from the state of despair in which my brother had left me

but, at the same time, from my affection for Eponine.
I said to her rather softly:

‘Did you know that Robert is really sick?’

She was still full of laughter, which eventually gave way to sur-

prise.

I continued, somewhat hampered by my intoxication:

93
 .

‘You see, I’m a fool, a frivolous man; I’m so frivolous that I

forgot just now that he’s dying.’

She didn’t waste a second:

‘You make me so furious!’ she screamed. ‘I don’t give a damn

if he’s dying, I want to sleep with him. Dying or dead, I’ll get him.’
.’

‘Enough! Enough!’ said Rosie. ‘Is she crazy, or what? . .

‘It’s unnatural,’ said Raymonde.

‘I wish I could calm her down,’ I said, ‘but I can’t.’

‘You think we can?’ asked Raymonde.

Raymonde could never be faulted for her logic.

Eponine stood up, shrugged her shoulders and tried to con-

centrate on what she was saying:

‘Tell Robert . . . Tell him that you’ve spoken to me and that I’ll

be expecting him here, because now know how he

I feels .

Then, interrupting herself:

‘Well, well, will you look at her!’

Madame Hanusse was sleeping, frozen in an incongruous

position, with a hateful expression on her face. Her head was
resting on the table and every time she breathed it looked as if it

might fall off.

‘Tell him,’ continued Eponine, smiling in spite of herself at the

precarious state of her mother’s head, ‘that I know he’s dying.’

‘I won’t save him. Even if I could I wouldn’t save him; as a

matter of fact, he’ll die pretty fast once I’ve had my way with him.’
‘I won’t be talking to him,’ I told her. ‘He refuses to have any-
thing to do with me. I’m sure he’ll soon be dead. I’ll never see
him again.’

Eponine got all red in the face. Rosie and Raymonde started
to laugh.

But when they saw the way she looked, they stopped.

94
XIV
THE FILTH

Despite my indifference, it bothered me to see Eponine so

distraught and I took her aside, out into the doorway: I wanted to

arrange a rendez-vous.
She told me to come back at eleven o’clock, and she promised
that she would be alone; I shouldn’t have let the others get on my
nerves. Her friends were afraid of her . . . For a brief moment,
there in the darkness, we furtively embraced, caressing each
other with what was already a bestial gentility.

I went home again and dined on the meager rations I had

procured for Robert.
As I prepared to eat some trout, I thought: ‘Is eating this going

to make me cry?’ But I had already lost my appetite; the taste of a

meal intended for Robert was already reminding me of Eponine
and her impudence. I began to willfully indulge in dreams that
with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and
were close to being loathsome. I was happy to feel the blood start

rushing to my head. It seemed to me at the time that congestion

and anguish were to happiness what the genuine article is to an
imitation; I was grateful to my brother for dying and for joining
my disorders to the horror of his death.

An approaching storm and the debilitating heat contributed to

95
 .

my malaise which was more desirable than life. I was suffering, I

wanted to suffer, and that painful impatience had the ugliness of

nudity (the ugliness, and perhaps the enchantment as well).

I was suffocating, killing time before our rendezvous, and I fell

asleep. An extremely loud burst of thunder woke me up. I heard

the pounding of the rain, and the lightning flashing through the

clouds made me feel as if I were surviving above a level of death,

as if, having been dead for ages, I were no more than that dead
rain and those explosions of dead thunder, where my death
mingled with the death of all eternity. I remained inert, recum-
bent in the midst of this torrent in which I was nothing if not the
ruins of an impotent life, the remnants of a hideous dream . .

In the end I thought that if, as I lay motionless, I were waiting

for Eponine, her arrival would awaken me; that if she were to
come in, I would emerge from my intimate association with
death. That thought, in itself, had the power to wake me up, as I

had imagined the entrance of Eponine might do. I slowly realized

that I was going to bestir myself and go off to redisdover a body
whose turpitude would, as a matter of fact, put me back into a
state that was equivalent to death.

As I lay there fast asleep, I felt an itch that awakened me; but it

would soon send me back to oblivion again! I found myself out-

doors; I hadn’t anticipated the torrential rain. I should have
hurried and run; I knew that, but I walked slowly, as if the rain
were weighing me down. By the time I got to the foot of the
stairs, my clothes were so wet I had to take them off and wring
them out. I was now quite certain that I was awake, but I didn’t
pay any attention to the fact.

I went up to the bedroom: there was a light on and I saw

Eponine sleeping in the midst of the disorder she had created
during her revelry. Every single thing in the place was an indica-
tion of her chaotic existence; every odd little item, there in that

96
provincial bedroom, every piece of linen, every book told a tale of

frenzied pleasure. The few scraps of clothing she had kept on her
body completed the evidence of her ‘wayward life’.

I stretched out naked beside her. The dim light from a shaded
lamp made me feel as if I were in a room where someone had
died. I would have liked to fall asleep in that happy state . . . But
just the opposite happened: I took full advantage of the

opportunity to enjoy myself. I don’t know when my groping woke

her up: Eponine luxuriated in a semi-conscious state, out of
which she said to me with half-opened eyes:
.’
‘Do that again . . . Make believe I’m dead . .

Eventually, the supplication of my body rose up into the

cathedral reaches of hers, and my deliberate movements took on
a frightful meaning . . .: it was so pleasurable that we gladly gave

ourselves up to a little game: we were overwhelmed by something

that was beyond sleep and sensuality, something that resembled
the anguish of death. I’ve never been so wildly excited: we were
suffocating, then we slowly began to fall asleep. And the
voluptuous nightmare went on.

Far from diminishing with the passage of time, the pleasure

became so intense that it was almost painful: that made it all the
more delectable, but it would have stopped if we had ceased to feel
any anguish.
The end was so exhausting that Eponine, after a few moments
of despondency, broke out into tears.

She was sitting on the bed.

She said to me, as she must have done to her mother when
she was a child:

‘I feel like throwing up.’

I thought of the maladies that would, one day, come to destroy

her. I imagined how thin and inevitably grubby she would be

towards the end: the frustrating thing about it was the

97
impossibility of fully uniting the ultimate moments of pleasure

and death. Even at the height of orgasm, the two phases are
unaware of each other, have their backs turned to each other.
‘I don’t feel well either,’ I admitted.
At such times, everyone experiences as an impossibility the
necessity of existing: the necessity of not being dead!

My malaise prevented me from seeing things in perspective; I

was reduced to the sort of infinite exasperation that makes a

person who thinks it will last want to die, but also makes him
think that it will never end.
I told Eponine that I was going to leave, that I was totally

exhausted. She stretched out and closed her eyes, but she took

hold of my wrist.
Then she told me to go.

When I got outside the sun was just coming up and, as I passed
in front of the house, I saw at my feet, under her window, a piece
of stinking filth.

I tried to imagine what lunatic had deposited it there and

wondered what bizarre motive he might have had.
(But the act itself was consistent with a complete disintegra-
tion).

98
XV
THE SCREAMS

That piece of filth, intentionally deposited under Eponine’s

bedroom window, was for an instant so intriguing to me that I

wanted to go back and talk to her. I thought of the confused

emotions such a revolting act of homage could make her feel. I

told myself upon reflection that, as insane as it was, that sort of

thing was banal. I went home. I tried in vain to get to sleep, and I

was just dozing off when the telephone rang. It was the Mother
Superior calling to warn me that my brother had taken a turn for
the worse; he was in such terrible pain that it was making him
scream. He hadn’t asked for me, she said, but the doctor was on
the way and Robert appeared to be so ill that it would be better if

I were there.

I immediately got dressed; it was nine o’clock. I could hear my

brother’s screams in the corridor. When I reached his side he was
wincing and holding his stomach; the pain was causing him to
moan, with the moans changing periodically to screams.

He was naked and, under the tangled covers, had his knees
drawn up against his chest. He hadn’t any colour at all, and a
nun was wiping the perspiration off his face.
I asked him:
‘Where does it hurt?’

I was beginning to feel a bit of physical discomfort myself.

Without giving too much thought to what was doing,

I I started to

99
clear away some empty glasses that were cluttering up the
bedside table; the glasses trembled in my hand. The bottle of

brandy I had sent over the night before was standing on the
dresser: it was nearly empty.

Robert didn’t answer.

The nun did it for him:

‘He’s having pains in his stomach; he won’t talk at all and I

haven’t been able to find anything definite.’

I asked her what his temperature was.

‘It’s only a hundred and one. I have no idea what’s causing the
pains,’ she said. ‘Did he get sick like this when you were
children? do wish the doctor would come. really don’t
I I believe

it’s anything serious, but think it’s good that you’re here.’
I

Her voice was soft, quiet and somehow distant

She sat down and started to say her rosary.

Robert had taken an analgesic which was perhaps beginning

to work.

I managed to find myself a seat: I removed Robert’s clothes

from a chair, and I saw as I did so that his cassock was covered
with mud.

I was reaching the limits of exhaustion. I had drunk too much the
night before and I hadn’t slept. Everything around me was
becoming a blur. I even thought that our separation, which was
preceded by a moment of calm had been, despite my solitude,

somewhat pleasant; at least it was ‘interesting’. Whereas on this

particular day my brother wasn’t saying a word to me, didn’t even see
me: the pain had him so firmly in its grip and he was enduring it with
such rapt attention that the resemblance to love embarrassed me.
His passivity amounted to vulgar immodesty. My brother had
become subjected to an immense confusion, inconsistent to the
point where it surpassed him: a capricious and unpredictable

100
 torrent, now silent, was whipped by a sudden storm and was drawing
down into its waters a ravaged life - which had foolishly imagined to I

be jovial. I hadn’t been alarmed the night before at the injuries that
had made him seek rest: now was suddenly seeing him I in the light
of death.

On that unhappy morning I sensed that I was in danger. It

seemed to me that my own life, and not just my brother’s, was in

jeopardy. I had to worry, not about dying, but about losing the
desire to live, at least to live the only kind of life that mattered to

me. I no longer had before me just my brother’s sickbed: he was

moaning and screaming but didn’t speak, and everything, with the

imminence of death, was devoid of meaning. My nausea and the

my insomnia left me too weak to cope with that
fatigue resulting from

feeling. My me only in order to make

brother had spoken to it

impossible ever to speak to me again. remained by his side only to I

know more fully that we would now be far apart. saw nothing but the I

very thing that was taking him from the visible world, and I felt as if I

were living only in order to be more aware that I was dead.

Robert grew silent and the waves of pain subsided. I wanted to

take his hand but was so sure he was going

I to die that I thought
I had better not. The nun continued to move her lips in prayer
without making any perceptible sound. I felt oppressed and
wanted to leave the room. I was afraid I was going to be ill, and it

was only my perversity that made me stay. Finally, the doctor came in
and went down
I to the garden.

The doctor couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with Robert.

He gave him a thorough examination, but there was nothing to
account for his pains. Robert could hardly speak. He might have
been suffering the after-effects of a nervous breakdown ... In any
event, he had to be left alone. The wisdom of this elderly man
impressed me: it seemed to him that my brother, in his state of

collapse, was behaving in a manner calculated to get me concer-

101
ned. The doctor’s animosity towards the clergy included my
brother, but his many years of broad experience had given him
an insidious perspicacity . . . Would it ever have occurred to me,
when I heard Robert moaning, that his screams were forced?
That it was all an act? The idea was laughable but I didn’t have

the strength to laugh at it and it couldn’t pacify me. It was

evidence of the chasm which separated me from my brother who
had retreated the moment he realized that he was just like me,
that the principles upon which he had opposed me were empty.
But I was still alive, while he was foundering due to his renuncia-
tion of hope and the prohibitions of religion. At the time, I still

suspected him of wanting to show by example that life outside

the Church was impossible.

Even the act he was putting on illustrated the misery of the man
abandoned by hope - naked and insignificant - in a world where
there is no longer any law or God and whose limits are crumbl-
ing. I sensed fear and desire swaying him in the direction of evil. I

was so aggrieved that it was driving me out of my mind: with my

brother having become impious, I had to return to God in his

place. I was consumed with remorse; my frivolity revolted me. I

was finally afraid of my own vices.

I wasn’t counting on any help from religion, but the moment of

expiation was at hand. I was weighing the apparent possibility of

assistance against the horror of total impotence, a state in which I

would clearly be left without the slightest reason to hope. My

misery was like the piece of filth deposited in front of the house.

The nun came out of Robert’s room, to which it was better that

I should never return: she was the only tie that remained to

connect me with my brother. Her very gentility and her monkish

amiability left me cold, but when came time to it say goodbye

102
to her, I couldn’t hide my emotion: an impulse of painful
benevolence carried me against my will toward this woman
whom I hated and who would betray me as soon as she could.

103
XVI
THE THREAT

Madame Hanusse was waiting for me at my door.

She looked meaner and more like a fishwife than ever.
‘Did you notice or didn’t you?’ she said, standing up as
straight as she could.
‘Notice whom?’ I answered.
‘It wasn’t a person: it was a thing,’ she said.

Then she looked down and shook her head.

‘Actually ... it was something that came from a person.’

Tm very tired right now, Madame Hanusse, and I really don’t

feel up to guessing at riddles.’

‘You mean you didn’t see anything? ... At dawn, this

morning, when you left my daughter?’

Just then, I understood what she was talking about. I decided
to sit down, and I was so tired that the absurdity of the situation

escaped me.
‘So you did see it!’

.’
‘Do we have to talk about it? . .

‘I should say we do! As a matter of fact, Eponine told me to

hurry right over. She meant to tell you the other day that the
butcher told her he was going to kill you!’

‘Then it was he?’

‘Who else could it have been?’

‘You’re not sure of it. Is Eponine sure of it herself?’

104
 ’ .

‘Of course!’

‘But what proof is there? She didn’t see him.’

‘There’s proof, monsieur, plenty of proof. You’ll see; I mean,

he’ll kill you if you come back. There’s nothing to it; he’ll wait at
dawn for you to come out, then he’ll kill you; in other words: “Stay
.

away, or else .

‘But what proof is there?’

‘Do you want to die? ... I’m on your side, and I don’t want
anything bad to happen to you. You’re kind and respected. I

wouldn’t like to find you dead at my doorstep.’

‘Did Eponine ask you to . .
.?’

‘Of course! She doesn’t want you to die.’

‘Tell her that I’ll be there tonight at eleven o’clock.’

‘But you can’t. He’s watching for you. Even at eleven o’clock,
it’s dangerous.’
I handed her the usual remittance.

I had no desire that night to be with Eponine. I was physically

and emotionally spent. But I would have appeared to be giving

in. It was a sorry situation, appropriate to my condition. It was,
most of ail, ridiculous. The butcher could have threatened me,
and he could have deposited the piece of filth. But arming
himself with a knife and waiting for daybreak! . .

The idea had excited the imagination of Eponine who

delighted in frightening herself: a man had apparently come and
spied on us, listened to us and, finally, relieved himself in a

shameful manner. Something like that could be exhilarating, and

the death threat, even if it had been invented, served to intensify her
anguish.

I was exhausted and beyond the point of being annoyed. I didn’t

even curse Eponine’s gullibility. The only thing that mattered to

me now was sleep. I didn’t even care if I missed my appointment

105
and failed to show up. The butcher’s knife didn’t move me at all;

I knew I was doomed for other and quite different reasons: I no

longer had any enthusiasm for anything and the prospect of an

evening’s pleasure made me think of a wheel that keeps turning

after the machine has stopped. The despair I felt when I reflected

on my hopeless existence lacked the bitterness that is part of

genuine despair. It was, even before the fact, a dead despair. At
times like that nothing makes any sense, not even the certainty of
a swift return to life; not even an ironic version of that idea. When
the mind is in a certain state, even fervent happiness is nothing
but an interlude.

106
XVII
THE WAIT

Everything human serves as a trap for man: no matter what we

do, our every thought beguiles us and persists, if we have any
memory at all, only to become the instantaneous object of our

laughter. Even our loudest screams meet with the same derision:

those who hear them soon grow tired of the anxiety they create
and those who scream are amazed at having done so.
In the 'same way our greatest misfortunes are usually insig-

nificant: the only thing that makes them seem important is their

gravity which prevents us from seeing that they are just as

illegitimate as death. As a matter of fact there is, in principle,

nothing hopeless about us, unless it is the utterances to which we

are bound by dishonesty. That is why sanity is the lot of those

who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one’s equilibrium: it is

unhealthy to honestly endure the labours of the mind which

incessantly contradict what they have just established. A judge-
ment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who
speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when
everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing:
because, at that point, the measure of ‘what is’ has been taken.
(What is annoying is that it gets there all by itself and that, arriving

there by means of memory, it discovers there simultaneously both

that which fortifies and that which destroys it, so that it bemoans

107
its own endurance and then the necessity of bemoaning its

endurance).

I’m sure today that I was not as unhappy as it might appear from
what I have written. I was suffering mainly from the knowledge
that Robert was doomed. I told myself from that moment on that

my curiosity was pointless and that what I wanted was not so

much to know as to love. In any case, my despair was frivolous.

In the arms of Eponine, I found an exasperated gratification. In

my weariness and distress, the sight and feel of her sexual organs
filledme with a sort of joyful bitterness: the freshness of her
secret parts put me into a state of exaltation that, because was it

excruciating, was all the more acute. Her nudity was the
personification of vice and her slightest little movement had that

same bitter flavour. The abuse to which she had subjected her
sexual apparatus had left her nerves with a morbid sensitivity that
made the tiniest, almost painful stimulation so thrilling that she
would start to grind her teeth. Only a tepid or celibate soul would
say that habit dulls the senses: what happens is just the contrary,

but physical gratification, like painting or music, requires con-

tinual irregularity. The charm of the evening’s amusements was
enhanced by the fact that we each played at fulfilling the other’s

fantasies about the situation. I pretended to be occupied with

getting myself ready for the butcher’s knife, which the unspeak-
able object left that morning supposedly foretokened. The
thought of that made Eponine ecstatic: I was just the kind of man
to die such an execrable death; she would fool with words that,

coming from her, sounded utterly bizarre. Then she would give
herself to me, laughing with disbelief at what she had said.

As she talked more and more excitedly, there in the night, under
the circumstances created by the surprise of the previous

108
evening, she became so lascivious that we began to lose control

of ourselves. She trembled as she laughed and laughed at her

trembling: she kept swaying back and forth until she toppled
over. Then she succumbed to a fit of wheezing that was
interrupted, or perhaps prolonged, by nervous laughter. I told her

that she had been waiting for this night, that it was her night
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s yours.’

‘But if what you’ve been expecting actually happens,’ I

protested, ‘I’ll miss the ending; I won’t see it and you’ll enjoy it

alone!’

I thought she would laugh, but she shuddered instead. She

kept perfectly still and said to me in a whisper
‘Listen, I can hear footsteps.’

I listened and have I to admit that I was afraid.

‘He’s stopped,’ she said.

I looked at my watch to get the time: it was after three o’clock.

I didn’t hear anything.

‘Are you sure you heard steps?’

‘Yes. He may have taken off his shoes.’

The darkness seemed even more treacherous; the window

looked out over the pitch-black street In that silence it was hard
to imagine a man walking barefoot. I thought of the giant from
the butcher shop: I was naked and, laugh as might, the I situation

looked rather grim.

‘Listen,’ said Eponine, ‘I hear whispering.’
I couldn’t explain it, yet I did hear whispering. It had to be
coming from the street, from people concealing their presence.

The houses closest to us happened to be empty.

‘There are people out there spying on the man who was here
.’
the other night . .

‘No, it’s Henri coming in with a whore. He’s done it right in

front of me; I didn’t tell you, but he did.’

Eponine held me tight.

109
 .

man can get He’s

‘He’s as evil as a a monster.’
She was holding me so tight that it hurt; her tears tickled me
and I shuddered.
‘What did you think? I wouldn’t have sent my mother to you
for nothing.’

Then she lapsed into silence and concentrated on the quiet of

that endless night; her tears were soaking my shoulder, but she

hadn’t relaxed her grip on me which was sapping all her strength.
There wasn’t a sound to be heard.
Tm going out of my mind, Charles. You can’t imagine how
vicious and depraved Henri can be. When we were children he
used to bully me, beat me up; I was fascinated by him and Fd
pretend to cry. He’d frighten us and make us do all sorts of

disgusting things. Oh, Charles! He loved filth but he also loved

blood! You shouldn’t have come: the latch opens from the
outside and he knows how to open it’

‘He comes here?

‘Sometimes. Last week he would come up if he saw that the light

was out’
I was so transfixed that my mouth was hanging open; I

immediately felt my lips getting parched.

Eponine began to cry, but she was so frightened that she didn’t
make a sound.
Speaking very softly, I said to her
‘The lamp is lit’

‘Tonight he’ll come up if he sees a light’

‘Yesterday he gave a warning . . . and tonight he’ll come up . .

He hates you. I wanted to go away, but Fve been drinking . . . Tve

.’
been too frivolous, Charles . . . I’m too fond of . .

She bit my lip so fiercely and savoured her fear so intensely

that I was strongly aroused myself. Moving with calculated

110
violence, I changed my position, and my body became as taut as
it could be. There is no pleasure more voluptuous than that

which attends such deliberate anger. I felt as if I were being rent

by lightning which continued to strike, as if prolonged by the
immensity of the sky.

Ill
XVIII

THE EVIDENCE

Once our passions had subsided I sat up, trembling so badly that
I was most uncomfortable.
I heard the sound of running feet; someone out in the night

was racing up and down the streets, but the sound was getting
further and further away. It even seemed to me that it had been
coming, from the start, from a side street . . . Eponine listened

with me. I put my hand on her forehead: it was humid and cold. I

felt as if I too had broken out in a cold sweat; I had an unbear-

able headache and was nauseous.

I got up from the bed. Through the window I saw a shadowy

figure creeping off down the street. It was moving away and
disappeared into the darkness. In a way I was relieved that the

danger had passed. The butcher was leaving, if it was he. Seeing
him, however, had struck terror in my heart. I was appalled to

think that I had known such degrading trepidation: it was

hideously comical and, in the utter darkness of the night, so
pitiful that I was a bit afraid to focus on the spot where the
shadowy form had disappeared. I thought about the butcher: a
most sinister man . . . but, even though I no longer felt that

Eponine’s idea was mad, I still had my doubts. Up to that point I

hadn’t allowed myself to look, but I had just seen a human figure

stealing away, and whoever it was could have been hiding even

112
 .

then in some dark recess of the street. I wanted to escape from

my thoughts . .

But I couldn’t help wondering how was possible that we had

it

failed to hear anything at the moment when the intruder had pre-
sumably arrived in front of the house . . . The problem was
simple: logically speaking, what had happened was just the con-

trary. The intruder, standing under the window, must have heard
our groans! . . . We hadn’t heard a thing. The thought of that was
itself rather hard to bear, but the idea that he had listened to us

was even worse. Would Robert’s cassock have been muddy if he

hadn’t wandered about in the night as he had done the first time
when Eponine and I had recognized him? And hadn’t I had the
feeling that the shadowy form was that of a man in a cassock, or
that of a woman in a long black dress? I was so convinced by the
evidence, and it surprised me so little, that I went back toward
Eponine: I was laughing.
‘How very odd,’ I said, ‘in the dark, butchers look like priests!’

Eponine was on the verge of falling asleep, her head and

shoulders sagging toward the floor. She was sitting on the edge
of the bed, and the sound of my voice woke her up, but sleep

appeared to be getting the better of her. I was in such a good

mood that seeing her struggle in vain under the feeble light from
the lamp made me laugh a little more.
Wanting her to hear me. I took her hands in mine:
‘It’s Robert!’ I said.

She looked up and stared at me, completely lost: she was

wondering if she hadn’t suddenly gone mad.
‘Yes, Robert . . . Unless the butcher is going around in a
cassock. But he isn’t, it’s Robert!’
She repeated his name:
‘Robert!’

I took her hand again.

113
 .

It was so obvious, so overwhelming. Night was suddenly made

day. Darkness was light and tears could laugh . .

Eponine was laughing, hiding her face in her hands; but she was

naked and it was her nudity that laughed. It was a soft, intimate

laugh, excessively ashamed.

I observed that laugh, or rather, it pained me.
It was the same as excessive anguish; with excessive anguish, a

gentle laugh like that is artfully stifled. Such a laugh is at the heart of

excessive sensual pleasure and makes it a source of pain.

As softly as I could, I whispered to Eponine;

‘You’re just like Robert.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m happy.’

I lay down beside her without touching her. She had her back to

me, with her face in her hands. She didn’t move at all and, after a

while, I saw that she had fallen asleep. I was only half awake
myself. I sensed an amazing simplicity. Everything that had just
happened was amazingly simple. I knew that either my sufferings
or Robert’s affectations were a game. But because I was half

asleep, I ceased to distinguish between a simplicity that amazed

me and the awareness of a vast deception. I suddenly noticed
that the universe, the whole universe, whose inconceivable pre-

sence commands my attention, was a deception - a prodigious,

ingenuous deception. It would be hard for me today to give the
meaning of the word, but I know that it had the universe as its

object and that there wasn’t anything anywhere that was any
different ... I surrendered to sleep: it was the only way I could
endure what was happening to me. But I immediately became
convinced that the ‘deception’ was eluding me. And, while I

couldn’t resign myself to that universal deception, I was not about

to let it get away! This is an awkward way to say it (the preceding
is not a good account of what I felt) but, as I alternated between

114
 .

sleep and a revelation I couldn’t accept, I found consolation. It

was like something from a fairy tale and I was happy. If I were to
say now that death is my consolation would I be going too far, at

least in the following sense: there was, in that imperceptible shift,

a sudden revelation: as long as I simply remember, the revelation

remains; but as soon as I write! . .

115
 .

PART THREE
EPILOGUE TO THE
NARRATIVE WRITTEN BY
CHARLES C. .
 .

At the moment when I learned that my brother was dead, the

retiring sun had set aglow a placid swath of earth, prairies and
woods; sleepy little towns and snowy mountain peaks were
bathed alike in its bright pink light I stayed a long while at the
window: the horror of it all was, to say the least irksome. The
whole universe looked diseased . .

Ever since he had been arrested I had been sure that Robert
being ill, would soon be dead. He didn’t have long to live as it

was. His imprisonment accentuated the ghastly nature of his

death, but it really only brought it on a little faster. Nevertheless, to be
suddenly certain made me ill. I had an attack of fever. I was overcome
by the sort of despondency in which it seems useless to weep. (At the

time, Eponine had just been arrested herself, and saw little reason
I

to hope that she would ever return. She died, as a matter of fact, a
year after that.)

The fever held me in its grip for quite some time, and I slept in

the kind of semi-conscious state, haunted by luminous visions, in

which thought undergoes the arduous transformation into the
chaos of our dreams

I tried to escape from that amorphous pain.

119
 .

I got up. I went across the room, longing to flee from what was
now a constant torment.
There suddenly appeared before me a man of indeterminate

age who came and took a seat at my table; he was all out of

breath.

It was plain to see that he had come forth from a world where
brutality knows no bounds; not only was he as rude as a corpse
but he was, like Robert, also rather vulgar, like a dispirited man
on the verge of total collapse. His eyes were sunken, like those of

a corpse; his soul was that of a yawn so protracted that at length

it becomes a source of unbearable pain.

All of a sudden, a blast of air threw the door open . . . The

priest got up without saying a word; he closed the door and
came back to sit at my table.
I stared at him in silence.

He was dressed in rags. (Perhaps it was just a tattered cassock

or chasuble.)
In the darkness of my room, the flames from the fire made
him look like the sky at the moment when the moon shines down
through the clouds dispersed by the wind.

The conversation I am about to report is difficult to convey: it

was as insubstantial as a dream; I heard it and it eluded me; just

hearing it turned my mind to dust: I report it nevertheless - but

without a great deal of exactitude . .

He began to speak; this presence in my room was speaking to

me. If it is true that his remarks, in a certain sense, eluded me, it

was due to the nature of what he said: it was the sort of thing that
can rob you, if not of your memory, at least of your attention: the sort
of thing that can destroy it, reduce it to ashes.

‘Are you convinced now?’ he asked

Then, immediately after that:

120
 . .

‘You know, of course, but not everything

How strange it was that he didn’t laugh! Without a doubt, he

should have laughed: he didn’t ... If he had laughed I would
have woken up; I would have come out of an intolerable stupor.

But as soon as I did, I would have ceased to feel within me that

laughable infinity . .

He went on:
‘Of course, you’re embarrassed.’
Then, after a pause:
‘If you were in my place, what could you say? if you were . .

God! if you had the misfortune - to be!’

I could hardly hear the last words, but right away my prostra-

tion became more painful.

He continued, softly; it was definitely my brother who was

speaking.
‘That, as you know, was never supposed to be said. But that
isn’t all. I frighten you, but soon you’ll ask me to frighten you
even more. You’re not unfamiliar with my sufferings, but you
don’t know who am: my tormentors, compared
I to me, are quite
courageous.’
Finally, he said to me in a timid voice:
‘There is no cowardice that would quench my thirst for

cowardice!’
To my surprise I could tell that his timidity had the significance

of grace.

I could feel my blood start to run cold, and I shivered. Robert

was present before me: he was inspired and there slowly formed
about him an aura of shameful cowardice.

I don’t know if I have satisfied my ardent desire to faithfully corn-

121
municate the truth about my fever. The task is beyond me; yet
the idea that I am mentally betraying that truth is intolerable. 1

couldn’t remain silent without betraying it and I prefer to have

written. That doesn’t make it any less intolerable ... By writing,

however, I was doing my best to deal with the demand to which I

was subject.

Unfortunately, I’ve spoken of my obsessions when I should

have spoken only of my brother. But I couldn’t properly speak of

him without talking about myself. God can’t be separated from

the devotion he inspires, or a woman loved from the passion she
has aroused. For that reason, Fve sought the truth about my

brother in my fever.

He was arrested early in October at X . .

.,
shortly after the events

of which I’ve spoken. When I found out it had been some time
since I had heard from him. He had left R the morning after . . .

the night when I spotted him. When the nun at the rectory found
his room abandoned, she called me right away. The first thing I

thought of was suicide, but he had taken some underwear and a

bag and his bicycle was missing. On the other hand, Rosie and
Raymonde left the room they had rented early the same day.

They had apparently met on the highway. The whispering and

running I had heard that night were due to the presence of the
two whores out on the street at the moment when Robert arrived.
It was only much later that I learned what had happened: they
did some drinking in the evening and, as whores will do, sat
around trying hard to amuse themselves until late at night. Then,
still unsatisfied, they went out and wandered around in search of
some improbable adventure. They were in the vicinity of the

rectory when they heard footsteps, whereupon they hid. They

recognized Robert from afar and they surmised correctly that he
was heading for Eponine’s. They went on ahead of him and
Robert, disconcerted, stopped to take off his shoes. He heard

122
them whispering, but that vague threat didn’t frighten him off.

When, on his way back, he saw them standing in the middle of

the street, he turned back and tried to escape in the other direc-
tion. But Rosie (it was at this point that I heard her), running as
fast as she could, circled around and cut him off. That gave her
the chance to talk to him and she easily persuaded him to follow

her to her room; he was vague, at times apathetic and a bit deri-

sive. But he reserved his cruellest laughs for himself. He started

to drink and immediately showed the effects. As a matter of fact,

he looked as if he had been drinking when they met up with him.

He acted as if he weren’t there; he made love furiously, but, when
it was over, complained that he had been cheated: he was drunk
and kept moaning: he hadn’t had any awareness of the pleasure
he had experienced. The two whores - for Raymonde had joined
them - said that Robert, in his drunkenness, was like a mystic: he
seemed to see things that they didn’t see (he had the same look
at the moment when he collapsed in the church). Eponine’s
passion for Robert had led Rosie to become interested in him,

but what had intrigued her even more was his unpredictable

behaviour, which made him the emissary of a violent world that

was inaccessible for her. Their idyll, in a modest hotel at a health
resort about six miles from R . .
., lasted for several weeks. Ray-

monde, who had an adjoining room, just sat back and observed
the two lovers. She and Rosie would spend part of the day and
even from time to time the night together, but Raymonde only
very seldom went to ‘fool around’ in Rosie’s room. In dealing
with them, Robertwas always overly polite, which made them
laugh when they were alone, but which thoroughly intimidated
them when they were face to face. Robert would stay in the room
all day long, stretched out on a large bed, covering little sheets of
paper with illegible writing. Four or five times, he left the room at

night: he would make love with Rosie and, afterwards, ask her to
wait for him with Raymonde. Then he would go out on his

123
 bicycle and not come back until much later. Apparently, these
nocturnal excursions on the part of a man who kept to his room

by day brought about his arrest for which there would have been
sufficient justification anyway in his previous comings and goings.
He was arrested at dawn. Rosie, exhausted, was sleeping in

Raymonde’s room: they didn’t hear the police and the police

didn’t find Robert’s notes under his pillow.

I left it to Eponine to tell her friends about the purpose of my

brother’s excursions.

Eponine had once heard him making a small noise; she

approached the window and saw him completely naked. He saw her
and didn’t make a move, but she turned away. She came back to sit
on the edge of the bed and, keeping her head down, stayed there
without saying a word.
We didn’t hear anything the other times but, in the morning,

we would find traces of his visitation.

124
PART FOUR
ROBERTS NOTES
 .

FOREWORD BY CHARLES C . .

The first time I read these notes I had so much trouble decipher-
ing them that their meaning escaped me. After Robert’s death I

slowly began to copy them out.

At the time I wasn’t so much depressed as genuinely ill (I had

a fever every night) and it was quite a while before I became
aware of what they were really all about.

Even so, nothing contained in them was depressing to me: the

only thing wrong with them was that they stripped bare before my
eyes the ‘tortured soul’ who lacked ‘a sense of shame’ and time.
To me they had then, and have even partially retained, the
immodesty of thoughts whose fraudulence can’t be concealed by
any artifice or ruse. At first that exhibition of intellectual aridity

profoundly disturbed me: I hated my brother and his inability to

find some inspiration that would have relieved his words of their

opacity. These notes (which had become those of a dead man -

which would henceforth betray the person who had written them
- for they gave limits to that which either didn’t have any at all or

had other ones) annoyed me for a long time. I had, not only for
my brother but for myself, a feeling of failure. As I read them
again, I no longer saw in Robert anything but the ‘fraud’ he had
tried to make of himself at the time when he was striving to be
pious.
Death, which makes all traits definitive, was, in my eyes,

sentencing him without appeal to be a show-off. His papers could

127
now no longer be burned and if perchance he had burned them
himself, he would have written them again! Even if I had failed to

see the limitation he accepted, my error couldn’t have changed it.

The only way to atone for the sin of writing is to annihilate what
is written. But that can be done only by the author; destruction
leaves that which is essential intact. I can, however, tie negation

so closely to affirmation that my pen gradually effaces what it has

written. In so doing it accomplishes, in a word, what is generally

accomplished by ‘time’ - which, from among its multifarious

edifices, allows only the traces of death to subsist. I believe that

the secret of literature is there, and that a book is not a thing of

beauty unless it is skillfully adorned with the indifference of the
ruins. Otherwise it would be necessary to shout so loudly that no
one would imagine the survival of someone who bellowed so
naively. That is why, with Robert dead and these ingenuous writ-

ings being left, I had to destroy this evil he had created: why,
indirectly through my book, had I to annihilate, to kill him again.

Struggling to decipher his words, I at once began to feel

extremely ill at ease, so much so that from time to time I would

blush: these outbursts from the pen of the libertine sounded just

as false to me and embarrassed me just as much as the malicious

statements made before by the priest. I still shudder today at the

thought of that mixture of vulgar gaiety and unction. The affec-

tion that bound me, that still binds me to my brother was so

strong, so thoroughly based on a feeling of identity that I wished I

could change his words as if I had written them myself. It seemed

to me that he would have changed them himself: every naive
audacity eventually creates a need for sleep and the recognition
of an error without which we wouldn’t have had it.

Besides, the reason these pages sounded false wasn’t just that

128
they had been left unfinished, halfway between a spurious ease
and silence; as far as I was concerned they were ‘lying’, for I

knew, and they made me acutely aware of my brother’s

weakness. It isn’t just the childish - and painfully comical -
nature of the ‘crimes’ of which he accused himself that made me
feel that way. It was very much to Robert’s credit, as a matter of

fact, that he had, at the risk of being derided, still chosen to write

and had done it in a manner that was so painful (even more

imprudent, perhaps, than anything anyone had dared to do
before). But his method is disappointing, for language is always
involuntarily ridiculous; that aspect is deliberately obscured:
which is the reason for all the subterfuge, the circumlocution, the
‘tricks’ serving to disguise the horror that disarms one’s pen. For

me, who had known my brother intimately (even if only

imperfectly and under the false pretences I have mentioned), an
unspeakable shame was perceptible apart from the sentences
that were lying; it was perceptible directly: in the feeling I had of a
suffocating silence. For that silence was so precisely what Robert
wanted to say, his horror contained so well the blatant - and
emormous - falsity of everything, that these mutterings seemed
like treachery to me. They were. A series of stuttering lies were
substituted by Robert for that which never stuttered because no
one hears it or grasps it - for that which, saying nothing, lies

nevertheless, while unconvincing chatter begs to be contested.

Nothing, moreover, could have been more disappointing to me

than the senseless little tale that marks the end of the notes.

Robert had originally called it Conscience Takes a Holiday but ,

then he had crossed out the last three words.

It should be obvious that the whole thing is just reveries.

Robert was Rosie’s lover and Raymonde’s as well, but the Rosie

of Conscience in no way resembles the flaccid whore he loved.

Raymonde’s personality, it is true, remains unchanged but her

129
role is furtive. If some models must be found, the woman in

Conscience would have to correspond to the image of Eponine,

with whom he had allowed himself, during his final days, to

become completely obsessed.

When Robert as a child knew Eponine, she already had the mad,
restless look that I knew so well and which fascinated me.

Something violent and cold, determined and desperate ... (but

when she was very young, she didn’t have the vulgarity that she
affected later on). Every time I think of it today it disturbs me:
Eponine and my brother used to play with Henri, sometimes
alone, sometimes with other children. I was ill at the time, in

Savoy: if Eponine hadn’t confided in me later on, I would never

have known the direction their little games had taken. Today I

can see all too clearly that they are ultimately responsible for the
conversion of Robert who had been brought up without any reli-

gion; eventually, the depravity and brutality of Henri, the anguish

and vices of Eponine, filled him with horror: in order to escape

from the morass in which he was wallowing, he executed an

absurd inversion of his beliefs and way of life. That became a
veritable provocation: morally, I became a stranger to him and
since he was attached to me, his attitude towards me was reduced to
paradox, to a continual, annoying defiance. (Such sudden changes
are not unusual at the age of puberty).

Eponine didn’t exactly say that Robert was tortured by Henri;

she even avoided recalling that, way back then, Robert had
become Henri’s shadow. But all the associations that I had, up to
this point, refused to make (so great was my loathing for Henri,
whom I wished I could totally banish from my thoughts) are
finally forcing themselves upon me - and scaring me out of my
wits.

I can appreciate today what the encounter on the tower meant

to Robert, and whenever I think of my cruelty I can’t help getting

130
depressed. How could I have behaved so odiously? What am I to
think of the unconscious state in which, walking about as if I

were asleep, I nevertheless went straight to the point I wanted to

reach? It kills me to think of the blind man’s clairvoyance that

guided me and despite myself I begin, with clenched hands, to

behave like Oedipus. Now can see why Eponine’s re-entrance

I

into his life was to lead my brother back to the insane aberrations
of his childhood, why he loved Eponine more dissolutely - and
more deliriously - than anyone perhaps was ever loved: why,
finally, that love positively alienated him from what he chose to

believe for such a long time.

Although the final text of these notes has thrown this light on the
events that I have reported, I must say that it still leaves me with a
feeling of disappointment. Its weaknesses are even more palp-

able to me because the black truth shows through (that truth is

depressing in itself).

I realize that my attitude seems inhumane, but I am living

beside myself with fear. Nothing matters to me now except fear.

It’s hard for me, in my present state, to tolerate anything that isn’t

commensurate with the evil I’ve done.

In any case, I had to include these notes. The fact is that, in a

sense, I know my book is incomplete.
My narrative doesn’t quite measure up to what one expects such a
book to be. Far from emphasizing that which is its purpose, it

somehow conceals it. If I do get around to saying what is most

important, if I insinuate it, if I speak of it - it is, ultimately, just to leave

it further in the dark.

I don’t think I have lacked either courage or competence. But I

am paralyzed by my sense of shame. That is all the more difficult

for me to say in view of the fact that I condemn, where it occurs,

131
 .

the lack of reserve displayed by Robert.

It is remarkable that my sense of shame and Robert’s lack of it

had the same effect. Each of them has made what I have
described appear to be, not a given, defined event, but a mystery.
As we shall see, Robert rather indifferently resorted to a kind of
charade - whereas my account conceals the very thing that it was
supposed to make known.
... It would appear, then, that the nature of my subject is such
that it cannot be treated like any other it can be put forth for con-

sideration, it seems, only in the form of an enigma . .

My incomplete account would not, in that case, be incomplete in

the usual sense of the word: it would not be a matter of certain

missing facts that it would be simple to supply; the essence of it

would be ‘morally’ indescribable. On the other hand, my reserva-

tions about Robert’s notes wouldn’t be enough to make their

publication questionable.

These notes have, in the first place, the merit of employing the
formal language proper to charades. And there is no doubt that,

if the book itself is enigmatic, obliged to be so, if it proposes to

the reader, in place of a solution - which would be the pure and
simple narration of the events - a search for it, a reconstitution
of its origin, aspects and meanings, the defects I have mentioned
which make it harder for a reader to be favourably disposed,
endow these notes with the virtue of serving purposes that are
more remote: they give anyone who might endeavour to solve
the ‘enigma’ some clues that could help him.
(I feel compelled to express this final reservation, although it is

hardly of great importance as long as we confine ourselves to the

matters at hand - is a solution possible? I mean a complete,
immutable solution, not an exact response to an infinite series of

impertinent questions. In the final analysis, the enigmatic nature

of my subject seems to be connected with the sense of shame

132
whose restrictive influence I have already described; that subject
would be meaningless if it were not a source of unspeakable
shame . . . overcome, to be sure, but in the same way that pain

is still experienced by a victim of torture who says nothing; if it is

true that the enigma will never be solved, must not that subject
answer, beyond the limited enigma, certain classic ‘ultimate ques-
tions’? and, if it is difficult to believe in the divinity of Robert,

wouldn’t the ‘word’ of the charade, by definition, in the unlikely

event that it were guessed, be - what word has ever been ade-
quate to denote? Alas, that obscure, deceptive language, far from
clarifying the obscurity of the enigma, would disarm any fool who
had the temerity to confront it.

133
 .

THE DIARY OF CHIANINE

A night as endless as the dreams of a fever. A storm when I got

back ... a frighteningly violent storm. . . I’ve never felt so small.
At times the lightning rolled and came crashing down from all
sides; at other times it fell straight down with a vengeance, and
there were intermittent flashes of light that splintered with blind-
ing cracks. That made me feel so weak that I began to fear that I

wasn’t really on earth at all: I was in the heavenly firmament

where the house was shaking like a glass chandelier. The liquid

element as well, the water pouring down from the sky . . . no

more earth: a sonorous expanse, turned upside down and
inundated with rage. The storm was itself interminable. I wished I

could sleep, but the blinding glare from a bolt of lightning made
my eyes hurt. I was gradually waking up, and the cracking sound
produced by the lightning as it struck made my waking state

susceptible to a kind of holy terror. The lights had gone out long
ago. All of a sudden they went on again, and I immediately shut
them off. As I did, I saw light shining through the space under the
door.

My room connects with a decrepit sitting room full of rapidly

disintegrating furniture from the beginning of the last century. In

the midst of the fracas in the sky I thought I heard someone

sneezing. I got up to put out the light; I was naked and I stopped
before opening the door . .

134
 1

... I was sure I was going to find Immanuel Kant waiting for

me behind the door. He didn’t have the diaphanous face that

distinguished him during his lifetime: he had the hirsute mien of

a bushy-haired man wearing a three-cornered hat. I opened the

door and, to my surprise, found nothing. was I alone; I was

naked in the midst of the biggest thunderstorm I had ever heard.
I said to myself rather softly:

‘You’re a fool!’

I turned out the light and went back toward my bed, guiding myself
by the irregular illumination from the lightning.

Now I want to take some time to reflect.

I love the fear that humanity has of itself! People think there
are only two paths open to them: crime or servility. Strictly speak-
ing, they’re not wrong - but they adroitly see in the criminal only

the servitudes of crime. Crime commonly appears to them in the

form of destiny, of irremediable fatality. The victim? No doubt, but

the victim isn’t cursed, he simply succumbs to chance: fatality

strikes only the criminal. So that the sovereign being is burdened

with a servitude that crushes him and the condition of free men is

deliberate servility.

I laugh. Naturally. Prodigious humanity responds to the needs

of the criminal who can’t dispense with seeming base! The

servile, of themselves, reserve for him that cursed domain,
outside of which he would know he was enslaved. But the curse

isn’t what it seems, and the sighs or tears of the cursed are to joy

what the sky is to a grain of sand!

Mrs. Highcolour,

You have received my favour of the 7th instant. I mention

135
there in passing Father Chianine, parenthetically: an offence too

indecent to mention; the time? About three o’clock.

Dirty Cassock

Ecstasy! Ecstasy! I am foul. Ever since ... I am happy.

My happiness is boundless, like a river without its bed.

The future defunct, merry as a knife. My fever pleases me, red

with shame. Who am I? Could I be Eponine in bed with Charles?
Halfway to a diverting joke; that helps me because I’m ashamed
of it. Does shame overwhelm me? I enjoy it and the skies turn

over under me, but I still want to be clear, present, and to avoid

confusion.

It takes energy for Chianine to raise his skirt but even more to

speak of it properly. One doesn’t usually talk about it: one weeps.
But tears can’t describe misfortune; they have to preside over the
verbal ballet, humiliate words that refuse to dance. I choose
without complaint the path of clarity: it’s possible that I am betray-

ing the secrets of crime. But crime, which is nothing if it is

discovered, is nothing if it is secret. And crime, which is nothing if

it is merry, is nothing if it isn’t happy.

The malaise, writing, literature, from which I suffer, can’t be

overcome without lying. Chianine’s agreement with the laws that

determine the order of words makes my pen cry out. I simply
describe Chianine’s immense excitement and happiness under

136
the cover of obscurity, his certitude about having profaned even

the most profaned profanity. (Eponine has the same heart and
the same filth in her heart).
Because he was a priest, it was easy for him to become the
monster that he was. As a matter of fact, he didn’t really have any
alternative.

The truth is that Chianine was weak and was looking around for

something to hold on to: the love of the humble, the gentility, the
dynamism of juvenile theologians, the Masses, the grandiose

ceremonies with their origins in the beginning of time, the long

strings of hoarse, bearded, angelic sons of Moses in the heart of
Deus Sabaoth. He laughed at it, was worn out from laughing.
The joke went too far in that, living in God and God going too
far in him, it still left him on the ground, a man forgotten in the

same way that a hat is left on a chair.

I even for an instant imagine a man apart from God. For

can’t

any man who has eyes to see sees God and not tables or
windows. But God doesn’t give him a minute’s rest. HE has no
limits, and HE breaks those of the man who sees HIM. And HE

never lets up until the man resembles HIM. That is why HE

insults MAN and teaches MAN to insult HIM. That is why in MAN
HE laughs a laugh that destroys. And that laugh, by which MAN
is completely overcome, deprives him of all comprehension: it

gets worse when, from high in a windswept cloud, HE perceives

what I am; it gets worse if, as I rush down the street to get some-

thing done, I see MYSELF, I see the sky being emptied by the wind.

Everything vanished; I had the strength to ruin every notion

137
possible in the same way that one breaks glasses, in a fit of rage.

Then, wondering what to do and embarrassed by my scandalous

behaviour, I locked myself in the bathroom.

In a moment of blind emotion I sang, but slowly, as if I were

burying the world, but gaily, to the majestic strains of the Te

Deum :

DEUS SUM-
NIL A ME DMNI ALIENUM PUTO

I flushed the toilet and, standing there with my pants down,

started to laugh like an angel.

What it is like to be Chianine

An anguish, at the beginning, infinitely subtle, infinitely strong.
The rush of blood to the temples. The sweet pleasure of entering,

while naked, someone else’s room, of doing what absolutely

cannot be done, what will never be admitted, is absolutely inad-

missible (what I am saying is a provocation; it is not an admis-

sion).

The eyes, if they saw it, would jump out of their sockets. And that

isn’t even very important since it is a question in this sense of

going so far that consciousness is lost or almost lost. The same as
seeing a ghost, and the ghost of a loved one: a sort of delirium-
delectation, of ghostly delectation, of excessive intensity. But the
anguish doesn’t just take hold of the heart, the heart holds the
anguish in itself, or, rather, Chianine, the priest, his anguish to
his heart, just as he would embrace a woman and the delight of a
woman (who would be unable to contain herself).

It would obviously be insane not to see that under such condi-

138
 )

tions a man is filthier than an ape: his frenzy is much greater!

I liked to shock my old friends: the truth is that, with respect to

them, a sort of dead friendship had deprived me of the benefit of

indifference. I suffer - just barely - from the pusillanimity that

made them say I was sick (one of them suggested psy-

choanalysis!). Nevertheless, all I can do is to maintain a benign

silence towards them. It’s a waste of time for me to devote myself

to theology (but I am the dead, the laughably annihilated object

of the great, or rather, immense theology). I now no longer have
anything to say to theologians (I wouldn’t have anything to say to
Charles either!). All I could do would be to make them see - and
they wouldn’t be able to answer me - (I remember the title of a

book, the author of which an Augustinian whose name

is

escapes me: How To Avoid Purgatory - the sub-title: A Way To

Get To Heaven Without Waiting that I am in heaven here on
earth: heaven isn’t Rosie (or Raymonde), but Chianine (Eponine
also: the same thing as Chianine).

At the moment when Chianine does that for which he is named,

from that majestic crater, the night is the stomach of the lava: out
of breath, bel canto ,
he can’t breathe.

The warmth of the body, of sponge, of jellyfish; disappointment

in my room, at being smaller than a whale. But it is sufficient I

have the pain, the anguish of the drowning whale, especially the
sweetness, the sugared sweetness of death. I would like to die,

slowly and attentively, in the same way that an infant takes its

mother’s breast.

139
The religion to which I belonged, of which I was a priest,

has, by accusing man of betraying God, accentuated that which

defines our condition.
- God betrays us!
- With a cruelty that is all the more resolute in view of the fact

that we pray to him! His treachery demands to be made that

divine.

Only treachery has the excessive beauty of death. I wish I could

adore a woman - and that she could belong to me - in order to

find in her treachery her excessive divinity.

CONSCIENCE
Memorable Imagination
Rosie, radiant, had seen me: wearing a crown of roses, she was
descending a monumental staircase.

I saw a dancer hand her a glass: he was dressed like a jockey.

She took long drinks of iced champagne; the jockey put his

arms around her, emptied the glass and kissed her on the
mouth.
All around them, the crowd laughed with a very gentle
irritability: Rosie freed herself from the arms of the jockey and,
coming over to. me, said to me enthusiastically:

‘Did you see that?’

Her big round eyes were beaming.

She was happy to see me, to show me her joy.
‘If you only knew, if you only knew what a good time I’m
having.’

Then she said in a sultry voice:

‘Kiss me!’

140
 .

I took her in my arms. She surrendered herself as if she were

asleep. She had closed her eyes and when she blinked only the
whites were visible. No one in the noisy crowd, which the rise of
our anguished pleasure blotted out, could have paid any atten-

tion to what we were doing. She was dying of joy in my arms: like

sun on the water when the sea sounds in your ears.

‘Oh Robert,’ she said, ‘do it again, until my thirst is quenched!’

She pulled a little further away from me and was not without
it

brutality, or fear, that she said to me:

‘Look!’

She was looking at the crowd.

‘You see, I’m staring like crazy but, you know, I don’t want to
go crazy.’

In the fixity of her eyes there was the same intensity, glacial

and hostile, as in the hissing of an animal.

.’
‘Ah, now . . she said . .

‘I wish that would come up to my throat. Now I’d like - some

poison !’

‘And you know, don’t you, how conscientious I am.’

Just then, Raymonde called to her; she put up seven fingers and
shouted gaily:

‘Seven times!’
And when Rosie saw her she relaxed, broke into laughter; she
was enchanted, provocative, and she pushed me into the arms of
Raymonde.
‘Number eight,’ said Rosie, pointing to me.

‘You want him to be number eight?’ asked Raymonde, putting

up eight fingers.

Rosie whispered something in her ear. Raymonde came up to

me all excited and, in a gesture of defiance and ravishing mutiny,

warned me:
.’
‘Don’t move . .

She threw herself voraciously against my mouth, sending a

141
 . .

shiver down my spine so sharp that I would have cried out if I

had been able. She was possessed by an impetuosity so open, so

volatile that I held my breath with all my strength. Rosie, in the

midst of all this noise, which was enlivened by a movement of gay

entreaty, was caught up in a sort of intense, delighted hilarity

and, as her eyes filled with moisture, she said in a raucous voice:

‘Look at him! .

‘Look at me .

I was looking at Rosie and became totally absorbed in a vision of

unrestricted pleasure welling up all around me.
Rosie fell to her knees, and there on her knees she shouted
and danced all around. She shook her body up and down
suggestively. She moaned and kept repeating in a husky voice:

‘Do it again!’

She was tossing her head from side to side. But she stopped
and looked straight at Raymonde who was in my arms.
Then, with a long sob, she let her head fall back down again.

Rosie’s First Speech

Rosie’s tenderness was a delight to behold.

She stayed down on her knees, moaning all the while.

‘Ah,’ she said slowly, ‘look at me, my mind is completely clear, I

see. If you knew how sweet it is, how good it is to see and to be
.’
seen . .

‘See how I quiver with happiness! I laugh, and Fm open.’

‘Look at me: I’m quivering with happiness.’

‘How fine it how foul
is, it is to know! Yet, I wanted to, I

wanted at all costs to KNOW!’

142
 ‘I have in my mind an obscenity so great that I could vomit the
most dreadul words and it wouldn’t be enough!’

‘Do you know? That excess is more painful than death.’

‘Do you know that it’s exceedingly vile, so vile that I ought to
vomit?’

‘But look! Look, and recognize that I am happy!’

‘Even if I were to vomit, I would be happy to vomit. No one is

more obscene than I. It’s because I KNOW that I have obscenity

coming out of my pores, it’s because I know that am I happy.’

‘Look at me again - with more attention!’

‘Has any woman ever been more CERTAIN of being happy than
Rosie? Has any woman ever been more AWARE of what she was
doing?’

Rosie’s Second Speech

Then she got up and continued:
‘Now, Raymonde, we’re going to leave Robert alone. It’s

enough that you have opened up the void into which we’re
leading him, but if he were to go in there now, he wouldn’t know
how vast it is: he would trifle with me, just as he’s done with you,
without knowing what he was doing. He doesn’t know yet that

happiness demands lucidity in vice. Let him imagine us giving

ourselves to our most vulgar lovers, competing with them in

vulgarity.’

‘Come on, Raymonde, don’t keep me waiting, because I’m

already watering at the mouth.’

!
143
‘Perhaps you’ll run into us again a little later: the filthiest of

whores certainly don’t behave any worse than we do, but they
aren’t lucky enough TO KNOW IT.’

At that point she took a long look at me, smiling with mixed feel-

ings of hope and despair about her ability to express just how
happy she was: she gracefully drew her head back, her black hair
slithered about, and a conspiratorial wink directed at me from
her gleaming eyes brought the limitless feeling that she gave me
to its greatest height.

Joy Abounding
I lost her, then found her again, and the inhuman exploration
continued. Without respite and without lassitude, we lost

ourselves in unknown possibilities, in an empty, unfathomable

expanse that would go on forever? A loud burst of laughter and
chattering and the perception of a voluptuous twinge which

engendered an infinite exasperation, carried us into rooms that

were all in disarray. A door opened onto a steep, narrow

stairway. I followed Rosie up the stairs, out of breath all the way.

Eventually we came to a terrace bounded by four high cupolas. In

the distance, the lights in the village were going out and the sky
was full of brilliant stars. Rosie shivered; I took off my coat and
gave it to her. She bundled herself up against the cold as much
as she could; we could hear in the night some labourers digging
up a street, surrounded by the blinding lights and burnt odour of

work.
Rosie spoke in a low voice:
That was too beautiful,’ she said. ‘Now my nerves are failing
me and I’m tense .

Then:
‘When I went up the stairs, I went up as fast as I could, as if I

144
had fled from some danger; now it’s impossible to go any higher
and the noise from the bulldozers is making me sick.’

.’
‘But I’m still happy . .

‘I thought was goingto die from joy tonight; it’s joy, not anguish, that
I

is killing me.’

‘But that joy is very painful, and I won’t be able to stand it if I

have to wait any longer.’

There was nothing I could do.

In the state that Rosie was in, she wouldn’t have been able,
even with help, to go down a vertiginous stairway.
I finally told her the only way out that was left to us and she
agreed to it, but I was so tired myself that I was sure it wouldn’t
work. It was so bad that I had to lie down on the ground.
‘A nightmare as painful as that’ she said after a time, ‘is prefer-

able to anything!’

She looked into my eyes and, there in the darkness, con-

fessed:

‘I’m disgusting. Wait: I’ll go even further. Look at me; it’s as if I

were dying right in front of you: no, it’s worse. And since we no
longer have any way out, I can feel myself going truly mad.’

‘But,’ she continued, ‘you know how happy I was down below; I

feel even happier on this roof. I’m even on the point of being in

pain because of that happiness: I get pleasure at this point from

feeling an intolerable pain as if, eaten by lions, I was watching

them eat me.’

That little speech excited me so much that I penetrated deep

inside of her. She beat the air with her arms, ran out of breath

and made her body completely stiff as if she were bracing herself
for a fall: death itself couldn’t have racked her more violently.

145
 .

She considered, and I considered with her, a possibility so

remote that it seemed purely inaccessible. We looked at each

other for a long time with a sort of cold anger. Those icy stares
were without a doubt the most obscene language ever spoken by
any human beings.

.’
‘I’m sure . . she said, without for an instant relaxing that unbear-
able tension . .

She smiled and my smile answered that I was sure of the

irregularity of her thoughts.

If we had ceased to live, the divinity of that achievement would

have been dissolved forever in the void.

But it is difficult for words to say that which it is their purpose

to deny.

146
PART FIVE
THE EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT
Since the manuscript that Charles gave to me ends with these
notes, I now take up where I left off - and the very idea of that

would be enough to deter me if I didn’t feel strictly bound to do

it.

The preceding, as I read it again, seems truly preternatural.

That determination to test the limits of human existence leaves

me with mixed feelings: the same feelings that our ancestors must
have had with respect to the insane whom they venerated but
cruelly ostracized: they believed they were divine, yet they
couldn’t keep them from being repulsive - ludicrous, utterly

hopeless. We, with the help of some elementary reasoning, have

to resist the temptation to deny our limitations, but those who do
deny them have every right to reduce us for a time to silence.

Charles himself, after Robert’s death, did everything he could

to escape from temptation. It was probably just to escape from it

that he wrote his story and the foreword that precedes it That
would explain why the story stands so obviously unfinished
(which is the reason for my present intervention): when he gave
in, no longer able to avoid seeing what definitely left hi.n

bewildered (but which he should have seen long before), he

couldn’t finish a task that wasn’t equal to his renunciation.
(Another explanation would be to describe, along the lines that

Charles indicated himself, the impossibility of approaching the

149
very object of his book other than by successive efforts: as if that

object were concealing some blinding light, as if you couldn’t

approach it without deciphering like an enigma its deceptive

appearances, only to exclaim after you have done so: - I have

forced myself to make vigils and to stand watch through the night

and now see I that I am blind!)

I have already mentioned the reasons that Charles gave me to

justify his request for help. But he didn’t have the courage to tell

me the real reason which we couldn’t even discuss. That is the

fact that he was entrusting to me a book that was incomplete -

that he had lacked the strength to finish.

For he didn’t know - or, rather, didn’t recognize - as he was

writing it what was most important about the facts it reveals.

When he learned from a reliable source what he would have

suspected had he been more aware, it was such a painful blow
that he couldn’t bring himself to do what was necessary to finish

the book. It was for the same reason that when he asked me to

do the job, he did so under false pretences. I don’t think he

meant to deceive me, but he just couldn’t come right out and tell

the truth. Which was that - since he KNEW - the very idea of
opening the unfinished manuscript made him ill: and there was
nothing surprising about that.

In the afternoon he began nevertheless to talk to me as he had

no doubt decided to do in advance. didn’t know the reason, but I

Ihad been aware for some time that he was ‘all worked up’.
Speaking of the papers left by Robert, of which I knew nothing at

that point, he said somewhat evasively:

‘These random thoughts don’t make much sense ... Or

perhaps it’s the fact that they were written down sporadically that
makes them sound . . . obviously demented. But, because I have

150
 .

no idea what their purpose might be, it isn’t just their meaning
that escapes me. The whole thing may be just a game. In any
case, I’m sure it was only his desire to do the proper thing that
made Robert so cowardly.’
I could scarcely imagine what he meant by his allusion to
cowardice. I was at a loss for words, but it was better not to say

anything anyway. It made me even more uncomfortable to see

that Charles was laughing or, at least, could hardly keep from
laughing. I asked him, in earnest:

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘I’m not laughing,’ he said, against the evidence, ‘but I must be
crazy.’

Having said that, he gave in and started to really laugh.

‘You’ll find it hard to believe me,’ he said, ‘if I say that I mean
well. Perhaps I’m losing my grip .

Then he stopped laughing and I saw right away that he was

exasperated, that he was struggling most of all to keep from
crying.

‘It would take an Oedipus to unravel it all, but I think he would

get it all tangled up again. The trouble is that only the living have
the opportunity to express themselves: those who are dying have

to be silent. And even if they do speak, death shuts them up. I’ve

given you a manuscript. I may have given Robert an opportunity

to express himself, but the opportunity is limited.’

I didn’t know what to say. Although I wasn’t quite sure what he

was driving at, I thought what he was saying made sense.

‘You’d have to be able to guess, while still alive, what death

would mean for you if you were dying.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said, annoyed by his quirky argument.

‘I don’t know,’ he continued. ‘I see that even those who are

dying are satisfied with the meaning it has for the living. It would
.’
have to be possible . .

151
 \ . . for the living to forget that they are alive to the same extent

to which those who are dying forget that they are dying . . . That’s

impossible.’

‘I don’t know.’
I was beginning to see what was on his mind.
‘Do you mean to say that there can be no such thing as good
intentions unless we forget life and its conditions?’
‘1 guess that’s it.’

‘But, even for those who are dying, life is all there is.’

‘Of course. But in spite of everything, it eludes them.’

‘Which means that the right thing to do would be to live as if

you were about to die.’

‘I don’t know.’
For a long while he was silent; then he looked down and said

with a sort of resignation:

‘All of this depresses me.’

Then, with a sweeping gesture that showed his distress:

‘I’m afraid it’s just too much for me and I can’t take it any
longer. I have to admit that I don’t condemn Robert.’

As I said before, I could hardly imagine what was making him

talk like that. Without saying a word, I just showed my surprise at

the idea that he might have some reason to condemn him.

He looked as if a weight had been taken off his shoulders.
He spoke softly, as if he were sure knew what he was going I

to say . .

‘The trouble with Robert may be that he himself couldn’t really

condemn what he did. If he did what is called evil, it may be that

he did so with a passion not dissimilar to that which motivates a

person to do what is good. What seems to be unspeakable
weakness can sometimes be just distaste for the generally
accepted morality.’

He stared at me. He looked like a hunted man, but the sadness in his

152
 . . . . .

voice sounded convincing:

‘I’m sure,’ he said, ‘that that distaste can be so strong that,

under the effects of torture, it triggers a sudden panic.’

I was listening to him religiously. If he stopped talking for even

a second, the silence was unbearable - excessively so - like night
in a church.
He started again and from that point on, stopping from time to
time, he began to speak very carefully:

‘A few days ago I had a visit from a man who had been
deported. I usually avoid thinking about things that depress me,

but as soon as this man told me that he had been in a cell with
Robert just before he died, I knew only too well what he was
going to say . .

‘It struck me right away that my visitor was quite ill at ease . .

‘What I should have noticed from the very first appeared to me to

be perfectly obvious: Eponine was arrested shortly after Robert,

and the Gestapo came for me at my house the same day they
went for her . . . You know that I had left R. . the night before.
My brother hadn’t left any message for me . .

‘His cellmate looked like most of those who were deported: he

was so thin that it made you feel as if you were talking to

someone more dead than alive. He had insisted on coming to

see me right away because the memory of what he told me was

haunting him . .

‘The first thing he did was to describe the circumstances under

which he had met Robert. It was the kind of situation that people
being held for deportation usually encountered. Robert
apparently didn’t stand up too well under the torture; there’s no
question that when he came out of it he was dying. My visitor was

153
with him almost to the end of his life; when Robert was taken to

the infirmary he had, in all probability, less than an hour to live.

He began to talk toward the end, to be exact, the night before he died

‘I went mad with anguish the moment my visitor came through

my door. It’s hard for me to even talk about that skeletal figure
who was literally coming to bring me news from another world,
from an absolutely wretched world: I couldn’t say anything about

him that would have the kind of meaning that is the rule in such

a case, but he was without a doubt a man you could talk to. He
told me that the thought of the things he had to endure later on
made him shudder, but for various reasons the three days that he
spent in the company of Robert were still, for him, the most
eventful . .

‘He had just come out of a torture-chamber himself. He didn’t

tell me whether he had resisted or not; it was clear to me that he
had resisted, but he told me sadly that he would want to kill any
man who condemned those who give in: he himself felt sorry for

them; it was to him the worst misfortune that could happen to

anyone. The experience of seeing Robert on his death-bed made

him even more horrified.

‘Robert said to him agressively: “I didn’t want to resist; I didn’t

want to and don’t believe that I did; the proof is that I turned in

my brother and my mistress!” My visitor, as awkward as he felt,

wanted to know if he loved or hated those whom he had just

betrayed.’

At that point Charles found it a bit difficult to go on:

‘Robert answered that he had betrayed those whom he loved the
most. His cellmate thought the torture might have made him

154
 . .

mad but Robert wasn’t insane: as a matter of fact, he was as lucid as

could be. And, since it was obvious from his physical condition that

he had been tortured at length, my visitor asked him: “In that case,
why did they torture you?” His tormentors had at first refused to
believe him; they had demanded other names. We know that, in the

end, he let himself be tortured and refused to give any more informa-
tion: he didn’t give the names of those with whom he had actually
engaged in clandestine activity. By that time the police were tired of

trying to break him and they contented themselves with his initial

denunciations which the long torture he subsequently endured

without talking made more credible . .

‘What struck my visitor, after so many months of suffering, was

having seen my brother during the two days of agony that
followed his interrogation. It had seemed to him, and he said it

clumsily, that Robert couldn’t forgive himself for what he called,

in his own words, his cowardice: “It was as if he were, because of

what he had done, dying twice.”

‘He said that he thought for a time he had redeemed himself by

refusing to give any more information, but he realized eventually

that it was too late: the harm he had done was irreparable and he
had done the most cowardly and odious thing he could possibly
think of . .

‘I tried to find out if there wasn’t some abominable satisfaction

hidden behind those recriminations. That wasn’t likely: his

cellmate had thought the same thing: while my brother was

talking - and later, interminably - he had tried, as anguished as

he was, to understand how anyone could do such a shocking

thing. The one thing he thought certain was that Robert, after his

cowardice, felt overwhelmed by it First he admitted, somewhat

defiantly, to a CRIME for which no one had called him into

155
 account. Then he became so insolent that, if he hadn’t been
close to death, he would have been insufferable.

‘My visitor looked as if it were a relief to talk at such length. He

was a young Calvinist from the South of France who must have
been used to saying very little; his Southern accent was deceptive:
made him sound
it as if it were easy for him to say what he had
to say ... He had a very large, skeletal body; he was pale and the
effort he was making appeared to exhaust him. He was reliving

the whole experience in his mind; it seemed to have consumed

him as a fever might do. He insisted on giving the most useless
details, as if his life depended on his testimony. I don’t think he
cared or was even aware that what he was saying was so painful
to me.

‘When Robert talked, he was covered with blood; he spoke in a

low voice and with difficulty, in the moments between his gasps
for air. He hadn’t planned anything, hadn’t CHOSEN to betray

those he loved: the idea of such an infamous treachery

apparently captivated him; it had for him the fascination of the

void; his vertigo would probably not have been enough, but the
violence of his pain was a contributing factor.

‘The young man looked me with a sombre expression on his

at

face; what he was me was transforming him. In the same

telling

way, he told me, when he heard my brother’s final words, he

feltnumb ... He had faithfully guarded the memory of those final
words; when he repeated them for me he was, without a doubt, in his
simplicity, deeply moved.

‘
“You know, Monsieur,’ my brother said to him, “that I am a
priest, or rather, that I was a priest; today I am dying. The illness

from which I’m dying, the torture I’ve endured and the mental

156
anguish that I suffer when I think oi my crimes - for, I have to
admit, the crime I committed yesterday happened because I was
already intentionally living a life of crime - have changed me
completely from the benevolent soul that I was into a hollow

man. You must believe that I have never stopped and never will

stop for a second to think of God. I couldn’t run away from

.”
myself . .

“Even if I were to live forever, I wouldn’t expect anything. What I

did I wanted to do with all my heart Don’t be taken in by the

pain that I have to bear: I suffer because of my crimes, but only to
derive more pleasure from them. Now I’m dying in your pre-

sence, and it may be that you will bear witness for me: I

WANTED to be the lost soul that am today. I I can want oblivion; I

could never, for anything in the world, want to shield my

memory from disdain. But my belated refusal to talk to the police

embarrasses me and I am content to die knowing that it didn’t

make up for anything. I didn’t prove to be lacking in courage but,

in spite of it all, I’m still going out of the world a dishonoured

man. Finally, if I refused to give the names of any members of the

Resistance, it’s because I didn’t love them or just loved them

loyally, as a man should love his comrades. I became more
and more determined and more at odds with myself until I

laughed: with the speed of lightning, an infinitely wretched laugh

mitigated my terror: because it was easy for me to endure when it

was a case of people to whom I am a stranger. Whereas I

enjoyed betraying those I love.”

The young man told me at that point that he had nothing more
to add. He was happy to know that had not personally suffered I

the consequences of my brother’s denunciation. He had often

said to himself that if I were still alive and if he could get to talk to

me, he would be rid of his obsession. But when it came right

157
 .

down to it, he found that he was wrong. He had been unaware

until then that Robert was my twin brother, and the perfect

resemblance between us completely threw him. He finally got up

and said: “In a rather vulgar fashion I had hoped to get from you the
key to the riddle, but as I spoke realized that it was useless and crass.
I

Pardon me for having been unnecessarily brutal.” Just then sensed I

that I was pale and had a frightening look on my face.’

Speaking with even more difficulty, Charles added:

‘He went away and left me .

He couldn’t finish the sentence.

I felt as if I were mute and there was a long silence: I had to

make an effort to ask him if he had spoken in the manuscript

about what he had just told me.
As I surmised he would do, he said ‘no’: he had finished the
manuscript he had given me before the young deportee had
come to see him. He got up, went to get some bottles and
glasses, and poured out two brandies with water. We did our best
to talk about other things, but I felt a tension between us that
couldn’t be dispelled. Then it dawned on me that I was making
him nervous: he had been obliged to talk to me for a long time

but, having done so, he was sorry he had.

158
 BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

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DEMCO
 I

The power of Bataille s prose is still impresssive, his capacity to

shock still compelling' LITERARY REVIEW

Told in a series of first-person accounts, l’ABBÉ C is a startling

dissection of the intense and terrifying relationship between twin
brothers, Charles and Robert. Charles is a modern libertine,

dedicated to vice and depravity, while Robert is a priest so devout

that he is nicknamed L'Abbé’. When the sexually wild Eponine
intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium
and death ensue. With the skill of a master anatomist Bataille
peels away the psychological intricacies of sex, faith and death in
a provincial French town.

Georges Bataille was born in 1897 and died in 1962. A philosopher,

novelist and critic, he has continued to exert an increasingly vital
influence on today's literature and thought. His short novel STORY
OF THE EYE is now considered a major work of twentieth-century
fiction. Other works by Georges Bataille available from Marion
Boyars include BLUE OF HOOH. MY MOTHER MAOAME EOWARDA AHD
THE DEAD MAN and the ground-breaking volume of literary
meditations, LITERATURE AND EVIL

‘Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century.

He broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been
told before' MICHEL FOUCAULT

Along with Céline and Breton, Bataille writes as if he were

dropping a bomb; in a fore-flash he creates a world of demented
funereal sexuality' ETROIT FREE PRESS

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