‘You’ve no idea how instructive it is. At the clinic I’ve only come across cases of severe intoxication, and in the manuals only generalizations. Without Germaine, ether would have been something abstract. With Germaine, it’s a drama.’
I’d like to burst out with: ‘But what are you, a machine for recording dramas? A detective? A psychological secret agent? A dabbler in souls?’ But I stop myself in time. The one feeling Maurice is incapable of is indignation.
He’s probably the most intelligent man I’ve ever known, because that’s all there is to him. Nothing else: neither moral nor immoral, neither good nor bad. Intelligence for him takes the place of sensitivity. There are emotions and nuances that he can’t help but feel. He understands them. He doesn’t have instincts, he doesn’t have reflexes: he orients himself through awareness. I wonder what he would do if caught up in a great passion, one that devastates him, consumes him and overwhelms him … Ridiculous! There’s no chance of such a person having to face this kind of passion. Maurice would be up to imposing order on a cyclone.
Wherever he goes, he finds out how to orient himself. In a crowd of people or in a symphony, in a landscape or in a book, his first concern is to establish north and south. Then, knowing the route back, he allows himself to get adventurous. (S’égarer est un plaisir délicieux, à condition que la route de Paris ne soit pas éloignée.)
*
At the moment, Maurice is taking care of the Robert Grévy — Jacques Bertrand business. ‘A must-be couple’, he’s engraved in his imaginary notebook under the heading ‘Robert’, the day he introduced him to Jacques.
‘But Bertrand isn’t homosexual,’ I object, scandalized.
‘He will be. He has what it takes.’
‘And Robert Grévy?’
‘Used to be. Filled with nostalgia.’
Robert Grévy is married. His wife, Suzanne, who knows certain things about his past, doesn’t let him out of her sight. She’s a fiery, watchful wife.
‘As long as Suzanne’s around, there’s nothing doing,’ observes Buret, summing it up. Then he decides: ‘Suzanne needs to take a little trip.’
Tuesday, lunch with the Grévys.
‘Why are you looking at me that way, Maurice?’ asks Suzanne, surprised.
‘What way?’
‘I don’t know; worried, perhaps.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing. I thought you’d coughed.’
‘Yes, I had something stuck in my throat.’
‘Just as well it was nothing. It seemed suspicious.’
‘Suspicious?’
‘What are you getting alarmed about? It was imprudent of me to say anything. You won’t give me any peace now. Now I’m sure you think you have tuberculosis.’
‘No Maurice — but, anyhow, if you say …’
‘Know what? How about you pop into the hospital tomorrow and we’ll do an X-ray. To put your mind at rest.’
Three days later, Suzanne leaves for Savoy, advised to spend a month in the sun on a deck-chair. Of course, the X-ray showed two or three lesions.
Maurice Buret gives a modest laugh.
Is he a corrupter? No. He has nothing in common with Gide, neither vice nor proselytizing nor disquiet. No, particularly not disquiet. People — whether they fall or are saved — matter little to Buret.
‘I trouble myself only to vary as much as I can the psychological vistas open to me. I have the impression Robert and Jacques would be a very good combination. So I’ll try to facilitate bringing them together, to smooth the road, to clarify their own vocation. It’s a small effort, behind the scenes.’
I listen to Maurice and make a serious effort not to be scandalized. I should understand once and for all that this man has no moral scruples and therefore should be accepted in his totality. Or rejected in his totality, which I find even harder.
His spiritual patron (if the term ‘spiritual’ can be applied to him) isn’t Gide, but Laclos, and the moral atmosphere he lives in closely resembles that of Les Liaisons dangereuses, which is libertine rather than perverse, because it is not vice that dominates, but the intellectual appetite for always coming up with amusing games.
*
Only after an absence of several weeks (one of those mysterious trips, from which he returns with surprising personal reports), do I realize what Buret’s friendship means to me. He brings with him the daring sense that everything is possible in life, that all women are for the conquering, all doors to be opened. Something odd: though I know him to be cautious, methodical and reflective in everything he does, he still gives the impression of living spontaneously.
‘You even simulate spontaneity, my dear Maurice.’
‘I don’t simulate: I organize. I organize my spontaneity. You take me for a cynic, but I’m an enthusiast. It’s just that my enthusiasm is systematic.’
An hour of conversation with him is a personal lesson in clarity. A term must be found for every nuance, a corrective for every misunderstanding. ‘Everything can be defined,’ he stubbornly believes, and does not forgive a single ill-chosen word or ill-defined distinction. I’ve never heard him pass a vague judgement on anything, be it a woman or a piece of music or a painting. He will always tell me exactly what he likes or doesn’t, strictly maintaining the distinction between one nuance and another.
In his company, life becomes clear-cut, correctly proportioned, the horizons visible.
2
The offices of Ralph T. Rice in Boulevard Haussmann are barely a modest agency compared to the head offices in Piaţa Rosetti in Bucharest. A few rooms, some desks, a small archive in the process of being organized. I don’t know exactly what old Ralph wants to set up here: a simple sales office or a public company. It’s up to him to decide whether or not we get working on the Le Havre project. (I’d prefer Dieppe, however, which seems to me more suitable for commerce, and from the construction standpoint is immeasurably more open and spacious. I’ve sent a number of plans to the master, who’ll decide.) He may in the end do nothing. It’s not the moment for heavy investment in a business that, even if all goes well, won’t turn a profit for several years at least. At the end of 1929, when Rice Enterprises Inc. began to realize old Ralph’s age-old plan of establishing a French division, the project seemed feasible. Today, in 1931, it’s risky at best, and perhaps even foolhardy. Petrol is suffering a crisis matched only by agriculture. Rice is a daring businessman, but not one to play the stock markets.
The master has never really taken seriously what we in the office term ‘the French expedition’, though he still would have liked to be able to build here and had no reason to discourage Rice. Also, he was happy to give both Dronţu and I the chance to go abroad for a year. We drew straws and I was first.
‘Good: you go this year, next year Dronţu.’
It’s been about a year now. I waited for Marin to take my place, but he hasn’t come. He sent me a letter exactly four lines long, the first I’ve received since his wedding.
‘I can’t come. Married man, too tied up. Good luck over there. I miss you, pal, and wish I could see you. Marjorie sends her regards. She’ll write to you one of these days.’
She’ll write to you one of these days. No, Marjorie won’t write. I know it, and so does Marin.