To you, Germans — with my mouth at last released from military reticence — I address myself.
I have never hated you.
I have fought you to death with stiffly unsheathed desire to kill very many of you.
My joy sprang to life in your blood.
But you are strong. And I wasn’t able to hate in you that strength, the mother of things.
I took pleasure in your strength …
The date of the poem was 1917. The author was called Drieu la Rochelle. Jean turned to Claude; her lips were quivering. She stared at him.
‘Do you think they’ll punish them?’ she asked.
‘I’m sure they will.’
‘That’s all right then.’
He took the hand she had let fall. For an instant he recalled the blissful moments, gathered one by one, before Claude had been his. How could he get them back? Stroking her knee in the train that had brought them from Clermont-Ferrand, the way they kissed on the cheek every time they met or parted, her dressing gown falling open to reveal her breast, her nakedness in the mirror in their hotel room at Saint-Raphaël. Did all that have to lose its meaning, just because they had made love? Did a single act reduce to childishness all the feverish, intense emotions that had fired your imagination? From the age of thirteen until he was twenty he had written down in an oilcloth notebook his reflections and impressions of the life that was opening up before him. The notebook had got left behind in the tankette they had abandoned in the village square. Monsieur Graindorge, the surveyor, had doubtless picked it up and had a good laugh reading it. Jean felt he would have liked to add another entry to his old notebook that evening: ‘One sort of love, the most beautiful and the only really precious sort, comes to an end the moment you sleep with the woman you love for the first time. The stolen kisses, her half-glimpsed body, become childish things. An enormous, superb, intoxicating but obscene adventure begins. An immense amount of tenderness is needed to stop it degenerating into debauchery. Only in idealised romantic novels is the act of love portrayed as a marvellous levitation, the earthly flight of two bodies. The reality is not so magical, and that less magical element makes everything scary. Two bodies fall to earth, suffering the vertigo of emptiness, the return to oneself, a moment of appalling indifference. Sounds, smells, precautions can ruin everything. I’d be wiser never to make love to the woman I most care for, and instead to do it very often with women I’ll never be attached to. If I’m honest, the most balanced period of my life was the time between my first night with Nelly and my first afternoon with Claude. I didn’t realise it. Now I know it. My pleasure with Nelly may be over for good. With Claude, it’s perhaps the start of a long and difficult road to the prize …’
Claude’s hand squeezed his hard, as if reminding him to protect her, but her gaze remained turned to the fire.
‘Jean … There’s someone watching us.’
‘There’s only Jesús and Cyrille.’
‘No, someone else. Behind my back.’
Later — wrongly, because she was right — Jean remembered that it was this fear of Claude’s that had aroused his first suspicions. Before, she had (he thought) just been talking nonsense, floating in a semi-comatose sea of sedatives.
But Jesús looked up, stared at the window, and leapt to his feet to run to the front door, which he threw open. The fire crackled, spitting a ball of smoke.
‘Maman, it’s snowing!’ Cyrille shouted.
Jesús came back in, holding a whitish form tightly by the arm, a man covered in snowflakes. Claude wailed and threw herself into Jean’s arms.
Jesús closed the door behind the figure, who shook himself and took off his hat, leaving the top of his head and upper part of his face free of snow.
‘Why was you spyin’ on us be ’ind the window?’
‘I am sorry, so sorry. Deeply sorry, Madame.’
There was nothing frightening about him: he was more comic than anything else, twisting in his hands (in white leather gloves) a silk-brimmed hat of the sort known as an Eden. Jean recognised him more from his voice than his dress. The man from the woods had gone to considerable trouble. The melting snow already forming a pool at his feet revealed him dressed for polite society: a soberly elegant pinstriped navy-blue suit, black pointed shoes and in his hand a cane with an ivory knob.
‘Maman, Maman!’
Cyrille was crying, clinging to his mother’s legs as she, shaking convulsively, hid her face on Jean’s shoulder.
‘It’s nothing!’ Jean said. ‘It’s just a visitor.’
‘Yes, I came to wish you a happy Christmas. We’re neighbours, are we not? I had no wish to disturb you. Having lived as a savage for some time, I’ve rather lost the habits of society …’
He must have made an effort to wash himself and to run the scissors over his beard and hair, but the smell of dirt still hung around him, a tenacious tramp’s smell. He was so outlandish and unexpected that Jean would have burst out laughing if it had not been for Claude’s trembling. He gently pushed her down into the armchair so that her back was to the visitor. Cyrille, regaining his courage, peeped at him.
‘Jean, is it the man in the woods?’
‘Ah, so I am known to this young man!’
Blaise Pascal — it was he — coughed to clear his throat, hoarse with emotion. The hand clasping the knob of his cane went to his beard to restrain possible germs.
‘Why was you lookin’ in the window?’
‘Ah, so you’re the Spanish painter? Your friend told me about you. There was a time when I was very interested in painting. Would those two landscapes on the wall be yours?’
‘Oh, the boy could do jus’ as good …’
‘Don’t you believe it, dear Monsieur. I know that modern painting claims to have rediscovered, via a complicated detour, the genius of childhood, since — as they declare — all children possess genius, except for child prodigies. But allow me to tell you that your painting — in so far as I can judge from these two pictures — displays the very opposite of childishness. You know everything and you have had the strength to harness your ability. Trust me, Monsieur, I am happy to inform you, if no one else has already done so, that you are a great, a very great painter.’
Dumbfounded, Jesús stared at him. It occurred to Jean that this pure spirit with the frame of an ox knew nothing of deceit, and he felt greater faith in the bearded stranger’s measured speech than in La Garenne’s self-interested paeans. Jesús would accomplish his work in solitude, far from sycophants and the most articulate of admirers; in truth, all he needed was friends and love … Claude turned to look at the figure whose pleasant voice, with a nuance of vanity in its assured tone, seemed to have calmed her attack of nerves.
‘Come and get warm!’ Jean said.
The snow had all but melted from the visitor, but he stayed standing in his pool of water, embarrassed, trying to please by his refined politeness.
‘I would not wish to frighten you, Madame.’
‘I’m not afraid of you,’ Claude said.
‘You’ll excuse me for having spied on you at the window for just a moment. The truth is that I couldn’t decide whether to knock at the door or not. You made a delightful, delicate picture. The child is very handsome. Is he your boy, Madame?’
‘Yes, he’s my son.’
‘Come and get warm,’ Jean repeated.
The man did nothing, not from discretion but because he had developed a habit of not accepting any invitation.
‘You’re all wet!’ Cyrille said.
‘Very true, my boy, but I had no umbrella. When I left two years ago I took only this cane with me …’