Max knows that limp-wristed and corrupt are idiotic words, but he needs them to give a name to the hate which seizes him, to give a name to what will be his failure, he has laid his book before that faceless face, saying here you are, know me, I who have done everything to ensure that you will recognise yourself in me, a struggle for recognition, he will lose, limp-wristed, corrupt, a name for the someone who would make fun of his love scene, of the fornucopia, as Flaubert might say, which Max wrote at a time when it could still cost an author dear, when at the very least it would get your book banned in public and limit you to the market for erotic books aimed at lawyers.
And Max is all the more wary because not long ago, in Paris, a writer was found guilty of uttering an obscenity, Victor Margueritte, fined, stripped of his Legion of Honour for having written in La Garçonne, ‘she was picking the dark-hued lavender, seeing her crouching loins he had seized his chance, he had pulled up her skirt and she had felt the fiery god possess her.’
His Legion of Honour, they say he got it for gallantry in the field. Stripped of it for crouching loins. Plus two or three paragraphs of Sapphic delights. Max wrote his sex scene because he is jealous, not of Margueritte, a novelist whom you can see pulling the strings rather too obviously, but jealous of an Englishman whose book he has read which in London circulates under the counter.
This book has infuriated Max because as he read it he realised that it was exactly what he would have liked to write himself, it would have established his reputation in a blaze of lightning as a novelist out of the ordinary run of novelists, and he begins to hate the novelist he would like to have been as much as he hates the reader he would like to have.
So it transpired that this middle-aged Englishman wrote the book Max should have written, it wasn’t so much the story of a gamekeeper and a lady, but the man’s direct way with words like hole, penis, fuck, balls, and at the same time a great tenderness, a taste of apple, delicate gestures, everything that made Max want to say that this happened with Thomas because Hélène could no longer put up with Thomas’s hangdog manner, she took her decision, despite all the smiles of the reader whose sarcastic comments already ring in Max’s ears, she will give him what he has been wanting since the day they first met, only Max will use fewer metaphors than the Englishman, and Hélène will take the lead, for she will no longer allow herself to be taken.
One evening she goes to Thomas’s house, a nightdress under her cloak, goes up to his room, he is already asleep, she takes off her cloak, the rustle wakes him, don’t move! she gets into the bed, pins Thomas on his back, prevents him making the movements which men always think necessary for the seduction of the female, she doesn’t want him to try to seduce her, men always hurt her, so she will undress him.
Thomas’s penis when she removes his short drawers, but she has no wish to touch it, she is not a whore, she comes to him out of tenderness, now Thomas is naked the skin softer than she expected she is melted by it she repeats don’t move! and lowers herself on to Thomas laying her head next to his neck, the penis, an apprehension, Thomas makes a movement which hurts her, she says sh! she takes the penis, and Max thinks that the word penis is not entirely appropriate but what other word is there? penis is medical, phallus, too erudite, sex, that’s it, his sex.
It’s the word Max thought of first on the métro, when the frightened look in the eyes of a woman passenger made him realise that he’d just said it out loud while searching for what he wanted to say, but actually the word came to mind too soon, Max amused himself trying out other words, cock, tail, prick, dick, he changes his mind, and Hélène guides the penis with her hand saying ‘gently’, she is the one who thrusts, the contact surprises her, it’s more than a year since she felt it and the sensation is not the same as with the man then, Thomas does not dare look at Hélène, he has closed his eyes and breathes more loudly, she says ‘don’t hold back’.
She prevents Thomas from moving, she does not want him to go off as they say, she’d be afraid, and though she had not planned it in advance she’s the one now who, I’ll have to reread the English author thinks Max, he can prolong, describe, change the metaphors the one about melting her all molten, the one about the sword, the one about heaving waves breaking over the very quick of her, leave all that to the poets along with the one about the yielding scissors and the cloth, Hélène moves slowly, just think about what she’s doing, faster keep an eye on Thomas his breathing thinks of herself she tenses suddenly, and when it’s over don’t have too many flowers not as many hyacinth bells as the English writer has, nor meadowsweet nor bluebells, Thomas has given a little cry, she is prone on top of him, from time to time faint stirring between her legs, how many years has she wasted? She kisses Thomas’s face, licks the tears on his cheeks, he tries to caress her she restrains him she does not want to find just another male, with their jerking, their writhing, that stupid look they put on their faces when they dominate, the ridiculous thrusting of their buttocks, some really bite, others just leave unbearable lovebites on the neck, one of her friends told her, ‘They learn about love in the army, at the same time as they learn to march in step.’
She licks Thomas’s neck, lips, breasts, armpits, desires crowd in on her, she kisses his navel, moves down to the cloud of dark hair, thinks his man-hair is beautiful, his sex has shrunk in the calm shadows, no more threatening than a comma, as on a Michelangelo, she swings her hair over it, she begins to sing softly.
‘So I’m not going to be allowed to read the scene which steams up this chalet in the mountains, Max, couldn’t you at least let me add a fireplace, a blazing hearth?’
‘Or a pier-glass in veneered mahogany? Now it’s you who are writing novelettes, the story hasn’t even begun yet.’
‘You mean this fornucopia isn’t the climax of the tale?’
‘I shan’t be publishing any scenes of fucking.’
‘Sixty years from now, Max, on the manuscript, it would make an interesting variant, variants give life to books.’
‘No variant.’
‘So there won’t be any culminating point to your story, nor even a climactic turn of phrase such as you get in the Arabian Nights, a moment of pure poetry, “the buttocks of the young man were so beautiful that the eighteen young girls began to sing”?’
‘No scene with fucking, I shall be elliptical, I’ll pick up the story just after.’
‘And what did Thomas do just after?’
‘He did what you or I did.’
‘He went back to sleep?’
‘He went off to the war, after marrying Hélène, she didn’t agree with the war, but she was Swiss.’
‘He was like us, bit of a socialist, hostile before…’
‘His name on the B list of people to be arrested on the first day of the mobilisation.’
‘And in your country as in Germany nobody was arrested because everybody agreed with everybody else, it was to be the war to end war.’
‘He acted with heroism.’
‘Your military medal?’
‘To which you can add the Legion of Honour and the croix de guerre.’
‘Und ein leg less.’
‘Hélène didn’t care for that at all, Thomas came home in 1917, a hero, even the Paris papers had reported his gallantry, an exemplary record, schoolteacher, a pacifist, a son of the people, a captain within three years, six times wounded, defended his position at Verdun to the last man and brought back his wounded CO — one of the Langle de Carys, a Catholic and a royalist — crawled, though he himself had very little feeling in his right leg, genuine front-page material, with coloured-up sketches, they had a field day, but Hélène didn’t care for it at all.’