He just went on staring at her, I was furious, I didn’t want him to fall for another girl but that in itself is not enough to make a man love you. You can write books about it, but it’s not enough. I thought he was very silly to stare at her like that, she started kicking up like a mare in season, she was insufferable, he just looked moony, a woman and a damp-eyed puppy, in a farmyard, I didn’t bother to say anything, anyway I wasn’t really in love with him.
He could have done whatever he liked with her, it wouldn’t have bothered me. To start loving a man because you see him straightening his tie before going up to some Marie-Thérèse who jiggles all she’s got for everyone to see, wears vulgar dresses, in that pink Liberty print, a pink muslin blouse, pink pearls and shows as much cleavage as it takes to attract looks from the morons, and very few from me.
I suddenly had this feeling that I had ceased to be anything, that I had no breasts, no backside, but I didn’t feel that I had fallen in love. I didn’t say anything and it didn’t last. Anyway she’s got peculiar breasts. I left the pair of them to it, he came after me, men are like that.
I know exactly when I started to love him, three months after we’d been together, Arosa, that farcical episode at Arosa, on the first floor of the chalet we’d rented for one night, with the raised bed.
I’d climbed into it, I was waiting for him, he was also already in his nightclothes, a little painted wooden chair, at the foot of the bed, the solemn look he gave me as he stood on the chair to join me, very amorous, as was only right and proper.
His foot went right through the chair, foot, calf, knee and halfway up his thigh, went clean through the flimsy wooden seat of a chair which was never intended for amorous use, a chair painted pale blue. He nearly fell over, he couldn’t free his leg, it might have happened to me, he wasn’t really hurt, only very annoyed.
He tried to extricate his leg but the splinters began sticking in his thigh, he swore, turned red in the face, a parfit knight with a chair circling his naked thigh, that’s what set me off with the giggles, I shouldn’t have, the most awful giggles, I bit my lip, I didn’t want anyone on the floor below to hear me, my hot-blooded knight in a nightshirt, with one leg through a chair, we must get help, out of the question, he tried to break off the splintered wood but he was standing and couldn’t do it, I was helpless with laughter, I bit the inside of my cheeks, we must have been making a terrible row, I could see he was in a bad way, I got down clinging to the bed posts.
He was beginning to be in real pain, I stopped laughing, I made him lie down on the floor, on his back, with his leg in the air, the chair clamped around his leg, I managed to slide the chair up his thigh to ease out the splinters which had started to dig into his flesh, he had good thighs, he didn’t seem to be thinking about sex any more.
I kept my eyes on the job, I snapped off the splintered ends one by one to widen the hole in the chair and pull it off without doing him any damage, gently, and then I got the giggles again because I suddenly wanted to say: if only Marie-Thérèse could see you now!
Of course all that was already over and done with, but I still wanted to say it, naturally I didn’t do anything of the sort, a fit of the giggles, my lover man, on his back, beautiful light of a candle, one leg in the air, his white nightshirt pulled up, with him doing his best not to make too indecent a spectacle of himself, come on try, with one leg in the air and a chair wrapped round it, I was laughing, I couldn’t get the last of the splinters out and pull the chair down over his knee.
His skin was smooth, I wasn’t laughing now, I kissed him, and suddenly I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone before, he didn’t quite get it, for him love meant taking my breasts in both hands and gazing at me solemnly, I liked that too, though not as much as when he was on his back with that chair around his leg.
The staccato rat-tat-tat continues in bursts, riders are still falling in the clearing at Monfaubert, mown down by the chattering sewing-machine which has swung round towards them, but Captain Jourde can no longer react, regroup, respond, for the Captain is down, back propped against a tree, he has taken a burst in the chest.
He asks the lieutenant to sit him up, the lieutenant obeys, then walks into the throng of riderless horses and helmetless riders, some covered in blood and clinging for dear life to the pommel of their saddles, others screaming and thrusting and smiting, keep hold of this rage, keep the goal before you: destroy the Boches and their filthy dreams.
Captain Jourde is determined to die facing the enemy, but what he sees in front of him standing not two metres away is his own black mount, an Anglo-Norman thoroughbred, looks thin, has blood on its chest, it holds up one leg, which is also bleeding, the horse shudders, looks at the Captain who is saying to himself that the charge he led has failed, around him bullets whine, smack, slap, mew, ricochet, shatter a stone, a nose, the Captain’s hand claws at the grass.
The regimental log simply states that the Captain died in battle, the press prefers ‘on the field of honour’ or ‘for France’, it makes a great deal of difference to a good many women who henceforth enter into what is called ‘the heroic wakefulness of wives’.
Calmette, Caillaux, Henriette Caillaux and a woman of letters, after the war Max will be told that he’s an obsessive, there is more to History than one floozy’s flings, History is made by the mass of humanity, the prevailing laws, nations, passions, men of true greatness, great ideas or inter-imperialist contradictions, the hand of God, Max, or the wood that burns so that trees may turn green again, the act of righteous revenge which burns down the house which sets fire to the street, the act becomes a crime, then begets a new and more handsome street, war as a crime without punishment, undertaken to restore right: passions which at the last bring you back to the universal, or on the contrary the pure instinct of death, with nothing before it, especially not women, actually my dear Max, I challenge you to publish the name of that woman of letters who is supposed to have been loved at the same time by both Calmette and Caillaux, ‘I hold the roses close so that my arms are pricked’, the Swiss Ambassador talked about it in his correspondence, but he was Swiss.
Max gets under the skin of his friends on both the left and the right. He makes the Great War turn entirely on ‘a pair of frilly lace knickers’, it’s too anecdotal my dear Max, wait a minute, at least let me tell the end of the Caillaux story, this woman reporter, a colleague, a friend, has just met Madame Caillaux, seven years after it happened, she asked her: ‘When Calmette collapsed after you shot him, what was the first thing you felt?’ What was Madame Caillaux’s reply? I could give you three guesses but I’ll tell you anyway: ‘That I was not in love with my husband.’
Max is sometimes pretty odd, puts you in mind of Molière’s cunning valet, Scapin, the sort of man who ends up thinking that everything’s one big joke, that it was on Madame Poincaré’s account that Poincaré the warmonger wanted to be President and that Madame Caillaux prevented her husband making peace, Max has a very odd way with him, all that talk of knickers, also quite incapable of hanging his mackintosh or overcoat on a coat-stand, he always leaves it draped over a chair, a desk, any old place.
He says he does it out of nostalgia for the coat pegs they had in the trenches, that’s right, for more than a month one winter they used the feet of frozen corpses sticking out of the trench walls, bit of a bonus according to Max, German army boots, that didn’t matter, they made decent coat pegs, then when the thaw came they turned out to be French corpses, their own comrades, in a perfect state of preservation: German boots and French corpses, imagine.