A Dark Stranger E-Book

Julien Gracq

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 301

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A surreal, nouveau-Gothic story of Death in a 1920s seaside hotel From the moment he arrives at an elegant seaside hotel with his lover, Allan unsettles and obsesses the other guests. Elusive, equivocal, beautiful, he lives, gambles, swims and dances with a strange fierceness that they find intoxicating. Soon he even haunts their dreams. One by one, each guest is fatally drawn to Allan. And, as the hazy August heat fades and summer comes to an end, they gravitate towards self-destruction. Rich, lushly poetic, A Dark Stranger is a dreamlike portrayal of lives lived on the edge of the abyss. Julien Gracq (1910-2007) taught history and geography in various lycées. A close friend of André Breton, his work was inspired by German Romanticism, and combines startling imagery with a rich, precise metre. Staunchly avoiding the French literary scene-he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951-he is one of the few authors to have been published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade during his lifetime. He died in 2007 aged 97. Julien Gracq's Château d'Argol is also available from Pushkin Press..

Leseprobe

JULIEN GRACQ

A DARK STRANGER

Translated from the French by Christopher Moncrieff

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

For Roger Veillé

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;

They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,

And husband nature’s riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence …

Sonnet XCIV

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

GÉRARD’S DIARY 29th June

30th June

1st July

3rd July

4th July

5th July

6th July

7th July

15th July

16th July

18th July

19th July

20th July

22nd July

29th July

30th July

3rd August

4th August

6th August

8th August

9th August

10th August

11th August

14th August

15th August

18th August

19th August

22nd August

23rd August

24th August

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Also Available from Pushkin Press

About the Publisher

Copyright

A DARK STRANGER

During these fleeting, drifting days of late autumn I recall with special fondness the paths on that little beach at the close of the season, suddenly strangely overwhelmed by silence. It’s barely alive in its itinerant idleness, that hotel where the influx of women in light dresses and unexpectedly triumphant children will recede with the equinoctial tides and, like September breakers, suddenly reveal the brick and concrete caves, the rocky stalactites, the childish, appealing structures, the over-groomed flower beds that the sea breeze will devastate like dried-up anenomes; everything which, suddenly abandoned to a vacant heart-to-heart with the sea will, for want of reassuring frivolity resume its unassailable and loftier status of a ghost in broad daylight. On the seafront, dead, glassed-in verandas, their wrought ironwork eaten away by the salty scourge, fret themselves like looted jewellers’ shops—suddenly, incredibly, the worn out, washed out blue of shutters closed on unseeing windows holds back the ebb of life that’s responsible for this decay. Yet in the sourish sunlight of the October morning, sounds spring up, strangely detached from the silence in the same way the solemn movement of a sleeper frees him from a dream—the white gate of a wooden fence creaks, a doorbell echoes loudly from one end of the eager street to the other. I must be dreaming. Who has come calling here with such ceremony? There’s no one here. There’s no one anymore.

I disappear behind the rows of villas above the amphitheatre of the beach, walk up and down avenues buried beneath the trees on soft brown soil muffled by sand and pine needles. As soon as I turn the corner of the beach an equivocal silence sets in. The rumbling of thesea reaches the depths of these avenues’ hollow green pathways only hesitantly, stirring me like the rumble of rioting at the bottom of a sleepy suburban garden. On this background of dark mineral greenery, of pine and cedar, silver birches, poplars suddenly blaze out, reduced to faint golden smoke, spreading their red flames like fiery caterpillars consuming a piece of paper. Soon the great maritime grisaille will restore this whole scene to primary colours—here and there a subtle pigmentation takes hold, puddle by puddle—salt blanches the surface of walls, turns metal railings a jarring red, the sea breeze scatters sand on floors through cracks in the doors—a sudden, unexpected encroachment pervades this little town, harsh and grey like the salt and the coral, with the vague traces of a fire gone cold, of a dried-up tidal wave.

There are colourless afternoons, closed off, sunk beneath hopelessly unchanging skies—like the poor fairy-tale world inside the glass walls of a conservatory—deprived of that changeable layer of skin that the sun creates for them and which prepares them as best it can for life, when the consciousness of the all-powerful reserve of things wells up in me to the point of horror. Just as after the performance is over I sometimes imagine slipping back into an empty theatre at midnight and, in the dark auditorium, catching the scenery refusing to play the game for the first time. Streets emptied for the night, a theatre that reopens, a beach abandoned to the sea for a season weave conspiracies of silence, wood and stone as effective as five thousand years and all the secrets of Egypt for unleashing spells over an open tomb. Hands distracted, holding keys, playing with rings, hands skilled with weights that make tombstones turn, move the bezel which makes you invisible—I became this ghostly stealer of mummies when, as a gentle breeze blew in off the sea and the sound of the rising tide was suddenly more perceptible, the sun finally vanished into the mist on that afternoon of 8th October 19 …

GÉRARD’S DIARY

29th June

THIS MORNING, a walk to Kérantec. Quite deserted around the pier in the little harbour, the beach that stretches away to the left totally empty, dunes running beside it covered in dried rushes. There was heavy weather out to sea, an overcast grey sky, great leaden waves crashing on the beach. But between the piers the silence of the swell against the stone side-walls was incredible; great big tongues, urgent and rough, yet agile, unsettling, shooting up suddenly like anteaters’ tongues as they reached the sea wall without warning, exploded in mid-air in an ice-cold spray. I had lunch in an empty restaurant all on its own in the middle of the dunes, the raised floor made a hollow sound, the vast dining room (the local youth must dance there on Sundays) with its strings of cheerless paper flags, its varnished pine boards, reminded me less of parties than of a ship’s wardroom, the Sailor’s Rest, everything which, as so frequently in this part of the world, (lifeboat sheds for barns, outdoor pantries built onto every house in the street) brings with it that unavoidably gloomy, mean, rule-bound character that so often gives the Breton countryside a mournful look.

As I came back along the path by the shore I ran into some youngsters from Kérantec walking in pairs, coming for the dancing. Serious, almost solemn—the girls’ hair flew in the strong wind—hands in pockets; it wasn’t warm. A lonely pathway nonetheless. In the distance, from the dunes that hang over the track, above the low line of the roof of Le Retour du Pêcheur you could see foam flying with the sea’s every salvo. An unusual pleasure spot. Then, among the muffled bombardment of the waves, in a brief ray of sunshine I heard the tinny sound of a record playing which—above the uneven bass note of the tide, in the midst of this great echo chamber of clouds and water—wasn’t in any way offensive. Yet one girl followed along the seashore all alone in the opposite direction to the stream of ants. Idle, slow, indifferent, occasionally bending down to pick up a shell, a piece of driftwood—or just looking vaguely out to sea, and at those moments her hands always shifted stupidly to her hips—what thought was there in that rustic head that was genuinely her own? In real landscapes just like in paintings I’m constantly intrigued by the idlers who appear at midday or twilight, spit in corners, throw stones, hop and skip or ferret out blackbirds’ nests, sometimes darkening a whole area of the landscape with gestures as unfathomable as it’s possible to be.

After strolling back I had dinner alone—the in crowd had already left for the casino.

After dinner, stretched my legs on the beach for a moment. A fine beach, melancholy and magnificent, the windows on the seafront set ablaze by the sunset like an ocean liner lighting up. The empty sand, still warm, like a beach of human flesh which you want to walk over, cover, to soil as artlessly as it does itself. And yet the air is so pure, so purely cold, so clear, as if constantly washed by unseen showers. A gentle gurgling in a furrow in the sand (the tide is going out) tries hard to turn the ground into a flooded landscape—the almost human sound of channelled water cutting into it like a woodsman’s axe. I took a deep breath. Ah, what a mouthful! Sand drifted across the dunes, the air snapped like great banners, standing up against the cutting edge of the wind with a feline flick of the tail. And out on the horizon the hurried toing and froing of the waves, always this commotion of foam, this riotous churning, a confusion of clouds lined with squalls and sunshine, this fierce train of swells, the unfailing impatience of the sea in the background.

30th June

THE HÔTEL DES VAGUES gets under way, like a ship sailing through summer. There are enough people here now for you to feel the jostle; a makeshift state of mind sets in in this little holiday world. Seen from my window this morning, Jacques tacking off for a swim. Every day there’s an early bustling from his room above me—the way you walk into the wardroom unselfconsciously, laugh loudly with that bold upside-down intimacy of bunkmates. But any lack of awkwardness always stops outside Christel’s door; no one would dream of knocking on that door until her majestic appearance—the young princess in a towelling bathrobe—gives the signal. In every little group of human beings, each vaguely-constituted unit, there’s always the one people seek advice from, who they consult with a sideways glance before loosing the hounds.

Christel rules this little world with one heavy eyelid voluptuously closed—so much so that you can’t imagine more perfect peace of mind, rejuvenation, than in this precise setting—with its perfectly-formed jaw (the jaw that conveys so well any excess or lack in a person, that jaw so often tactless), perfectly right. Once she closes her mouth there’s no point wondering whether to expect another word. An extraordinary sense of measure and control. The essence of tranquillity, restfulness.

Christel interests me. She interests me because she plays—and enjoys playing. But among the informality of the beach I sometimes catch her eyes shining with reserve. What a lovely word! Which suggests to me—and I’d like it to to her—much less the restraint of a good education than the somewhat perverse amusement of watching yourself play your part so well. Rather like, on the level of this mini-theatre, the “Am I a god for them?” of Conti in Béatrix—into which Balzac, a born actor, couldn’t help but put all his self-satisfaction.

She isn’t a goddess for me—but as from tomorrow I intend giving her the chance to prove she’s an intelligent person to talk to.

1st July

IT’S A LONG TIME since I opened this diary with such impatience, such a longing to write. I open my window on the night breeze—I’ve been pacing up and down the room for ages, strong and vigorous, clear-headed like after a bath, alert and bursting with bright ideas, all of them conceited, fleeting. This evening I had a most unusual conversation with Christel.

I already sense how inept I’m going to be at expressing the colour—the nocturnal, moon-like atmosphere in which my memory constantly bathes her. To do so I need to conjure up Poe, that aura of birth and remembering, of a time still obscure, a sequence that can be reversed—an oasis in the desert of time:

’Twas night in the lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year …

… I couldn’t start writing straight away. I walked up and down the room again. Out the window the bay is all lit up, a vast arc more than eight kilometres across, it seems as small as a kindergarten paddling pool, the beach shimmers and in the troughs the sea is inky black—now and then a wave breaks with a slip of its oil-black, silent tongue. The arc lights raise a motionless song, upright as a flame, to the planets above, while out to sea the signalling of the lighthouses brings peace to this great expanse of mist and water. The night, calmer than morning, at rest beneath phalanxes of stars.

Christel is a princess. At every moment her presence, a gesture, a word, brushes aside any doubt. She’s can’t move without creating the mirage of a train of respectful obsequiousness in her wake. Even at midnight, alone with a man in the depths of this empty darkness, she’s more guarded than in a crowded room. Which removes any unpleasant ambiguity from my story at least.

Did I have any aim taking Christel off on that walk? Lodged in the corner of my being where forebodings and anxieties lurk, all I had was a profound sense that ‘it would be interesting’. The day had been heavy, too warm, the deadly drowsiness of a beach senseless with sun—the pinewood was like a cage full of perfume, a vase of smells so strong as to almost make you pass out—like when I was young, going outside on a brilliant June morning where the overly-grand scent suddenly rooted me to the spot, like the road to initiation, the pathway to mystery, the Corpus Christi procession passing our front door. I’d been working, intoxicated, on my study of Rimbaud: I thought I’d identified precisely which obscure maze of rumours, which conspiracy with the worst chorus of earthly fragrances, from which there’s no escape, was responsible for some of the poems in his Illuminations. This day of omens was very much the prelude I’d dreamt of to a conversation that I only remember as being vaguely steered through long silences, its sudden pauses so difficult to fill.

We must have meant to go as far as the golf course on the far side of the dunes. Vast, gently undulating like the beautiful fleece of a wild animal, almost completely hidden from the sea from which all you can hear is the great noise of the surf on the smooth, empty beach nearby, and whose plumes of spray can sometimes be glimpsed through the thistles amid tremendous thundering. At night it must have been a deserted, empty place. I’ve always liked walking in the moonlight in such exposed, open spaces.

Christel was wearing a white beach dress, bare feet in sandals. For the first time I noticed a small gold cross on a chain round her neck which she sometimes played with while talking. This little detail struck me, and I don’t know why but I could hardly take my eyes off it for the whole of the walk—as if it had a subtle meaning whose significance nonetheless escaped me.

We’d set out towards the end of the evening. The wind had dropped, the air was divinely cool. Heading north—the direction of our walk—you soon leave the houses behind. It’s almost rural there—low houses with vegetable gardens, farmyards, garden tools, sometimes a cock crowing in the daytime. Then immediately comes bare heath, a desolate landscape, almost dramatic, all the more naked for being traversed by a line of telegraph poles.

The conversation got off to a bad start. First the members of the ‘in’ crowd filed past without the slightest sign of benevolence from Christel. She talked to me about Jacques.

“Undoubtedly the most remarkable young man here. And yet he’s still a child. I feel at ease with him, like someone from school.”

I poked gentle fun at Jacques. Jacques is the hotel poet. His room is apparently full of esoteric books—and the corridors either reverberate with lavish offerings of jazz-hot or the most outrageous contemporary beats. But after talking to him a few times I came to the conclusion that he does it deliberately. To be frank the boy hasn’t read a thing.

“What does it matter? Jacques is only interested in difficult poetry. Of course for him it’s not a question of making sense of it, but I think he’s trying quite rightly to reach a certain depth. That’s all I try to do too …”

A pause, then: “I don’t know why it is I like certain things. Other than that’s the way they present themselves to me. And it’s always something you can take or leave.”

Christel is quick to turn a conversation into a monologue. I admire the easy way she seizes the dice. She belongs to that breed that can’t be interrupted. Besides, when she wants to she talks with real seductiveness.

We crossed the dunes, very stirring in the moonlight, their great undulations so dignified as on the day after a battle. Grey mist hovered on the distant horizon as on the far side of a clearing in a great forest massif.

“Who’d think of going for a walk in this part of the world on a night like this? What I’ve always loved most in the best-known landscapes is the place that’s sometimes the most difficult to find—how would you put it?—where you turn your back on the view? In Venice, in that maze of little alleyways that are so strangely muddled up with the canals, for me it was the lovely moment where the alley turned into a passageway, where you walk past doors in that suspect, slightly seedy intimacy of a hotel corridor—a cheap hotel with a jug of hot water, a slop pail—and at the end, through a dark, arched doorway, the whole of Venice is as one in a little square of black water, shimmering and twirling in the sunlight with a tireless lapping sound. It’s the same here, there’s nothing I like more than those long clipped lawns beyond the dunes where you turn away from the sea—so stately, so stilted, but with the great sound of the sea nearby, an endless backdrop. And in those little channels of black water where the tide comes in without a sound.”

“Were you in Venice for long?”

“Yes, Venice was my early childhood in a way. We used to go back there with my mother nearly every autumn. For as long as I can remember my father has always had the curious knack for coming and going. Always weighed down with business, directors’ meetings—a ridiculous life of sleeping cars, luxury hotels—a fashionable beach for a few days occasionally.”

“I’d like to hear about your childhood, Christel.” (I’m writing this as a kind of commentary, leaving out the parts where I wasn’t keeping the conversation going. What’s the point? I’ve always thought that most of the time dialogue is a virtually unguided monologue—in the grip of their demons one of the two always wields the sceptre, as they say in the best literary salons).

“I’ve got very few memories of my early childhood. But when I was twelve I do remember being in this big, depressing boarding school—long, starkly-lit corridors, chilly courtyards overshadowed by lime trees. It was a dismal time. I had very little idea how to make friends—and my week, every week (and I was a good pupil mind you) was spent waiting for Sunday morning, visiting time. After mass we’d play in the courtyard. The janitor appeared with a list of names, and it was the chosen few. I hardly ever went out, I lived in a state of permanent uncertainty. The minutes went by, the janitor’s appearances got fewer and fewer as the courtyard got emptier, taking on an atmosphere of impending execution. And that was that. I remember that courtyard in the rain, enclosed, disenchanting, cut off from the world. The most isolated, emptiest corner of a wood wasn’t as isolated, as empty as that feeling of abandonment. And so I’d walk under the dripping lime trees. I can still remember their glistening trunks even now, running with water, dark and hostile, soaking wet twigs lying on the ground, bark peeling off, unending torrents pouring from the branches. I was drunk on loneliness, on stifled tears. I used to watch the clouds go by in gusts of wind, sometimes a stronger gust would shake the branches, spray the sodden ground with great big raindrops. Outside were busy streets, the enchanted labyrinth of the town, cafés, theatres, the crowd, beautiful places where life takes shape, gets tangled up, leans on other lives, takes their shocks, their warmth—it was everywhere I wasn’t. And yet I knew how disillusioned I was each time I went out, as if a curse followed me through the streets, a mark of banality and disinterest. Yet there was always this obsession with a thousand possibilities, a free, charmed life protected by a magic spell inside those high, merciless walls whose harsh shutterless windows all glimmered.

“Then the teacher on duty took us back to the classroom, a crippled little flock, shorn, shivery sheep, the symbol of abandonment. And how despite herself her voice got lower, more familiar, from not needing to carry so far (there were so few of us left), for me it was like a forlorn caress. I used to mutter to myself: ‘Poor, poor Christel!’ At that moment I felt myself becoming totally devoted, good, helpful—for a few minutes the terrible injustice flung in the face of my childhood turned me into a sister of charity.

“I was thirteen when I was taken to the theatre for the first time. I’ll be brave enough to admit that my taste, among the (apparently) least excusable operas, leads me instinctively, boldly, to the worst, the ones that don’t compromise. They were doing Tosca (it makes you think doesn’t it—but I forbid you to laugh). As I came into the auditorium I walked straight into real life, the only one I want to have. I love everything about the theatre: the strong perfumes, the rush of red plush, the half-light of a shiny, pearly cavern, cut off, laminated like the inside of a seashell or a beehive. Wherever I find myself in a theatre, the maze of corridors, the sloping floors, the staircases all make me think I’ve come in through an underground passage, and that’s vital for the sense of security, of perfect isolation I get in there. That church scenery in a theatre that’s already a church, for me it crowned the profane music with a kind of religious aura: it touched every fibre of my being at once, it was Sacred Love and Profane Love (be good enough to believe I’m not joking) like in certain naive paintings—I’d have liked to burst into tears but I stayed rigid, dry eyes wide open, as if an electric current was passing through me constantly. I’m sure there’s part of the score (but to my shame I don’t know where) which seems as if it ought to belong to some innocent entertainment, like a village fête on a bright sunny day—yet at the same time I felt myself plunged into a Rome of heat and smells, of vast, pitiless high walls (I’ve since seen Piranesi’s Views and the Castel Sant’Angelo, but that night I imagined them) beneath a lethally stormy sky and luxurious passions—so I don’t know why that particular part, why that little island laughing in unawareness, balanced on the heights of a disaster suddenly seemed grimmer than the most tragic lines, so much so it made me shudder. The last act shattered me. It was life in death, life after death, a triumphant hymn to love even beyond the coup de grâce. I’m not ashamed to admit that when the conspirators are uncovered by the extravagant theatrical gesture at the abyss into which the heroine has just thrown herself, it was this stroke of genius in the worst possible taste that finally reduced me to tears. I was there at the heart of the tragedy, beyond life, totally carried away. It was a matinee performance in winter: when we got outside it was dark, my mind was buzzing, I kept bumping idiotically into walls like a drunk. The city and its lights reeled under an avalanche of blackness, in the suffocating cracks in its glimmering red avenues, to the triumphal flapping sound of a flag at half mast.”

I looked down my nose rather at Christel, although I was touched by such a passionate, contemptuous confession. There’s a warm, gentle mockery based on strictest complicity, one you don’t have to admit to—which just comes from the need to dispel any excessive sympathy.

For a while we sat in a hollow in the dunes. The sand was incredibly white, already cold like a snowfall in the glorious moonlight. The tide was going out, you could hardly hear the sea. The haziness of the landscape, lost between the open sea and the misty horizon of moors covered in pearly dust, was beyond compare. Christel was lost in dreams—borne away by some sad thought. She spoke in snatches, with long intervals of silence.

“Maybe I’m wrong to say this—giving voice to your thoughts is rather like making a vow—but I think I’m destined to wreck my life. I’m far too unconcerned about things that don’t matter. It’s as if I’m throwing nothingness back into nothingness in a sort of rage. ‘Lost time should be lost. What’s empty should never be turned to profit’. That’s my kind of nobility. What wouldn’t I give to be able to float, sleeping, above the boredom of life, all those moments when you can’t help thinking you could be somewhere else.”

I pointed out to Christel that her haughty disdain could just be laziness and a lack of courage. It’s only by keeping life at a high level of tension that by way of reward we reach those special moments, the chance of a miracle, those dramatic events that I could tell she’d been thinking about for the last few minutes.

“And what makes you think this ‘tension’ is so low in me,” she replied, mockingly, smiling at the unseemly turn the conversation was taking. But she’d already moved back behind cloud, taking on that nocturnal, hushed voice, so resonant and unruffled that I can’t describe it in words.

“I don’t really believe we make our own luck. It passes us by too wonderfully. I’m a Calvinist on that score (she smiled as she spoke, a strange fixed smile). I’ll tell you another story. It’s a moral tale, although its value lies in getting the details exactly right. One night I was coming back from Angers to Nantes on the fast train. About halfway there’s a part of the landscape I love, where the Loire narrows between some large wooded hills with chateaux at the top, a very royal valley. I was on my own in the corridor looking out at the dreary rain-streaked night. As so often I was ‘talking to my inner self’. I live alone and often do that. In conversation I can never think of an answer till it’s too late, so I come up with my best oratorical gambits that way, and sometimes I get oddly worked up. I imagined I had someone to talk to, and began preparing them for an effect of the light over the Loire which I’ve often noticed at this spot. ‘Oh what a shame, it’s such a shame the night’s so dark’. And precisely at that moment, precisely—in the space of two or three seconds it became as clear as day, an apocalyptic light, a disturbing magnesium light all the way to the horizon. I stood there white as a statue, not moving my arms or legs, as white as you’d be at the sound of the last trumpet. There’s something so terribly forceful about improbability that I think you can be sure I’m not making it up. The next day I saw in the paper that a meteor had passed over the Loire and apparently came down in the sea about a hundred kilometres away. For the rest of my life I’ll never forget that supernatural ‘that’s no problem’. I rank the meteor along with my sign of the zodiac.”

We came back along the dunes. Her long, elastic stride, so stately, so haughty, made me feel elated. Having no idea what time it was, certainly very late, I kept thinking I could see dawn breaking. Christel teased me gently for falling under the meteor’s spell. Her clear laugh burst out in the night, we trod down the long grass between the large bare patches of the dunes, white as salt. And it’s true I’d have liked to keep on walking till morning.

3rd July

THE DINING ROOM at the Hôtel des Vagues is unusual, with its wood panelling, the décor of a day in the life of a ship’s cabin, and at the same time with that grandeur a room acquires from having a large staircase incongruously in the middle. I like it particularly on these rainy summer days, in the light from frosted windows, where a huddled, bored intimacy finds its way through the skimpy beach clothes, the atmosphere of an evening in the country, a mountain refuge hut in a sudden snowstorm. Lunches drawn out by shivery cold are conducive to camaraderie.

Which is how I ended up smoking at Irène and Henri Maurevert’s table. Young marrieds. Him, tall, quite elegant, somewhat lethargic, somewhat vague. Although I have to say not without attractiveness. I’ve had some quite long conversations with him about Rimbaud (interesting to note how successfully this man of letters—I’ll explain my use of the expression if you like—has played the part of a man for all seasons in our time, a ‘forum for inquirers and the inquisitive’, that he’d have laughed at if someone had predicted it). Perhaps, beneath an over-attentiveness that in other ways is so kind, touching, he’s already rather bored with Irène. It’s the little things, those little things that are everything: the drumming of fingers on the tablecloth when the long-awaited coffee threatens to prolong the tête-à-tête too much—the occasionally over-indulgent glance out to sea from the picture windows—the first, as yet-discreet appearance on the table of keys, paperwork, private correspondence, business correspondence, newspaper cuttings by which a honeymoon couple heads into that state of duplicity with which, as forty approaches and caught unawares through a half-open door, a well-off middle class family wrestling with their private after-dinner outpourings is more or less fraught. Yet Irène is physical, lively, seems to tackle each new day with carnivorous good grace. It’s obvious she’ll always be unaware of any kind of altercation with life. With her, whatever the topic of conversation, after a few minutes Henri takes on the expression of a man pushed into a corner. I love catching fault lines between people at their source: nothing more irresistible than the desire to drive in a wedge and then, inevitably, with a few blows of the sledgehammer … Irène! A strong woman, and I dare suggest a sensuous one.

It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Christel. My mind still full of our encounter the night before, I probably did my utmost to steer it in that direction. Henri seemed to have little interest in the conversation, but as soon as we started talking about Christel I detected a glint in Irène’s eye. I’d swear she knew about our little jaunt the other night—she scoffed in veiled terms at the interest I take in that ‘young person’. She’d apparently known Christel well at boarding school, had stayed ‘on good terms’ with her, which I think is part and parcel of those polite friendships that whither and turn to disappointment once you pass eighteen, and which are the chosen territory for the worst female treachery. Perhaps driven by a liking for complicating the game, for introducing pointless motivations purely out of love of the art, something you see so often in women, she tried to pique my curiosity about Jacques. “Christel is very much to his taste, you know. They’re forever swimming, playing tennis together. Everyone thinks they’d make a lovely couple. All the same I don’t think Christel could make a man happy. She’s a woman who lives from one impulse to the next. Literally. A cerebral type. To my mind there’s nothing that withers a woman more quickly. Nothing that burns a woman out more quickly than contempt. And Christel is contemptuous; she’s a princess, distant, a Sphinx. But I wouldn’t want to put you off, my dear Gérard.”

Her friendly concern enchanted me. So was I mistaken? In this hostility I detected something more than the usual rivalry between women. Impossible to see Irène, this magnificent brunette, without immediately being aware that she’s above all the woman, with all the appetites, the needs, the blinkered vision of her sex. Not even the most banal, hackneyed gallantries could fail to spring automatically from the lips of someone faced with a woman who’s been more mercilessly depersonalized by her sex than anyone I’ve ever seen. I don’t wish to be improper—yet it’s perfectly obvious that that mouth, that backside, those breasts rebel against the thought of appealing to anything except the brief caress of a palm, lips, words of sexual arousal. And what makes most women proud, Irène experiences as humiliation. Tucked up so snugly in her prison of flesh, she’s got something against Christel for being able to play the angel, stir the imagination, dreams, more directly than the senses. It’s a sign of a far and away rarer jealousy, because prejudices scoff at it, which I think I found in that word “Sphinx” which she used with such scorn.

One day I’m going to write a moral tale to suit modern tastes: Beauty and the Beast. A story of female jealousies where they claw each other to death as in the time of the Bacchants. It’ll show the tribulations of a saintly soul struggling vainly to escape her prison of seductiveness—having a fit of humiliation because she senses she’s gradually going to become what she appears to be, and tearing her rival apart, who’s swathed in ingénue impoverishment, the somewhat scanty charms of the Platonic Ideal. Epigraph: ‘Dramatis personae’. You’ve got to laugh. But I’m being unkind to Iréne. Her perfume smelt exquisite—the kind I prefer on her: violent. If only we could accept ourselves as we are, make intelligent use of what nature has given us. There’s no other kind of genius.

As we got up from the table Gregory, with that falsely indifferent manner of his, that fugitive look worse than any pleading, came over and suggested to Henri and I that we have a game of miniature golf. I’ve noticed how much this biblical prophet, this haunter of ghosts, likes silent games. Pipe between his teeth, overjoyed and contemplative—a mass of composure and visible reserve—I can imagine him turning over a single thought indefinitely, one that punctuates this lethargic game without interrupting it. He must think the way you chew. Solitary, awkward, a pulse that you imagine being slower than other people’s. Yet through being engrossed in his musings, settling himself on his legs, sucking luxuriantly on his pipe, he ended up beating us by several lengths. With a slightly red-faced formality that found it difficult not to burst out into triumph he offered us both cigars. Dear Gregory! I think he’s delightful.

4th July

IGOT UP EARLY to watch the sun come up over the bay. For me the main attraction of this hotel, set back from the seafront whose dull roar is never out of earshot, is its beautiful garden, the lime trees, the cedars, the simple flower beds. Above the expanse of greenery a corner of pink roof was so wonderfully rural in the light of dawn that I wanted to applaud. The whole morning was glistening