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I had bitterly reproached Jo March and Maggie Tulliver with having betrayed their childhood loves: by loving Jacques I felt I was living out my destiny.
So once more I should know the misery of joyless awakenings; in the evenings, there would be the refuse bin to empty; there would be more weariness and boredom. In the stillness of the chestnut groves, the delirious fanaticism which had helped me to get through the past year had finally exhausted itself; it would all be the same as before, only without that kind of madness which had helped me to bear it.
I opened the envelope. At the top of the letter he had written: ‘Is it any business of yours?’
The secret of happiness and the very height of artistic achievement is to be like everybody else, yet to be like no one on earth.’ He closed with this: ‘Will you look upon me as your friend?’
‘I shall never love anyone else, but love is impossible between us two,’ I decided.
‘A painful, painful evening in which his mask concealed with too hermetic a fixity his real face. . . . I wish I could vomit up my heart,’ I wrote next morning in my diary.
Perhaps all admiration was self-deception; perhaps in the depths of every human heart one found only the same unreliable pretence; perhaps the one link possible between two souls was compassion.
At times Jacques was everything to me; at others absolutely nothing at all. I was surprised to feel almost a kind of hatred for him sometimes. I asked myself: ‘Why is it only in moments of regret, expectation, and pity that I feel my greatest surges of tenderness?’
I noted in my diary: ‘I need him – which doesn’t mean I need to see him.’
He joked and chattered away: his presence completely masked his absence, disguised his real self too completely: I didn’t know where I was in this masquerade. I wept half the night.
the first thing I noted was what I called my ‘serious side’. ‘An implacable, austere seriousness, for which I can find no reasonable explanation, but that I submit to as if it were a burden I have to bear.’
He kept complaining that he didn’t believe in anything; I kept racking my brains to provide him with objects he could believe in; it seemed to me a sacred task to work hard for one’s own development and enrichment; this was the sense in which I took Gide’s precept: ‘Make yourself indispensable’;
He had the gifts. He still replied: ‘What’s the use?’ He countered all my suggestions with those three little words. ‘Jacques still persists in wanting to build on absolute foundations; he should study Kant; he won’t get anywhere like this,’ I naïvely noted in my diary one day.
On the day when he mentioned marriage, I made a long inventory of the things that separated us: ‘He is content to enjoy beautiful things; he accepts luxury and easy living; he likes being happy. But I want my life to be an all-consuming passion. I need to act, to give freely of myself, to bring plans to fruition: I need an object in life, I want to overcome difficulties and succeed in writing a book.
I understood that he looked upon marriage as a solution and not as a point of departure.
I was reading Mauriac’s Good-bye to Adolescence; I was learning long languid passages of it by heart and I would recite them to myself in the streets.
he resembled that king of Thule whom he liked to take as an example and who didn’t hesitate to throw his most beautiful golden goblet into the ocean for the sake of a sigh.
cloche
cloche /klōSH/ I. noun 1. a small translucent cover for protecting or forcing outdoor plants. 2. (also cloche hat) — a woman's close-fitting, bell-shaped hat. – origin late 19th cent.: from French, literally ‘bell’ (see cloak).
we were completely ignorant as to the purpose of cafés: ‘But what are all those people there for? Haven’t they got homes?’ Zaza asked me once as we were passing the Café de la Régence.
We borrowed the same books from Adrienne Monnier’s library; we read with passionate interest the correspondence between Alain Fournier and Jacques Rivière; she far and away preferred Fournier; I was fascinated by Rivière’s methodical rapacity.
it seemed to me that I had been taken in by ‘a conjuring trick whose secret, though childishly simple, cannot be guessed’.
I began by groping my way blindly through the systems of Descartes and Spinoza. These sometimes bore me up to lofty heights, out into the infinite: I would see the earth like an ant-hill at my feet, and even literature became a futile jabbering of voices; sometimes they seemed no more than clumsy scaffoldings constructed on air without any relationship to reality. I studied Kant, and he convinced me that no one could ever put me wise to things. His Critique seemed to me to be so very much to the point and I took so much pleasure in getting the hang of it that for the moment I couldn’t find it
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She would recommend books; she lent me La Tentation d’Occident by a young unknown called André Malraux.
Temptation of the west
On one evening a week for two hours I would talk about Balzac or Victor Hugo to young working girls; I would lend them books and we would have discussions; they were fairly numerous, and regular attenders; but they mainly came in order to meet one another and to keep in with the centre, which provided them with more material benefits.
dancing and flirtation attracted them much more than study circles.
I saw nothing wrong in making them read Les Misérables or Le Père Goriot; but Garric was much mistaken if he imagined that I was providing them with Culture; and it was distasteful to me to follow instructions which called upon me to talk to them about human dignity or the value of suffering: I would have felt I was having them on.
Monsieur Franchot, a brilliant talker, well up in literature and the author of two novels which he had had published at his own expense, asked me one evening in a sarcastic tone of voice what beauties I could possibly find in Max Jacob’s Cornet à dés. ‘Ah! ‘I snapped, ‘it cannot be penetrated at a casual reading.’
Another bone of contention was the books I read. My mother could not resign herself to the inevitable; she turned pale as she glanced through Jean-Richard Block’s La Nuit Kurde.
I had had my fill of books: I had read too many that were everlastingly repeating the same old thing; they didn’t bring me any fresh hope. I preferred killing time in the picture galleries in the rue de la Seine or the rue de la Boétie: painting took me out of myself.
Sometimes I would lose myself in the glowing embers of the setting sun; I would look at pale yellow chrysanthemums blazing against a pale green lawn; at the moment when the street lamps came on and changed the leafy trees of the Carrousel into a stage set at the Opéra, I would listen to the fountains playing.
‘But I want to be driven by a force so exacting that it doesn’t leave me time to bother about anything! ‘I didn’t find any such force, and in my impatience I universalized my particular case: ‘Nothing has any need of me, nothing has need of anybody, because nothing has any need to exist.’
But the worst of living in a prison without bars is that you aren’t even aware of the screens that shut out the horizon;
In Russia, perhaps, things were going on: but it was very far away.
At the Sorbonne, my professors systematically ignored Hegel and Marx; in a big book on the progress of conscience in the western world, Brunschvig had devoted a bare three pages to Marx, whom he placed on the same level as one of the obscurest reactionary thinkers.
The incomprehensible uproar going on in the world might be of interest to specialists; it was not worthy of the philosopher’s attention, for, when he had got to the point where he knew that he knew nothing and that there was nothing worth knowing, he knew everything.
The most honest attitude to take, after all, was to do away with oneself; I had to admit this, and I admired those who committed suicide for metaphysical reasons; yet I had no intention of resorting to suicide myself: I was far too afraid of death. When I was alone in the house, I would sometimes have to fight against my fear as I had done at the age of fifteen; trembling, with clammy hands, and feeling utterly distraught, I would cry: ‘I don’t want to die! ‘
As I was not engaged on any sort of work, time became decomposed into instants that cancelled each other out indefinitely; I could not resign myself to this ‘multiple and fragmentary death’.
I wandered around Paris, mile after mile after mile, staring at unknown vistas through eyes swimming in tears.
‘Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one’s nose.’
Laforgue: ‘O, well-belovèd, it’s too late now, my heart is breaking, A break too deep for bitterness, and I have wept so long . . .’
I was afraid that my affection for him would trap me into becoming his wife, and I savagely rejected the sort of life that awaited the future Madame Laiguillon.
I had been thinking all day of the heart-to-heart talk we would have in his shaded room.
Philosophy had neither opened up the heavens to me nor anchored me to earth; all the same, in January, when I had mastered the first difficulties, I began to take a serious interest in it. I read Bergson, Plato, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Hamelin, and, with passionate enthusiasm, Nietzsche.
I rejected Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas, Maritain, and also all empirical and materialist doctrines.
she announced that she had ‘broken it off ‘with her fiancé. The physical attraction between them was too strong, and the young man was scared by the intensity of their kisses. He had asked Suzanne not to see him any more, in order to preserve their chastity;
One day I walked a little way with him along the boulevard Saint-Michel: that evening, I asked my sister if I had acted improperly; she reassured me that I hadn’t and I did it again.
Pierre Nodier brought me two numbers: it was my first contact with left-wing intellectuals. But I didn’t feel at all out of my depth: I could recognize the idiom to which the literature of the period had accustomed me; these young men, too, were talking about soul, salvation, joy, eternity; they declared that all thought should be ‘concrete’ and ‘carnal’, but they said so in abstract terms.
Politzer believed that ‘in the interests of truth, historical materialism is not inseparable from revolution’: he believed in the value of the idealist Idea, on condition that it was apprehended in its concrete totality, with no intermediary stage of abstraction.
They condemned capitalism because it had destroyed ‘the sense of being’ in man; they considered that through the uprisings of the peoples of Asia and Africa ‘History is coming to be the servant of Wisdom’.
Politzer defined it in a phrase which caused a sensation: ‘The triumphant, brutal life of the sailor who stubs out his cigarette on the Gobelins tapestries in the Kremlin terrifies you, and you don’t want to hear about it: and yet that is life!’ They weren’t far removed from the surrealists, many of whom were in fact being converted to the Revolution.
