Haunted furniture, amid which I often woke up with the mad fear that my freedom had only been a dream . . . An odd wedding present for a new lover!
A shelter, not a home, is all that I leave behind me: the second- or first-class rolling stock, the hotels of every category, the filthy dressing rooms in vaudeville theaters in Paris, the provinces, and foreign parts, have been more familiar to me, more protective, than what my friend calls “a lovely intimate nook”!
How many times have I run away from this ground-floor apartment, running away from myself?
Leaving today, loved and in love, I wish I were even more loved, even more loving, and changed, and unrecognizable even to myself.
No doubt, it’s too soon, and the right time hasn’t come yet . . . But at least I’m leaving with emotion, overflowing with regrets and hopes, in a hurry to return, reaching out for my new destiny with the shining energy of a snake ridding itself of its dead skin . . .
Part Three
“GOODBYE, MY beloved friend. The trunk is locked.
My pretty pigskin bag, my traveling suit, and the long veil that will drape my hat are waiting for me to wake up tomorrow; they’re lined up, sad and obedient, on our big couch.
Already gone, sheltered from you and from my own weakness, I give myself the pleasure of writing you my first love letter . . .
“You’ll receive this express letter tomorrow morning, at the very time I leave Paris.
It’s nothing but a ‘see you soon,’ written before going to bed, to let you know that I love you so much and care for you so much!
I’m heartbroken at leaving you . . .
“Don’t forget you promised to write me ‘all the time’ and to console Fossette.
In turn I promise to bring back to you a Renee who’s tired of touring, thin with loneliness, and free of everything, except you.
Your “RENEE.”
The shadow of a bridge passes rapidly across my eyelids, which had been closed and which I reopen to see racing by, to the left of the train, that little potato plot I know so well, huddled against the high wall of the old fortifications at the city limits . . .
I’m alone in the car.
Brague, extremely thrifty, is traveling second class with the Old Caveman.
Rainy daylight, weak as a gray dawn, hangs low over the countryside, in which the smoke from factory chimneys trails through the sky.
It’s eight, and the first morning of my journey.
After a brief spell of dejection that followed the bustle of setting out, I had lapsed into a sullen immobility that made me hope for sleep.
I sit up straight in order to proceed mechanically with an old campaigner’s preparation: I unfold my camel’s hair rug, I inflate the two silk-covered rubber cushions—one for my lower back, one for the nape of my neck—and I conceal my bare head beneath a veil as bronze as my hair . . . I do this methodically, carefully, while a sudden indescribable anger makes my hands tremble . . . Yes, a real rage, and directed at myself!
I’m leaving, every revolution of the wheels is taking me farther away from Paris; I’m leaving, a chilly springtime is forming frozen drops at the trips of the oak twigs, everything is cold and damp in a fog that still smells of winter; I’m leaving, when I could now be beaming pleasurably at the warm side of a lover!
I feel as if my anger is arousing in me a devouring appetite for all that’s good, luxurious, easy, selfish, a need to let myself roll down the easiest slope, to embrace with arms and lips a belated, tangible, ordinary, and delicious happiness . . .
Everything about this familiar suburb bores me, with its pale villas in which the housewives, in their camisoles, are yawning after getting up late to shorten their empty days . . . I shouldn’t have separated from Brague, I should have stayed with him on the dirty-blue upholstery of the second-class compartment, amid the cordial conversation, the human smell of the packed car, and the smoke of cheap cigarettes . . .
The rat-tat-tat of the train, which I hear unwillingly, acts as an accompaniment to the dance theme from The Dryad, which I hum with obsessive persistence . . .
How long will this feeling of inferiority last?
Because I do feel myself diminished and enfeebled, as if I had been bled.
And yet, even on my saddest days, the sight of a run-of-the-mill landscape—just so long as it sped by rapidly to the right and left of me, just so long as it was veiled at moments by a curl of smoke that became shredded on the hawthorn hedges—used to work on me like a healing tonic.
I’m cold.
An unpleasant morning slumber is numbing me, and I feel as if I were fainting, not falling asleep, troubled by childish arithmetical dreams, in which this tiresome question recurs:
“If you’ve left half of yourself back there, have you lost fifty percent of your original value?”
*** “Dijon, April 3
“Yes, yes, my health is good.
Yes, I found your letter; yes, I’m having success . . . Oh, darling, here’s the whole truth!
When I left you, I sank into the most absurd, the most impatient despair.
Why did I leave?
Why did I abandon you?
Forty days!
I’ll never be able to stand it now!
And I’m only at the third city!
At the third city,
In gold, in silver . . . Her lover dresses her.
“Ah, my lover, I have no need of silver or gold, but only you.
It rained in the first two towns I played, so that I could more fully savor my abominable solitude, in hotel rooms with chocolate-and-beige wallpaper, in those imitation-oak dining rooms which the gaslight only makes darker!
“You don’t know what discomfort is, you spoiled son of Madame Keep-Chopping!
When we’re back together, to make you angry and to make myself be loved more dearly, I’ll tell you about my midnight walks back to the hotel with my makeup case weighing down my weary arms, my waiting by the door in the thin mist while the night clerk slowly wakes up, the horrible room with sheets not completely dry and a tiny pot of hot water which has had time to get cold again . . . And you want me to share these daily joys with you?
No, darling, let me wear out all of my resistance before I cry out to you:
‘Come, I can’t take any more!’
“Anyway, the weather here in Dijon is good, and I’m timidly greeting this sunshine like a gift that will soon be taken back from me.