“Take me!” I ask it,
“What are you giving me?
Another self? There is no other myself.
Are you giving me a young, ardent, jealous sweetheart who’s sincerely in love with me?
I know: that means a master, and I don’t want any more masters . . . He’s kind, he’s frank, he admires me, he’s straightforward?
Well, in that case, he’s below me, and it would be a misalliance . . . He awakens me with one glance, and I cease to belong to myself if he puts his lips to mine?
In that case, he’s my enemy, the thief who steals me from myself! . . .
I’ll have everything, all that money can buy, and I’ll lean over a white terrace overflowing with the roses from my gardens?
But it’s from there that I’ll see the true lords of creation passing by: the wanderers! . . . ‘Come back,’ my sweetheart implores me, ‘abandon your profession and the sad shabbiness of the milieu you’re living in; come back to your equals’ . . . I have no equals, I only have fellow wayfarers . . .”
Windmills are turning on the horizon.
In the little stations that the train passes through, the Breton headdresses, the first white headdresses, are flowering like daisies . . . Here I am, entering dazzled into the yellow realm of broom and furze!
Gold, copper, vermilion, too—because pale rape plants are mingled in—set these poor heaths aflame with unbearable light.
I lean my cheek and my open hands on the windowpane of the railroad car, surprised not to find it warm.
We’re riding through a fire, miles and miles of blossoming furze, a desolate treasure that even the goats reject, in which the butterflies, burdened by the warm scent of half-ripe peaches and pepper, flit by on torn wings . . .
*** It’s in Caen, two days before our return home, that I find this letter from Max, one line, without a signature:
“My Renee, don’t you love me any more?”
That’s all.
I hadn’t foreseen that gentleness and that very simple question, which thwarts all my literary efforts.
What did I write to him last time? . . .
It hardly matters.
If he loves me, it’s not in my letters that he’s read the warning.
If he loves me, he’ll be familiar with those mysterious impacts, with that light, maleficent finger which hits you in the heart, those tiny thunderclaps which suddenly freeze a gesture or cut your laughter short—he’ll be aware that betrayal, desertion, and lies strike at a distance; he’ll know the brutality and infallibility of presentiment!
My poor, poor friend, whom I tried to love!
You might have died or cheated on me, and I’d never have known—I, whom the best-concealed infidelity used to wound by telepathy in the past . . .
“My Renee, don’t you love me any more?” . . .
I didn’t burst into passionate tears, but I jotted on a sheet of paper the condensed phrases of a vaguely reassuring telegram:
“Day after tomorrow, five o’clock, will be home.
All my love.”
In some subtle way I envy that suffering man.
I reread his lament, and I speak to that letter as if to him in person, my mouth hard and my eyebrows malicious:
“You love, you suffer, and you complain!
You’re just like me when I was twenty.
I’m deserting you and, thanks to me, you may possibly acquire what you now lack.
You’re already seeing through walls: doesn’t that surprise you, you big, dense male?
A refined nervous system, an innocent and ardent suffering, a hope that grew green again, tenaciously, like a mown meadow, all of that was my lot in life, and now it will be yours.
I can’t take it back from you, but I owe you a grudge for it . . .”
A handful of letters accompany Max’s.
Blandine herself writes:
“Madame, Monsieur Maxime has brought back Fossette, she has yet another new collar.
Monsieur Maxime is asking after Madame, he doesn’t look very happy, you can see he’s been waiting for Madame . . .”
A letter from Hamond, who speaks simply but writes with almost ceremonious courtesy; a letter from Margot, who has nothing to tell me but fills two leaves with nunlike chitchat: everyone is rushing to write to me, just when I’m coming back, as if their conscience were reproaching them a little for having neglected me for some time . . .
Whom will I confide in when I’m back?
Hamond?
Margot?
Neither one.
I tear up their insubstantial nonsense before leaving the stifling tomb called the “star dressing room” at the Folies-Caennaises, in order to go onstage.
We’re in an old-style cafe chantant: we have to walk through some of the audience to enter the stage; that’s the worst part of the evening.
They jostle us, they intentionally block our path to take a longer look at us; my bare arm leaves some powder on a man’s jacket, someone’s hand slyly tugs at my embroidered shawl, furtive fingers grope my hips . . . Our heads high, we endure the contempt and the lust of this overheated crowd, as if we were proud prisoners . . .
AVERY distant church bell rings half-past the hour.
The Calais train, which is to take me back to Paris, won’t stop here for another fifty minutes . . .