Climates (10 page)

Returning to Paris reawakened my phantom fears. Odile’s accounts of her long days of solitude were so empty that they invited the most painful hypotheses to fill their vast, deserted expanses.

“What have you been doing all this time?”

“Nothing really. I got some rest, I daydreamed, I read.”

“What did you read?”

“I told you in my letter:
War and Peace
.”

“Come on, you can’t have spent two weeks reading one novel!”

“No, I did things: I tidied my clothes, I sorted out my books, I replied to old letters, I visited some couturiers.”

“But who have you seen?”

“No one. I told you in my letter: your mother, my mother, my brothers, Misa … And I’ve listened to a lot of music.”

She became more animated and told me about the Spanish music by Albéniz and Granados that she had just discovered.

“And another thing, Dickie, I must take you to
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
 … It’s so intelligent.”

“Is it based on the ballad by Goethe?” I asked.

“Yes,” Odile replied brightly.

I looked at her. How did she know the ballad? I knew Odile had never read anything by Goethe. Who did she go to the concert with? She could read the anxiety in my face.

“It said so in the program,” she said.

The Tuesday after
I returned from Sweden, we dined with Aunt Cora. She invited us once every two weeks and was the only member of my family for whom Odile felt any liking. Aunt Cora, who saw Odile as a gracious ornament for her table and was good to her, criticized me, saying I had grown silent since my marriage. “You’re gloomy,” she said, “and you spend too much time fussing about your wife; couples only work at a dinner once they’ve reached the indifferent stage. Odile is delightful, but you’ll only be ready in a couple of years, maybe three. At least this time you’ve just come back from Sweden, I hope you’re going to be dazzling.”

In fact, success at this dinner was not granted to me at all but to a young man I knew well because he was friend of André Halff’s. It was at Halff’s house that I had previously met him, and Halff spoke of him with a unique combination of admiration, fear, and irony. Admiral Garnier, the naval chief of staff, had introduced this man to the avenue Marceau gatherings. His name was François de Crozant, he was a naval lieutenant and had just returned from the Far East. That evening he described Japanese landscapes and talked of Conrad and Gaugin in powerful, vibrant, poetic language that I could not help but admire, although I did not much like him. Listening to him, I gradually remembered things André had told me about him. He had had several postings in the East and had a small house near Toulon full of things brought back from his travels. I knew he composed music and had written an unusual opera on a subject from Chinese history. I also knew, though only obscurely, that he was admired in sporting circles for breaking several automobile speed records and had been one of the first naval officers to go up in a seaplane.

A man in love is an extremely sensitive reagent for the feelings of the woman he loves. I could not
see Odile, who was seated at the other end of the table, on the same side as me, but I knew the expression on her face at that moment and with what unnecessarily acute interest she would be listening to François’s tales. I remember that dinner very well. My feelings were those of a father who loves his only daughter above all else, who realizes that, as a result of unfortunate but inevitable circumstances, he has taken her somewhere contaminated by a terrible epidemic and hopes ardently and desperately that he can save her before she is infected. If I could ensure that Odile did not end up in the same group as François after dinner, if no one told her the details that I had already heard about his life (details so likely to attract her attention), perhaps I could take her home at midnight still quite unsullied by the most terrifying of germs.

It so happens that I was lucky in this, and not thanks to some adept maneuver on my part but because straight after dinner François was scooped up by Hélène de Thianges, who took him off to the Chinese salon that Aunt Cora always kept for couples eager to be left alone. Meanwhile I myself had a peculiar conversation, about François himself, no less, with a pretty woman called Yvonne Prévost,
whose husband was also a naval man, a captain who worked alongside the admiral at the ministry.

“Do you find Crozant interesting?” she asked. “I knew him well in Toulon. I lived there for many years before I was married because my father was naval commander there. I remember men found Crozant artificial, some even said disloyal, but women chased after him … I was too young myself, but I heard what people said.”

“Well, yes, I am interested.”

“Oh! I don’t remember very clearly. I think he was a tremendous flirt. He would behave as if he cared passionately for a woman, would court her ardently, showering her with letters and flowers, then all of a sudden he would abandon her and start showing an interest in another while the first had no way of knowing what had caused this change … He subjected himself to an extraordinarily disciplined routine. In order to stay in shape he went to bed at ten o’clock every evening, and they used to say that, when the appointed hour came, he would have shown the prettiest woman in the world the door … In matters of love he was hard and cruel, behaving as if the whole thing was a meaningless game to himself and to everyone else.
You can imagine how much pain he caused with a personality like that.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. But why would anyone love him?”

“Oh, well, that, you know … All right, I had a friend who loved him, and she told me, ‘It was appalling but I couldn’t cure myself of him for a long time. He was so complicated, endearing, and demanding, brutal and terse one minute, but sometimes gentle and beseeching too … It took me several months to realize he could only bring me unhappiness.’ ”

“And did your friend manage to escape?”

“Yes, very successfully. She can laugh when she talks about him now.”

“And do you think he’s trying to cast his spell on Hélène de Thianges at the moment?”

“Oh, for sure! But this time he has more than met his match. Besides, a woman like her, who is young and has some social standing, would do well to save herself. François ruins the lives of women he comes across, because he can’t help talking about his lovers to all and sundry. In Toulon, every time he made a new conquest, the whole town would know about it the following day.”

“But this François of yours is a loathsome character.”

“Oh, no!” she said. “He’s very charming … That’s just the way he is.”

We are almost always the craftsman of our own unhappiness. I was wise when I promised myself I would not talk of François to Odile. Why then was it impossible for me not to mention this conversation when we were in the car taking us home? I think it was because arousing Odile’s interest, seeing her listen intently to what I was saying was a pleasure whose appeal I had difficulty resisting, perhaps also because I was under the illusion—absurd though it may seem—that this harsh criticism of François would distance Odile from him forever.

“And you say he’s a composer?” Odile asked when I stopped talking.

I had unwisely called up the demon. It was no longer in my power to drive him away. I had to spend the rest of the evening relating everything I knew about him and his unusual way of life.

“He must be a strange man to know. Shall we invite him to dinner sometime?” Odile asked with apparent indifference.

“Gladly, if we see him again, but he has to go back to Toulon. Did you like him?”

“No. I really don’t like the way he looks at women, as if he can see through them.”

Two weeks later we met him again at Aunt Cora’s house. I asked him whether he had left the navy.

“No,” he said in his abrupt, almost insolent way. “I’m doing a six-month posting with the Hydrographical Service.”

This time he had a long conversation with Odile; I can still picture them sitting on the same upholstered sofa, leaning toward each other and talking animatedly.

On the way home, Odile was very quiet.

“Well then,” I said, “what do you think of my sailor?”

“He’s interesting,” said Odile, and she said nothing more all the way home.

On several consecutive Tuesdays
,
François and Odile took refuge together in Aunt Cora’s Chinese salon as soon as dinner was over. Naturally, this was very painful for me, but I was keen to do my best not to show it. I could not help talking about François with the other women; I hoped to hear them say they found him boring, so that I could then pass this on to Odile. But almost all of them admired him. Even the sensible Hélène de Thianges, who was so wise that Odile called her Minerva, told me, “He’s very attractive, I can assure you.”

“But how? I try in vain to be interested in what he’s saying; it strikes me it’s always the same old
things. He talks about Indochina, nations conquering other nations, Gaugin’s ‘intense’ life … I thought it quite remarkable the first time I heard it. Then I realized it was a star turn; watching it once is enough.”

“Yes, perhaps. You’re partly right. But he tells such incredible stories! Women are like big children, Marcenat. They still have a sense of wonder. And, anyway, the scope of their real lives is so limited that they’re always longing to escape it. If you only knew how boring it is looking after a household, meals, guests, and children every day! Married men and bachelors in Paris are all part of the same social and domestic machinery, and they have nothing new, nothing fresh to offer us, whereas a naval man like Crozant is like a breath of fresh air, and that’s why we find him attractive.”

“But really, don’t you think Crozant’s whole stance smacks of unbearable false romanticism? You mentioned his stories … I can’t stand all those adventures … that he’s clearly invented.”

“Which ones?”

“Oh, you know perfectly well: the one about the Englishwoman in Honolulu who threw herself in the water after he’d left; the one about the Russian
woman who sends him her photograph framed by a coil of hair. I think it’s all such bad taste …”

“I hadn’t heard those stories … who told them to you? Odile?”

“No, no, everyone did, why would you think it was Odile? … Tell me honestly, don’t you think that’s unpleasant, shocking, even?”

“If you like, yes … All the same, he has unforgettable eyes. And not everything you’re saying is accurate. You’re seeing him through the prism of myth. You should talk to him in person, you’ll see he’s very straightforward.”

We often saw Admiral Garnier at avenue Marceau. One evening I maneuvered so that I was alone with him and asked him about Crozant.

“Ah!” he said. “A true sailor … One of our great leaders of the future.”

I resolved to stifle the feelings of disgust that François de Crozant aroused in me, to see more of him and to try to judge him impartially. It was very difficult. When I had met him with Halff, he had been rather disdainful toward me, and I had had the same uncomfortable impression the first time we met again. For a few days now he seemed to have been making an effort to overcome the boredom
that my surly, hostile silence inspired in him. But I thought, perhaps correctly, that he was now interested in me because of Odile, and this did nothing to endear him to me. Far from it.

I invited him to dine with us. I wanted to find him interesting, but did not succeed. He was intelligent but, deep down, fairly shy, and he overcame his shyness by affecting a brusque assertiveness that I found exasperating. I thought him far less remarkable than my former friends, André and Bertrand, and could not understand why Odile, who had swept them aside so contemptuously, showed such sustained interest in what François de Crozant had to say. The moment he was there, she was quite transformed and even prettier than usual. One time François and I had a conversation about love in front of her. I had said, I think, that the only thing that makes love a truly beautiful sentiment is faithfulness, in spite of everything and until death. Odile gave François a quick glance that I thought peculiar.

“I really don’t understand the importance of faithfulness,” he said with the staccato diction that always gave his ideas an abstract, metallic feel. “You have to live in the present. What matters is getting all the intensity out of every moment. There
are only three ways of achieving this: with power, with danger, or with desire. But why would you use faithfulness to keep up a pretence of desire when it has evaporated?”

“Because true intensity is to be found only in something lasting and testing. Don’t you remember the passage in
Confessions
where Rousseau says that barely touching the gown of a chaste woman affords more acute pleasure than possessing a woman of easy virtue?”

“Rousseau was not a well man,” said François.

“I loathe Rousseau,” said Odile.

Feeling them united against me, I set about defending Rousseau, about whom I was actually indifferent, with clumsy vehemence, and the three of us realized that we would now never be able to have a conversation together without it becoming confidential and dangerous beneath its veneer of transparency.

Several times when François was talking about his work I became so fascinated that I forgot my hostile feelings for a few minutes. After dinner one evening, as he walked across the salon with his rolling seaman’s stride, he asked, “Do you know how I spent my evening yesterday, Marcenat? With
Admiral Mahan’s book, studying Nelson’s battles,” and, in spite of myself, I felt the little thrill of pleasure that seeing André Halff or Bertrand used to give me.

“Really?” I replied. “But were you doing it for your own pleasure or do you think it could be useful for you? Naval procedures must have changed so much. All those stories of boarding enemy ships, favorable winds, and the position to adopt to give a broadside, is that of any value still?”

“Don’t go believing that,” said François. “The qualities that result in victory, on land and at sea, are the same today as they were in Hannibal’s day, or Caesar’s. Take the Battle of the Nile, why were the English successful? … First, Nelson’s tenacity when, having searched all over the Mediterranean for the French fleet and failing to find them, he didn’t abandon his hunt; then the promptness of his decision when he finally found his enemy at anchor and the wind in his favor. Well, do you think those fundamental qualities—tenacity and audacity—are no longer valid because the Dreadnought has replaced the Victory? Not at all, and besides the basic principles of any strategy are immutable. Here, look …”