Climates (16 page)

I carried on dreaming of Odile almost every night. Most often I would see myself in a church or a theater, with the place next to me empty. All at once I would think, “Where’s Odile?” and start looking for her. I saw pale women with a mess of hair, but not one of them looked like her. Then I woke up.

I could not work. I had even stopped going to the factory. I did not want to see a single human being. I liked my heartbreak. Every morning I went down to the village alone. I could hear the sound of an organ coming from the church, so light and
fluid that it blended with the air and seemed to be its murmuring voice. I pictured Odile by my side in the light-colored dress she wore on the day we first walked together beside the black Florentine cypresses. Why had I lost her? I wanted to find the word, the action that had transformed that great love into this sad, sad story. I could not. There were roses she would have loved in every garden.

It was on a Saturday in August, during one of these walks at Chardeuil, that I heard a drumroll followed by the local policeman crying: “Mobilization of land and sea forces.”

Philippe, I have come
into your study to work this evening. As I came in I struggled to believe I would not find you here. You still seem so alive to me, Philippe. I can see you in that armchair, book in hand, your legs bent back beneath you. I can see you halfway through a meal, when your gaze had wandered and you had stopped listening to what I was saying. I can see you welcoming one of your friends, and your long fingers endlessly twiddling a pencil or an eraser. I loved your little gestures.

Three months already since that horrible night. You said, “Isabelle, I can’t breathe. I think I’m going
to die.” I can still hear that voice, it was already so different, no longer yours. Will I forget it? The worst thing for me is thinking that even my pain will most likely die. If you only knew how sad I felt when you said so earnestly, “Now I’ve lost Odile forever. I can’t even remember her features.”

You loved her very much, Philippe. I have just reread the long exposition you sent me around the time we were married, and I envied her. At least that is something that will be left of her. There will be nothing of me. And yet you loved me too. I have your first letters here in front of me, the ones from 1919. Yes, you loved me then, you loved me almost too much. I remember once saying, “You value me at three hundred when I’m worth forty, Philippe, and that’s awful. When you realize your mistake, you’ll think I’m worth ten, or nothing.” You were like that. You told me Odile used to say, “You expect too much of women. You put them on a pedestal; it’s dangerous.” She was right, poor little thing.

For the last two weeks I have been resisting an urge that is growing stronger by the day. For my own sake, I would like to make a record of my love as you did of yours. Philippe, do you think I will succeed—however ineptly—in writing our story? I
shall have to do it as you did, fairly, being very careful to say everything. I can tell it will be difficult. We are always tempted to sentimentalize ourselves and depict ourselves as we would like to be. Particularly me; it is one of the things you held against me. “Don’t be self-pitying,” you used to say. But I have your letters, I have this red notebook that you hid so carefully, and the little journal I started and you asked me to give up on. If I were to try … I am sitting at your desk. The image of your hand is all part of this ink-stained green leather. I am surrounded by terrifying silence. If I were to try …

The house on the rue Ampère
.
Potted palms in cachepots surrounded by green cloths. The gothic dining room, the sideboard with its protruding gargoyles in high relief, the chairs—they were so hard—with Quasimodo’s head sculpted on the chair back. The red damask living room and its armchairs with too much gilding. The bedroom I grew up in, painted in a white that was once virginal but had grown dirty. The schoolroom, a junk room where I took my meals with my teacher when there were grand dinners. Mademoiselle Chauvière and I often had to wait until ten o’clock. A grumpy, sweating, overstretched valet would bring us a tray
of viscous soup and melted ice cream. I felt as if, like me, he understood the unobtrusive, almost humiliating role that the only child played in that household.

Oh, my childhood was so sad! “Do you think so, darling!” Philippe would say. No, I am not wrong about this. I was very unhappy. Was it my parents’ fault? I have often held it against them. Now soothed by a stronger pain, when I look back at the past with fresh eyes, I can see they thought they were doing the right thing. But their methods were strict and dangerous, and I feel as if the results condemn them.

I say “my parents” but I should say “my mother” because my father was very busy and scarcely asked more of his daughter than to be invisible and silent. For a long time his distance gave him tremendous prestige in my eyes. I considered him a natural ally against my mother because, two or three times, I heard him reply with amused skepticism when she revealed a bad aspect of my character. “You remind me of my director, Monsieur Delcassé,” he said. “He puts himself behind Europe and says he’s helping it move forward … do you yourself believe we can mold a human being? … well, of course
we can’t, dear friend, we think we’re actors in this drama when we’re only ever spectators.” My mother flashed reproachful looks at him, pointing anxiously at me. She was not unkind, but she sacrificed my happiness and her own to her fear of imaginary dangers. “Your mother’s only affliction,” Philippe told me later, “is overdeveloped cautiousness.” That was exactly it. She saw every human life as a hard battle, and we needed to be toughened up for it. “A spoiled little girl makes an unhappy woman,” she would say. “You mustn’t get a child used to thinking she’s rich; God knows what life has in store for her.” And: “It doesn’t do a young woman any favors paying her compliments.” Which was why she repeatedly told me I was far from beautiful and would have a lot of trouble appealing to anyone. She could see this made me cry, but in her view childhood represented what earthly life was for those who feared hell: even if it meant harsh penitence, my soul and body had to be steered toward a worldly salvation at whose gates marriage would be the final judgment.

This upbringing might, in fact, have been very wise had I had her strong personality, her self-confidence, and great beauty. But being naturally shy, my fear made me withdrawn. By the age of
eleven, I avoided human company and sought refuge in reading. I was particularly passionate about history. At fifteen, my favorite heroines were Joan of Arc and Charlotte Corday; at eighteen, Louise de la Vallière. I felt peculiarly happy reading about a Carmelite’s suffering or Joan of Arc’s final moments. I felt I too could summon infinite physical courage. My father was very contemptuous of fear and had made me stay out in the garden at night when I was very young. He also asked that I not be shown pity or tenderness when I was ill. I learned to view visits to the dentist as stages toward a heroic sanctity.

When my father left the Foreign Office and was appointed French minister in Belgrade, my mother took to closing our house on the rue Ampère for several months every year and sending me to my grandparents in Lozère. There I was unhappier still. I did not like being in the country. I preferred monuments to landscapes, and churches to woodland. Reading through the journal I wrote as a girl is like flying over a desert of boredom in a very slow airplane. I felt I would go on being fifteen, sixteen, seventeen forever. My parents, who honestly believed they were bringing me up well, killed any taste for happiness in me. My first ball, something
most women remember as such a dazzling, lively event, stirs only feelings of painful and enduring humiliation. It was in 1913. My mother had had my dress made at home by her chambermaid. The dress was ugly, I knew that, but my mother was scornful of luxury. “Men don’t look at dresses,” she said. “People don’t like women for what they wear.” I had little success in society. I was very awkward and had a desperate need for affection. I was seen as stiff, clumsy, and pretentious. I was stiff because I spent my life restraining myself, clumsy because I had always been denied any freedom of movement or thought, and pretentious because I was too shy and too modest to talk graciously about myself or anything amusing, so I took refuge in serious subjects. My slightly pedantic seriousness at balls meant the young men kept their distance. Oh! How I longed for the man who would tear me away from this slavery, from those long months in Lozère when I saw no one, when I knew every morning that nothing would interrupt the day except for an hour’s walk with Mademoiselle Chauvière. I pictured him handsome and charming. Every time
Siegfried
was put on at the opera, I begged Mademoiselle Chauvière to secure permission for me to watch it because, in
my view, I was a captive Walkyrie who could only be delivered by a hero.

My secret exaltation, which took the form of religion at the time of my first communion, found another outlet during the war. I had a nursing diploma, so I asked to be sent to a hospital in the military zone as early as August 1914. My father was on a posting a long way from France at the time, and my mother was abroad with him. My grandparents, panicked by the declaration of war, allowed me to go. The ambulance I was assigned to in Belmont had been inaugurated by Baroness Choin. The nurse who ran the hospital was called Renée Marcenat. She was quite a pretty woman, very intelligent, and proud. She saw immediately that there was a contained but very real strength in me and, despite my youth, she made me her assistant.

There I discovered I could appeal to men. Renée Marcenat once told Madame Choin in front of me that, “Isabelle is my best nurse; she has only one fault—she’s too pretty.” This absolutely delighted me.

A second lieutenant in the infantry whom we had treated for a minor injury asked for permission to write to me when he left the hospital. The
dangers I knew he would be exposed to drove me to replying with more emotion than I would have liked. He became affectionate and, as one letter led to another, I found I was engaged. I could not believe it. It seemed unreal, but life is mad in times of war and everything happened very quickly. When they were consulted, my parents wrote to say that Jean de Cheverny was from a good family, and they approved of my plans. I myself knew nothing of Jean. He was playful and good-looking. We spent four days alone together in a hotel on the place de l’Étoile. Then my husband rejoined his regiment and I went back to the hospital. That was my entire married life. Jean was hoping to secure more leave during the winter but was killed at Verdun in February 1916. At the time I believed I loved him. When I was sent his papers and a small photograph of myself that was found on him after his death, I cried a great deal and in good faith.

When the armistice
was announced, my father had just been appointed minister in Peking. He invited me to accompany him, but I declined. I was now too accustomed to independence to tolerate family slavery again. My income allowed me to live on my own. My parents agreed to my turning the second floor of their house into a small apartment, and I linked my life closely with Renée Marcenat’s. After the war she had joined the Pasteur Institute, where she worked in the laboratory. She was extremely useful to them and had no trouble arranging for me to be taken on alongside her.

I had grown fond of Renée. I admired her. She acted with an authoritativeness that I envied, and yet I sensed she was vulnerable. She wanted to give the impression she had turned her back on marriage, but from the way she talked about one of her cousins, Philippe Marcenat, I thought I deduced that she wanted to marry him.

“He’s a very secretive person,” she said, “and he seems distant if you don’t know him well, but he’s actually almost frighteningly sensitive … The war did him good by getting him away from his usual life. He’s about as suited to running a paper factory as I am to being a great actress …”

“But why? Does he do anything else?”

“No, but he reads a great deal, he’s very cultured … He’s a remarkable man, I assure you … You’ll like him very much.”

I was convinced she loved him.

There were now several men of varying ages prowling around me. Behavior had become much freer after the war. I was alone, and, in that world of doctors and young scholars frequented by Renée, I had met some men I found interesting. But I had no trouble resisting them. I could not bring myself to believe them when they said they loved me. I was
obsessed by my mother’s “unfortunately, you’re ugly,” despite the refutations it had been given during my time as a nurse. I still had a deep lack of faith in myself. I thought men wanted to marry me for my fortune or saw me as a mistress for a few evenings—convenient but not demanding.

Renée told me that Baroness Choin would like to invite me to dinner. She often went there herself on Tuesdays.

“I’d be bored,” I said. “I so hate the social scene.”

“No, you’ll see, she almost always has interesting people. Besides, next Tuesday my cousin Philippe will be there and if you’re bored we can always find a quiet corner for the three of us.”