The Counterfeiters (31 page)

George had some important news to communicate to Philippe Adamanti, which he had judged it more prudent not to write.

That morning he had arrived at the
lycée
doors a quarter of an hour before the opening and had waited for him in vain. It was while he was waiting that he had heard Léon Ghéridanisol apostrophize the young woman so brilliantly, after which incident the two urchins had entered into conversation and had discovered to George’s great joy that they were going to be schoolfellows.

On coming out of the
lycée
, George and Phiphi had at last succeeded in meeting. They walked to the Pension Azaïs in company with the other boys, but a little apart, so as to be able to talk freely.

“You had better hide that thing,” George had begun, pointing to the yellow rosette which Phiphi was still sporting in his buttonhole.

“Why?” asked Philippe, noticing that George was no longer wearing his.

“You run the risk of getting collared. I wanted to tell you before school, my boy; why didn’t you turn up earlier? I was waiting outside the doors to warn you.”

“But I didn’t know,” Phiphi had answered.

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know,” George repeated, mimicking him. “You might have guessed that there would be things to tell you when I didn’t see you again at Houlgate.”

The perpetual aim and object of these two boys is to get the better of each other. His father’s situation and fortune give Philippe certain advantages, but George is greatly superior in audacity and cynicism. Phiphi has to make an effort to keep up with him. He isn’t a bad boy; but lacking in back bone.

“Well then, out with your things!” he had said.

Léon Ghéridanisol, who had come up, was listening to them. George was not ill pleased that he should
overhear him; if Ghéri had filled him with admiration just now, George had a little surprise in store for Ghéri; he therefore answered Phiphi quite calmly:

“That girl Praline has got run in.”

“Praline!” cried Phiphi, thunderstruck by George’s coolness. And Léon showed signs of being interested. Phiphi said to George:

“Can one tell him?”

“As you please,” said George, shrugging his shoulders. Then Phiphi, pointing to George:

“She’s his tart.” Then to George:

“How do you know?”

“I met Germaine and she told me.”

And he went on to tell Phiphi how, when he had come up to Paris a fortnight before, he had wanted to visit the apartment which the procureur Molinier had once called “the scene of the orgies,” and had found the doors closed; that a little later as he was strolling about the neighbourhood, he had met Germaine (Phiphi’s tart) and she had given him the news: the place had been raided by the police at the beginning of the holidays. What neither the women nor the boys knew, was that Profitendieu had taken good care to wait before taking this action until the younger delinquents should have left Paris, so that their parents might be spared the scandal of their being caught.

“Oh, Lord! …” repeated Phiphi without comments. “Oh Lord! …” It had been a narrow squeak, thought he, for George and him.

“Makes your marrow freeze, eh?” said George, with a grin. He considered it perfectly useless to confess—especially before Ghéridanisol, that he had himself been terrified.

From the dialogue here recorded, these children might be thought more depraved than they actually are. I feel convinced that it is chiefly to show off that they talk in this way. There is a good deal of bravado in
their case. No matter: Ghéridanisol is listening to them. He listens and leads them on. His cousin Strouvilhou will be greatly amused when he reports the conversation to him this evening.

That same evening Bernard went to see Edouard.

“Well? Did the first day go off all right?”

“Pretty well.” And then as he said no more:

“Master Bernard, if you are not in the humour to talk of your own accord, don’t expect me to pump you. There’s nothing I dislike so much. But allow me to remind you that you offered me your services and that I have a right to expect a few stories.… ”

“What do you want to know?” rejoined Bernard, with no very good grace. “That old Azaïs made a solemn speech and exhorted the boys ‘to press forward in a common endeavour and with the impetuous ardour of youth …’? I remember those words because they occurred three times. Armand declares the old boy regularly puts them into all his pi-jaws. He and I were sitting on the last bench at the back of the class-room, watching the boys come into school—like Noah, watching the animals come into the Ark. There were every kind and sort—ruminants, pachiderms, molluscs and other invertebrates. When they began to talk to each other after the speech, Armand and I calculated that four sentences out of ten began with: ‘I bet you won’t.… ’ ”

“And the other six?”

“ ‘As for me, I …’ ”

“Not badly observed, I’m afraid. What else?”

“Some of them seem to me to have a
fabricated
personality.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Edouard.

“I am thinking particularly of a boy who sat beside young Passavant. (Passavant himself just seems to me a good boy.) His neighbour, whom I watched for a long time, appears to have adopted the
‘Ne quid nimis’
of the ancients as his rule of life. Doesn’t that strike you as an absurd device at his age? His clothes are meagre; his neck-tie exiguous; even his bootlaces are only just long enough to tie. In the course of a few moments, energies, and to repeat, like a refrain: ‘Let’s have no useless efforts!’ ”

“A plague upon the economical!” said Edouard. “In art they turn into the prolix.”

“Why?”

“Because they can’t bear to lose anything. What else? You have said nothing about Armand.”

“He’s an odd chap. To tell you the truth, I don’t much care for him. I don’t like contortionists. He’s by no means stupid; but he uses his intelligence for mere destruction; for that matter, it’s against himself that he’s the most ferocious; everything that’s good in him, that’s generous, or noble, or tender, he’s ashamed of. He ought to go in for sport—take the air. Being shut up indoors all day is turning him sour. He seems to like my company. I don’t avoid him; but I can’t get accustomed to his cast of mind.”

“Don’t you think that his sarcasm and his irony are the veil of excessive sensitiveness—and perhaps of great suffering? Olivier thinks so.”

“It may be. I have sometimes wondered. I don’t know him well enough to say yet. The rest of my reflections are not ripe. I must think them over. I’ll tell you about them—but later. This evening, forgive me if I leave you. I’ve got my examination in two days; and besides, I may as well own up to it … I’m feeling sad.”

Olivier, who had returned to Paris the day before, arose that morning fresh and rested. The air was warm, the sky pure. When he went out, after his shave and his shower-bath, elegantly dressed, conscious of his strength, his youth, his beauty, Passavant was still sleeping.

Olivier hastened to the Sorbonne. This was the morning that Bernard had to go up for his examination. How did Olivier know that? But perhaps he didn’t know it. He was going to find out.

He quickened his step. He had not seen his friend since the night that Bernard came to take refuge in his room. What changes since then! Who knows whether he was not more anxious to show himself to his friend than to see him. A pity that Bernard cared so little about elegance. But it’s a taste that sometimes comes with affluence. Olivier knew that by experience, thanks to the Comte de Passavant.

Bernard was doing his written examination this morning. He wouldn’t be out before twelve. Olivier waited for him in the quadrangle. He recognized a few of his school-fellows, shook a few hands. He felt slightly embarrassed by his clothes. He felt still more so when Bernard, free at last, came up to him in the quadrangle and exclaimed, with outstretched hand:

“Oh, dear! how lovely he is!”

Olivier, who
had
thought he would never blush again, blushed. He could not but feel the irony of these words, notwithstanding the cordiality of their tone. As for Bernard, he was still wearing the same suit he had on the evening of his flight. He had not been expecting to see Olivier. With his arm in his, he drew him along, questioning as they went. He felt a sudden shock of joy at seeing him. If at first he smiled a little at the refinement of his dress, it was with no malice; his heart was good; he was without bitterness.

“You’ll lunch with me, won’t you? Yes; I have got to go back at one thirty for Latin. This morning it was French.”

“Pleased?”

“
I
am, yes; but I don’t know whether the examiners will be. We had to discuss these lines from La Fontaine:

How would you have done it?”

Olivier could not resist a desire to shine:

“I should have said that La Fontaine, in painting himself, had painted the portrait of the artist—of the man who consents to take merely the outside of things, their surface, their bloom. Then I should have contrasted with that the portrait of the scholar, the seeker, the man who goes deep into things, and I should have shown that while the scholar seeks, the artist finds; that the man who goes deep, gets stuck, the man who gets stuck, gets sunk—up to his eyes and over them; that the truth is the appearance of things, that their secret is their form and that what is deepest in man is his skin.”

This last phrase Olivier had stolen from Passavant, who himself had gathered it from the lips of Paul-Ambroise,
as he was discoursing one day in a lady’s drawing-room. Everything that was not printed was fish for Passavant’s net; what he called “ideas in the air”—that is to say—other people’s.

Something or other in Olivier’s tone showed Bernard that this phrase was not his own. Olivier’s voice did not seem at home in it. Bernard was on the point of asking: “Whose?” But besides not wishing to hurt his friend, he was afraid of hearing Passavant’s name, which up till now had not been pronounced. Bernard contented himself with giving his friend a searching look; and Olivier, for the second time, blushed.

Bernard’s surprise at hearing the sentimental Olivier give voice to ideas which were entirely different from those which he had once known him to have, immediately gave place to violent indignation; he was overwhelmed by something as sudden and surprising and irresistible as a cyclone. And it was not precisely against the ideas themselves that he was angry—though they struck him as absurd. And even perhaps, after all, they were not as absurd as all that. In his collection of contradictory opinions, he might have written them down on the page facing his own. Had they been genuinely Olivier’s ideas, he would not have been angry either with him or with them; but he felt there was someone hidden behind them; it was with Passavant that he was angry.

“It’s with ideas like those that France is being poisoned!” he cried in a muffled, vehement voice. He took a high stand. He wished to outsoar Passavant. And he was himself surprised at what he said—as if his words had preceded his thoughts; and yet it was these very thoughts he had developed that morning in his essay; but he felt shamefaced at expressing what he called “fine sentiments,” particularly when he was talking to Olivier. As soon as they were put into words, they seemed to him less sincere. So that Olivier had never
heard his friend speak of the interests of “France”; it was his turn to be surprised. He opened his eyes wide, without even thinking of smiling. Was it really Bernard? He repeated stupidly:

“France? …” Then, so as to disengage his responsibility—for Bernard was decidedly not joking:

“But, old boy, it isn’t I who think so, it’s La Fontaine.”

Bernard became almost aggressive:

“By Jove, I know well enough it isn’t you who think so. But, my dear fellow, it isn’t La Fontaine either. If he had only had that lightness, which, for that matter, he regretted and apologized for at the end of his life, he would never have been the artist we admire. That’s just what I said in my essay this morning, and I brought a great many quotations in support of my theory—for you know I’ve a fairly good memory. But I soon left La Fontaine, and taking as my text the justification these lines might afford to a certain class of superficial minds, I just let myself go in a tirade against the spirit of carelessness, of flippancy, of irony, of what is called ‘French wit,’ which some people think is the spirit of France, and which sometimes gives us such a deplorable reputation among foreigners. I said that we ought not to consider all this as even the smile of France, but as her grimace; that the real spirit of France was a spirit of investigation, of logic, of devotedness, of patient thoroughness; and if La Fontaine had not been animated by that spirit, he might have written his tales, but never his fables nor the admirable epistle (I showed that I knew it) from which the line we had to comment upon were taken. Yes, old boy, a violent attack—perhaps I shall get ploughed for it. But I don’t care two straws; I had to say it.”

Olivier had not particularly meant what he had said just before. He had yielded to his desire to be brilliant and to bring out, as it were carelessly, a sentence which
he thought would tremendously impress his friend. But now that Bernard took it in this way, there was nothing for him to do but to beat a retreat. But his great weakness lay in the fact that he was in much more need of Bernard’s affection than Bernard of his. Bernard’s speech had humiliated, mortified him. He was vexed with himself for having spoken too soon. It was too late now to go back on it—to agree with Bernard, as he certainly would have done if he had let him speak first. But how could he have foreseen that Bernard, whom he remembered so scathingly subversive, would set up as a defender of feelings and ideas which Passavant had taught him could not be considered without a smile? But he really had no desire to smile now; he was ashamed. And as he could neither retract nor contradict Bernard, whose genuine emotion he couldn’t help respecting, his one idea was to protect himself—to slip out of it.