The Devil in the Flesh (11 page)

Marthe was waiting for me to exonerate myself. She begged me to forgive her for being so critical. I did so, with bad grace. She wrote to her landlord and, not without irony, asked him to be kind enough to allow me to invite one of her friends to her apartment while she was away.

WHEN MARTHE CAME BACK TOWARDS THE END of August, she didn’t go to J …, but went to live at her parents’ house, which meant they could extend their summer holiday. These new surroundings, where Marthe had spent her whole life, acted on me like an aphrodisiac. My weary senses, my secret longing to have the bed to myself, all vanished. I didn’t spend a single night at home. I was in a blazing hurry, like someone who is going to die young and thus works twice as hard. I wanted to have the best from Marthe before motherhood ruined her.

Her childhood bedroom, which she had denied to Jacques, became our room. I enjoyed seeing the picture above the single bed of her at her first communion. I also made her look at another one of herself, as a baby, so that our child would be like her. Enchanted, I wandered round this house where she had been born and had blossomed. In a boxroom I found her cradle, which I wanted her to use, and made her get out her vests, her tiny little knickers, all Grangier family heirlooms.

I didn’t miss her apartment in J …, where the furnishings lacked the charm of even the most unsightly family furniture. It had nothing to teach me. Yet here, all this furniture, on which Marthe must have bumped her head when she was small, reminded me of her. Not only that,
but we were alone, without town councillors or landlords. We behaved no better than savages, we walked around the garden, a true desert island, virtually naked. We lay on the lawn, had tea under an arbour covered with clematis, honeysuckle and Virginia creeper. We fought over bruised plums that I picked up still warm with sun, each holding one end in our mouth. My father had never managed to get me to do any work in the garden at home like my brothers did, yet I took care of Marthe’s. I raked, I weeded. In the evening after a hot day, I felt the same exhilarating manly pride from quenching the thirst of the soil and the parched flowers as I did from satisfying the desires of a woman. I had always regarded happiness as foolish—I now realised just how powerful it was. Thanks to my care and attention the flowers bloomed, the chickens dozed in the shade when I’d thrown them some seed—just kindness?—just selfishness! Dead flowers and thin chickens would have brought sadness to our island of love. The water and seed I gave them was intended more for myself than for flowers and chickens.

With this renewed love, I either forgot or disregarded what I had recently learnt. I took the promiscuity that was incited by being at this family house for the end of promiscuity. So the last week of August and the month of September were my only time of real happiness. I didn’t cheat, I didn’t hurt myself or Marthe. I couldn’t see any more obstacles. At the age of sixteen I contemplated a way of life that people wish for in their maturity. We would live in the country; we would be for ever young.

Lying beside her on the lawn, stroking her face with a
blade of grass, slowly and deliberately I described to Marthe what our life would be. Since her return, Marthe had been looking for an apartment for us in Paris. When I announced that I wanted to live in the country, her eyes brimmed with tears: “I’d never have dared suggest it,” she said. “I thought you’d be bored all on your own with me, that you needed to be in a town.” “You don’t know me very well,” I replied. I would have liked to live near Mandres, where we had once gone for a walk, and where cultivators grow roses. It so happened that I had smelt these roses since then, when Marthe and I had been out for dinner in Paris and caught the last train back. In the station forecourt, labourers were unloading enormous crates which filled the air with perfume. When I was a child I had often heard about the mysterious train full of roses that went past while children were asleep.

But Marthe said: “Roses only flower for a short time. After that, aren’t you afraid you might think Mandres was ugly? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to find somewhere that isn’t as beautiful, but which has just as much charm?”

I had to admit she had a point. My longing to enjoy the roses for two months of the year made me forget that there were ten other months, and my choice of Mandres showed me yet again just how fleeting our love was.

Often, on the pretext that I was going for walk or invited out somewhere, I didn’t have dinner at F … and would stay with Marthe.

One afternoon I found her with a young man in airman’s uniform. It was her cousin. Marthe, who I never called by the familiar
‘tu’
, got up and kissed me on the neck. Her cousin smiled at my discomfiture. “There’s nothing to worry about with Paul, my love,” she said. “I’ve told
him everything.” I was embarrassed, and yet enchanted to think that Marthe had told her cousin all about her love for me. The young man, who was charming and shallow, and whose sole concern was making sure his uniform didn’t conform to regulations, seemed delighted at our affair. To him it was a great practical joke on Jacques, whom he despised for not being an airman or a barfly.

Paul reminded her about the childhood games that the garden here had witnessed. I was burning with questions, because what they were talking about showed me Marthe in a new light. Yet at the same time it saddened me. I was too close to my own childhood to have forgotten the games that are unknown to our parents; adults either can’t remember such games, or view them as an unavoidable evil. I was jealous of Marthe’s past.

When, laughing, we told Paul about the spiteful landlord and the Marin’s grand reception, in a moment of drollery he offered us his bachelor apartment in Paris.

I noticed that Marthe didn’t dare tell him that we were planning to live together. I had the feeling that although he encouraged our relationship as a form of amusement, if there were to be a scandal, he would just follow the crowd.

Marthe got up from the table and served dinner. The servants had gone to the country with Madame Grangier, because Marthe, discreet as ever, insisted that she preferred living
à la
Robinson Crusoe. Believing their daughter to be a romantic, and that you should no more argue with a romantic than you should with a lunatic, her parents left her to herself.

We lingered over dinner. Paul fetched the best vintages
from the cellar. We were in high spirits, something we would probably regret, for in a sense Paul was party to our adultery. He sneered at Jacques. By keeping quiet there was a danger that I might make him see how tactlessly he was behaving; so I thought it best to join in the game rather than humiliate this glib cousin of hers.

By the time we noticed how late it was, the last train to Paris had already gone. Marthe offered Paul a bed for the night. He accepted. I gave her such a look that she added: “And you’re staying too, my love, naturally.” It made me feel as if I was in my own house, married to Marthe, and that one of my wife’s cousins had come to stay, when, outside our bedroom door, Paul said goodnight to us and kissed his cousin on both cheeks in the most natural way possible.

WHEN THE END OF SEPTEMBER CAME, I SENSED that to leave this house was to leave happiness behind. Just a few months’ grace, then we would have to choose between living a lie or living with the truth, unable to relax wherever we were. Since the important thing was that Marthe’s parents didn’t abandon her before our child was born, I eventually dared ask if she had told Madame Grangier that she was pregnant. She said yes, and that she had also told Jacques. So I couldn’t help noting that she sometimes lied to me, because in May, after Jacques had been staying, she had promised that he hadn’t had any contact with her.

IT WAS GETTING DARK EARLIER AND EARLIER now; the evenings were too chilly to go for a walk. It was difficult for us to meet at J.… In order not to cause a scandal we had to behave like burglars, keep a lookout in the street to make sure the Marins and the landlord were not at home.

The melancholy of that October, its chilly nights, although not cold enough to light the fire, gave us good reason to go to bed at five o’clock. To my parents, being in bed during the daytime meant you were ill; while for me, bed at five o’clock was enchanting. I never dreamt that other people might be doing the same thing. I was alone with Marthe, in bed, motionless in the midst of a busy world. I hardly dared look at her when she was naked. So was I a monster? I was filled with remorse over man’s most honourable activity. I regarded myself as a barbarian for having impaired Marthe’s gracefulness. When we first became lovers, when I bit her, hadn’t she said: “Mark me”? And hadn’t I marked in the worst possible way?

Marthe was no longer simply the woman I loved most, which isn’t the same as saying that she was the most beloved of mistresses: she was everything to me. I didn’t spare a thought for my friends; in fact I feared them, realising that they think they are doing us a kindness by turning us
away from our path. Luckily they regard mistresses as insufferable, beneath one’s dignity. This is our one and only safeguard. When it ceases to be so, there is a chance that our mistresses might become theirs.

MY FATHER BEGAN TO GET FRIGHTENED. BUT since he had always stood up for me against his sister and my mother, he didn’t want to appear to be backing down, and it was by not saying anything to them that he went over to their side. When he was alone with me, he told me he would stop at nothing to split me up from Marthe. He would inform her parents, her husband … But the next day he let me do just as I pleased.

I knew his weaknesses. I took advantage of them. I answered him back. I berated him in the same way as my mother and my aunt, criticising him for leaving it too late to exercise his authority. Wasn’t he the one who had introduced me to Marthe? It was then his turn to reproach himself. An atmosphere of tragedy filled the house. What an example to set to my brothers! My father could already foresee the day when there would be nothing he could say to them when they used my lack of discipline to defend their own.

Until now he had thought it was just a dalliance, but my mother intercepted my mail again. Triumphantly she handed him the evidence for the prosecution. In it Marthe talked about our future, our child!

My mother still saw me as too much of a baby to think it feasible that I was the one she had to thank for this
grandson or granddaughter. She didn’t believe it possible to be a grandmother at her age. Deep down, it was this that convinced her that the child wasn’t mine.

Respectability and strong emotions aren’t mutually exclusive. With her deep-seated sense of respectability, my mother couldn’t accept that a woman might cheat on her husband. For her this constituted such immorality that it couldn’t possibly be anything to do with love. To my mother’s way of thinking, the fact that I was Marthe’s lover meant that there were others. My father knew how fallacious such logic could be, but he used it to sow the seeds of doubt in my mind and disparage Marthe. He led me to believe that I was the only one who didn’t ‘know’. My answer was that she was only being maligned in this way because it was me she loved. Not wishing me to profit by these rumours, my father assured me that it had happened before we became lovers, even before she was married.

Having maintained an outward show of dignity among the family, my father lost all self-control and, when I didn’t come home for several days, he despatched the chambermaid to Marthe’s house with a note addressed to me, demanding that I come back immediately; if not he would report me to the police for running away, and would take Madame L to court for corrupting a minor.

Marthe kept up appearances, pretended to be surprised and told the maid that she would give me the letter the next time she saw me. I went home later, cursing my age. It was preventing me from having a life of my own. My father didn’t say a word, nor did my mother. I scoured the
Code Civil
, but couldn’t find any laws relating to minors.
With extraordinary unworldliness I didn’t think that my behaviour could land me in the reformatory. Eventually, having gone through the Code from cover to cover to no avail, I tried the
Grand Larousse
, where I read the entry on ‘minor’ a dozen times without finding anything that affected us.

The next day my father again left me to my own devices.

For those who are interested in the motives behind his peculiar behaviour, I can sum them up in three points: first he allowed me to do as I liked. Then he was ashamed about it. He made threats, angrier with himself than he was with me. After that, the shame of having flown into a rage made him give me free rein again.

When she got back from the country, Madame Grangier’s suspicions had been aroused by her neighbours’ insidious questions. Pretending that they thought I was Jacques’s brother, they told her about us living together. Added to the fact that Marthe couldn’t help constantly mentioning me for no apparent reason, or talking about something I had said or done, it wasn’t long before her mother guessed who ‘Jacques’s brother’ really was.

Yet she still forgave her, convinced that the child, which she thought was Jacques’s, would put an end to our liaison. She didn’t tell Monsieur Grangier, for fear of a scene. But she put her discretion down to her own natural generosity, of which she was keen for Marthe to be aware so she would then be grateful to her. And in order to show her daughter that she knew everything, she harrassed her continually, used such tactless innuendos that when Monsieur Grangier got his wife on her own, he begged
her to go gently with their poor innocent girl, because all this surmising would eventually make her do something foolish. To which Madame Grangier just gave a little smile, to make him think that her daughter had told her everything.

This attitude of hers, like the one she had displayed before while Jacques was on leave the first time, made me think that even if Madame Grangier had totally disapproved of her daughter’s behaviour, she would still have sided with her against her husband and son-in-law, purely for the satisfaction of proving them wrong. Because at heart Madame Grangier admired Marthe for cheating on her husband, something she had never dared do, whether out of principles or lack of opportunity. Her daughter was avenging her, or so she thought, for being misunderstood. Absurdly idealistic, she confined herself to resenting her for loving a boy of my age, who was less capable than anyone of understanding ‘feminine sensitivities’.