The Devil in the Flesh (4 page)

By now we were in the Jardin du Luxembourg; nine o’clock struck on the Sénat building. I abandoned any idea of going to the
lycée
. By some miracle I had more money in my pocket than a schoolboy usually has in two whole years, having sold the rarest stamps from my collection at the Stamp Market behind the théâtre de Guignol on the Champs-Elysées the day before.

Since Marthe told me during our conversation that she was having lunch with her parents-in-law, I resolved to make her stay with me. Half-past nine struck. Marthe jumped, still not used to the idea that someone should give up what they were supposed to be doing on her account, even if what they were supposed to be doing was to be in class. But seeing that I didn’t budge from my iron chair, she wasn’t brave enough to point out that I ought to be sitting on a seat in Henri IV.

We sat there, not moving. It was what happiness is supposed to be like. A dog jumped out of the pond and shook itself. Marthe stood up, like someone shaking off their dreams after a nap, their face still overlaid with sleep. She
flexed her arms as if doing gymnastic exercises. I thought this didn’t bode well for our friendship.

“These seats are too hard,” she said, as if apologising for standing up.

She was wearing a printed silk dress, which was creased from sitting down. I couldn’t help picturing the patterns the cane slats would have made on her skin.

“All right, come to the shops with me then, since you’ve made up your mind not to go to school,” said Marthe, in her first reference to what I was neglecting for her sake.

I went with her to several lingerie shops, where I stopped her from ordering what she liked but I didn’t; such as avoiding pink, which irritated me although it was her favourite colour.

After these first victories of mine, I needed to stop her from going to lunch with her parents-in-law. Not believing that she would be able to lie just for the pleasure of staying with me, I tried to find something else that would make her also play truant. She had her heart set on going to an American bar. She had never dared ask her fiancé to take her to one; besides, he didn’t know any bars. This was what gave me my excuse. I thought that his refusal, which was a great disappointment to her, would make her want to come. But after half-an-hour, having exhausted every means of persuasion, and having actually given up trying, I went with her to her parents-in-law’s house, feeling like a condemned man who hopes to the last moment that salvation will come, even as he walks to the scaffold. I saw their street ahead, yet nothing happened. And then suddenly Marthe tapped on the glass partition, and asked the taxi driver to stop at a post-office.

“Wait a minute,” she said to me. “I’m going to ring my
mother-in-law and tell her I’m on the other side of town and can’t get there in time.”

After a little while, unable to bear my impatience, I spotted a flower-seller and went and picked out some red roses to make a bouquet. I was thinking less of the pleasure they would give Marthe as of how she would have to tell more lies that evening to explain to her parents where the roses came from. The plan we had made when we first met, to go to an art school; the lie she was telling on the telephone, which she would repeat to her parents that evening, and to which would be added the lie about the roses, to me were favours sweeter than any kiss. For, having often kissed young girls’ lips without much enjoyment, and forgetting that it was because I didn’t love them, I felt little desire for Marthe’s lips. But until today I had been a stranger to such complicity.

Marthe came out of the post office, radiant from her first lie. I gave the driver the address of a bar in the rue Daunou.

Like a girl at boarding school she went into raptures over the barman’s white coat, the elegant way he wielded the silver shakers, the strange or poetic names of the cocktails. Now and then she sniffed the red roses, and promised to paint a watercolour of them for me as a memento of this day. I asked her to show me a photograph of her fiancé. I thought he was good-looking. Already conscious of how much store she set by my opinions, I took hypocrisy so far as to tell her that he was very good-looking, although in a voice that lacked conviction, to make her think I was just being polite. Which to my mind would surely distress Marthe deeply, as well as making her grateful to me.

But in the afternoon she had to put her mind to the
reason for this excursion. Her fiancé, whose likes and dislikes she was familiar with, had left the task of choosing their furniture entirely to her. Yet her mother was determined to go with her. By promising not to do anything wildly extravagant, Marthe had finally been allowed to go on her own. That day she had to choose furniture for their bedroom. Although I had vowed to myself to not appear overly pleased or displeased by anything Marthe said, I had to try hard to just keep strolling along the boulevard, a pace that no longer matched the tempo of my heart.

To me, having to accompany Marthe on this errand seemed a stroke of bad luck. I would be forced to help her choose a bedroom for herself and someone else! But then I saw a way of choosing one for myself as well as for Marthe.

So soon did I forget her fiancé that after a quarter-of-an-hour I would have been amazed if someone had reminded me that another man would be sleeping beside her in this bedroom.

Her fiancé’s taste was for Louis XV.

Marthe’s poor taste was for something else; she had more of a penchant for the Japanese. So I had to battle against the pair of them. It was a question of who moved quickest. At the slightest remark from Marthe, guessing what had caught her eye, I had to point out something completely different, and which I didn’t always like, to make it seem as if I was giving in to her whims when I relinquished one piece of furniture in favour of the one she preferred.

“And to think he wanted a pink bedroom,” she mumbled. No longer daring to admit her own likes and dislikes,
she attributed them to her fiancé. I foresaw that in a few days’ time we would be mocking them together.

Nonetheless I couldn’t quite understand her being so weak-willed. “If she doesn’t love me,” I thought, “then why does she give way to me, renounce her own preferences, as well this young man’s, for mine?” I couldn’t think of a reason. The humblest thing would have been to tell myself that Marthe loved me. Yet I was convinced the opposite was true.

Marthe said: “At least leave him the pink fabric—leave him that!” The mere words made me feel as if I were loosening my grip. But “leave him the pink fabric” was tantamount to ceding everything. I pointed out to her how pink walls would ruin the simple furniture that “we had chosen”, and recoiling even further from such an outrage, I advised her to paint the walls of the bedroom with whitewash!

That was the
coup de grâce
. Marthe had been so harrassed all day that she accepted without a murmur. All she said was: “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

At the end of this exhausting day, I congratulated myself on my progress. One piece of furniture at a time, I had succeeded in transforming this love match, or rather this infatuation, into a marriage of convenience—and what a marriage! For convenience played no part in it, since each would find in the other only the advantages that a love match would offer.

As we parted that evening, instead of trying to avoid any more of my advice, she begged me to help choose the rest of her furniture over the next few days. I promised, on condition that she gave me her word that she wouldn’t tell her husband, because ultimately the only thing that would
make him accept this furniture, if he loved Marthe, was if he believed that everything was her idea, her wish, for this would then be what they both wished.

When I got home, from the look on my father’s face I thought he had already heard about my adventure. But obviously he knew nothing; how could he know?

“Ouf! Jacques will soon get used to the bedroom,” Marthe had said. As I got into bed I kept telling myself that if she reflected on her forthcoming marriage before she went to sleep that night, then she would view it quite differently from the way she had over the past few days. For my part, whatever the outcome of this idyll of theirs, I had already taken my revenge on Jacques: and I thought about their wedding night in that stark room, ‘my’ bedroom!

The next morning I lay in wait in the street for the postman, who would be bringing a notification of my absence. He gave it to me, I pocketed it and tossed the other letters into the letterbox at the gate. A simple procedure, although not one to employ every day.

To my way of thinking, cutting school meant that I was in love with Marthe. But I was mistaken. Marthe was simply my excuse for playing truant. What proved it was that, having sampled the delights of freedom with Marthe, I wanted to sample it alone, and then find some followers. Freedom soon became my drug.

It was almost the end of the academic year, and I was horrified to find that my idleness was going to go unpunished, when what I was hoping for was to be expelled, in short a drama that would bring this period to a close.

By living life constantly harbouring the same thoughts, by only seeing one thing, if you want it fervently, you end up not noticing the crime you are committing with your
desires. I certainly wasn’t trying to upset my father; yet what I wanted was the very thing that would upset him the most. The classroom had always been torture for me. The effect of Marthe and freedom had been to make it unbearable. I saw quite clearly that, if I was now less fond of René, it was only because he reminded me in some way of school. I was in pain, and the fear of finding myself back among my inane schoolmates the following year made me feel physically ill.

It was René’s misfortune that I succeeded in getting him to share my vice. So when he, who wasn’t as clever as me, told me that he had been expelled from Henri IV, I thought I must have been as well. I would have to tell my father, because he would appreciate finding out from me before the deputy-headmaster’s letter arrived, which was too serious a missive to be intercepted.

It was a Wednesday. The next day, which was a holiday, I waited until my father had left for Paris before telling my mother. The prospect of four days of domestic discord alarmed her more than the news itself. Then I went for a walk down by the Marne, where Marthe had said that she might join me. She wasn’t there. This was a stroke of luck. Had my love drawn the wrong sort of strength from our meeting, I might have been capable of battling with my father later on, but since the storm broke after a sad and empty day, I came home with eyes downcast, as was fitting. I arrived just after the time my father usually got back. So he would ‘know’. I walked round the garden, waiting for him to send for me. My sisters played quietly. They guessed something. One of my brothers, excited by the thought of a row, told me to go to the room where my father was having a rest.

Raised voices and threats would have given me the right to rebel. But it was worse. My father didn’t say a thing, and then, not at all angrily, in a quieter voice than usual he asked:

“Well, so what do you plan on doing now?”

The tears that couldn’t find their way out of my eyes buzzed around inside my head like a swarm of bees. Force of will was something I could have used my own against, albeit impotently. But faced with such gentleness my only thought was of giving in.

“Whatever you tell me.”

“No, no more lies. I’ve always let you do what you want; so carry on. No doubt you’ll be keen to make me regret it.”

When we are young, we are too prone, as women are, to imagine that tears make up for everything. But my father didn’t require tears. Confronted with this magnanimity, I felt ashamed, not only about the present but about what was to come. Because I sensed that whatever I said I would lie. “At least a lie will make him feel better,” I thought, expecting to be a source of yet more sorrows for him. “But no, it’s only myself I’m trying to lie to now.” What I wanted was work, nothing more tiring than going for a walk, and which, like a walk, would leave my mind free to concentrate on Marthe. I pretended I wanted to paint but had never dared tell him. Once again my father didn’t refuse, on condition I continued to study at home the things I ought to have been studying at school, except that I would be free to paint.

When the ties that bind us to someone aren’t yet strong enough, to lose sight of that person, all we need do is fail to meet them just once. By thinking about Marthe I thought of her less and less. My thoughts behaved the same way
our eyes do with the wallpaper in our bedroom. As a result of seeing it continually, they don’t see it at all.

And how amazing! I even acquired a taste for work. Despite what I’d feared, I hadn’t been lying.

Whenever something from the outside world made me think less idly of Marthe, I did so without love, with the sorrow you feel for something that might have been. “No!” I thought. “It would have been too beautiful. You can’t choose your bed and sleep on it at the same time.”

ONE THING DID SURPRISE MY FATHER. THE LETTER from the deputy-headmaster never came. This was what caused the first row that he had had with me, believing I’d hidden the letter, that I’d then pretended not to have any motive for telling him the news, and that in this way I’d persuaded him to be lenient. In fact the letter didn’t exist. I thought I had been expelled from school, but I was wrong. So at the beginning of the holidays my father was baffled when we got a letter from the headmaster.

He asked if I was ill, and if they should enrol me for the following year.

THE PLEASURE OF FINALLY GRATIFYING MY FATHER made up slightly for the romantic vacuum in which I found myself, for if I believed that I no longer loved Marthe, I regarded her at the very least as the only love worthy of me. In other words, I still loved her.

This was the frame of mind I was in when at the end of November, a month after receiving the formal announcement of her marriage, I got home to find an invitation from Marthe which began: “I don’t understand why I haven’t heard from you. Why don’t you come and see me? You’ve probably forgotten that it was you who chose my furniture?…”