The Devil in the Flesh (7 page)

In tears, she bit her lip: “What have I done to make you so unkind? Don’t spoil our first day of happiness, I beg of you.”

“You can’t love me very much if today is your first day of happiness.”

Blows like this injure the one who strikes them. I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying, yet still felt the need to say it. I found it impossible to explain to Marthe that my
love was growing. It had undoubtedly reached the age of ingratitude, and my vicious taunts were love maturing into passion. I was in pain. I implored her to forget my tirade.

THE OWNERS’ MAID SLIPPED SOME LETTERS UNDER the door. Marthe picked them up. There were two from Jacques. As if in reply to my doubts, she said: “Here, do what you like with them.” I felt ashamed. I asked her to read them, although to keep them to herself. With one of those instincts that drive us to the worst acts of bravado, Marthe tore up one of the envelopes. It must have been a long letter, because it didn’t tear easily. Her gesture gave me another opportunity to rebuke her. I deplored her bravado, the regrets that she would surely feel about it. Despite everything I made an effort and, not wishing her to tear up the second letter, I kept it, because judging from this performance it wasn’t out of the question that she might become unpleasant. At my request she read it. It might have been instinct that made her tear up the first letter, but not which made her say, after glancing through the second: “This is our reward from Heaven for not tearing up the letter. Jacques says that all leave has been cancelled in his sector, he won’t be coming for at least a month.”

Only love can forgive such lapses of taste.

This husband was beginning to get in my way, more so than if he had been there and we had had to be on our
guard. His letter suddenly assumed the proportions of a ghost. We had lunch late. At about five o’clock we went for a walk by the river. Marthe was astonished when I pulled out my basket from a clump of grass in full view of the sentry. She found the story about the basket very funny. I was no longer afraid of ridicule. We walked along, oblivious to the unseemly way we were dressed, clinging to each other. Our fingers intertwined. This first warm, sunny Sunday had brought the walkers out in their straw hats, like the rain does mushrooms. People who knew Marthe didn’t dare say hello to her, but she greeted them quite guilessly, unmindful of anything. They must have viewed it as preening. She questioned me about how I had escaped from the house. She laughed, but then her face clouded; squeezing my hand as tightly as she could, she thanked me for taking so many risks. We went back to her apartment to drop off the basket. In actual fact I had a role in mind for this basket, by shipping it off to our troops as a food parcel in order to give these adventures a fitting conclusion. But the idea was so appalling that I saved it for myself alone.

Marthe wanted to go along by the Marne as far as La Varenne. We had dinner opposite the Île d’Amour. I promised to take her to the Museum of the Écu de France, the first museum I’d ever visited when I was a little boy, and which had left me spellbound. I told her about it as if it were something interesting. Yet when we came to the conclusion that the museum was a hoax, I didn’t want to admit how much I had been taken in by it. Fulbert’s scissors! Everything! I had believed everything. I claimed I was just having a harmless little joke with her. Marthe didn’t understand, as making jokes wasn’t something I normally did. To be honest the disappointment left me depressed.
I thought: “As certain of Marthe’s love as I am at the moment, maybe I’ll find it’s just a sham like the Museum of the Écu de France!”

For I did often doubt her love. I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t a hobby for her, a passing fancy that she could give up overnight, when peacetime summoned her back to her responsibilities. And yet, I thought, there are times when lips, eyes, can’t lie. Undoubtedly. When they are drunk, even the least generous of men will get angry if you refuse to accept their watch, their wallet. In this respect they are behaving as candidly as when they are sober. The times at which we can’t lie are precisely those when we lie the most, especially to ourselves. To believe a woman ‘at a time when she can’t lie’ is like believing in the feigned generosity of a miser.

This clear-sightedness of mine was merely a more dangerous form of my naivety. I saw myself as not very naive, and yet I was, in another way, because no age can avoid naivety—old age perhaps least of all. This so-called perceptiveness cast a cloud over everything, caused me to doubt Marthe. Or rather I doubted myself, believing myself unworthy of her. Even if I had had endless proof of her love, I would have been no less miserable.

I was all too aware of the treasures we never discuss with those we love, for fear of seeming immature, to not suspect Marthe of this regrettable sense of modesty, and it pained me not to be able to get inside her mind.

I got home at half-past nine that night. My parents quizzed me about my walk. Enthusiastically I described the forest of Sénart, the ferns twice as tall as me. I talked about Brunoy, a delightful village where we had had lunch. Then my mother suddenly interrupted mockingly:

“By the way, René came round at four o’clock, he was most surprised to hear that he was on a long walk with you.”

I blushed in angry confusion. Like so many others, this experience taught me that, certain inclinations aside, I’m not made for telling lies. People always catch me out. My parents didn’t pursue it. They had had their little victory.

MY FATHER, I HAVE TO SAY, WAS AN UNWITTING accomplice to my first affair. In fact he rather encouraged it, delighted that my precocious talents should find an outlet somewhere. He had always been afraid I would fall in with a woman of ill repute. So he was pleased that I had won the love of a decent girl. He only got on his high horse when he found out that Marthe wanted a divorce.

My mother didn’t view our romance quite so favourably, however. She was jealous. She saw Marthe as a rival. She took a dislike to her, not understanding that it would have been the same with any woman I loved. Besides, she was more concerned than my father was about what people might say. She was surprised that Marthe could get mixed up with a boy of my age. But then she had been brought up in F …—in all those small suburban towns, as soon as you get away from the working-class suburbs, the same passions, the same cravings for tittle-tattle are as rife as out in the country. Not only that, being close to Paris makes the gossip, the speculation even more barefaced. Everyone should keep to their place. So as a result of having a mistress whose husband was a soldier, on instructions from their parents I watched my friends gradually melt away. They withdrew according to the social order: first the notary’s son and then the rest, all the way down to the
gardener’s boy. My mother was wounded by this process, which to me seemed like an accolade. In her view my life had been ruined by a madwoman. She probably blamed my father for having introduced me to her, and for then turning a blind eye. But since she considered that it was up to my father to do something about it, and my father said nothing, she kept quiet.

I SPENT EVERY NIGHT AT MARTHE’S HOUSE. I arrived at half-past ten and left at five or six the next morning. I didn’t jump over walls now. I just opened the door with my key; yet this openness required forward planning. So that the chime of the clock didn’t wake us, I wrapped the pendulum in cotton wool at night. When I left in the morning, I took it off again.

At home no one questioned my absences; it wasn’t the same at J.… For quite some time the owners and the elderly couple had viewed me in an unfavourable light, and hardly ever returned my greetings.

At five in the morning, so as to make as little noise as possible, I would carry my shoes on my way out. I put them on when I got downstairs. One morning I met the milkman on the stairs. He had a crate of milk in his hand; I had my shoes in mine. He said good morning with a horrible smile. It was Marthe’s downfall. He would tell the whole of J.… But what tormented me even more was that it made a laughing stock of me. I could have paid the milkman to keep quiet, but I didn’t, because I had no idea how to go about it.

That afternoon I didn’t dare tell Marthe. Besides, this one incident on its own wouldn’t have compromised her reputation. That had long been a given. Well before it
actually happened, rumours were already circulating that she was my mistress. We hadn’t been aware of anything. But all was about to be revealed. One day I arrived to find her utterly drained. The landlord had just told her that for the last four days he had been watching out for me as I left at dawn. He had refused to believe it at first, but was no longer in any doubt. The elderly couple whose room was below Marthe’s were complaining about the noise we made night and day. Marthe was shaken; she wanted to leave. It didn’t occur to us to behave more discreetly when we were together. It was something we didn’t feel capable of doing—anyway we had already been found out. It was then that Marthe began to understand a number of things that had surprised her. Her only real female friend, a young Swedish girl, wasn’t replying to her letters. I found out that the girl’s guardian had seen us embracing on the train, and had advised her not to have anything more to do with Marthe.

I made her promise that if a dramatic row or something similar were to blow up, whether with her parents or her husband, then she wouldn’t back down. The landlord’s threats, a few rumours, gave me every reason to both fear and hope that there would be a confrontation between Marthe and Jacques.

Marthe begged me to come and see her often while Jacques was home on leave, having already talked to him about me. I refused, afraid of not playing my part well enough, as well as of seeing another man fussing around her. His leave was for eleven days. He might cheat the system and find a way of staying an extra two. I made her promise to write to me every day. I waited for three days before going to the
poste restante
, to be certain of there
being a letter. There were already four. But I couldn’t take them—I didn’t have one of the required proofs of identity. I was all the more nervous, having forged my birth certificate, because you had to be eighteen to use the
poste restante
. In an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the young woman behind the counter, I insisted on having the letters that she was keeping back and wouldn’t give me. In the end, since they knew me at the post office, I persuaded them to at least send them on to my home address.

It was clear that I still had a long way to go before becoming a man. As I opened the first of Marthe’s letters, I wondered how she would accomplish this amazing feat—writing a love letter. But I was forgetting that there is no easier letter to write—all it takes is love. I thought Marthe’s were wonderful, comparable with the most beautiful ones I had read. And yet she talked about perfectly ordinary things, what agony it was to be so far away from me.

It surprised me not to be more consumed with jealousy. I began to see Jacques as ‘the husband’. I gradually forgot how young he was, I pictured him as an old greybeard.

I didn’t write back to Marthe; all things considered it was too risky. Deep down I was glad to be prevented from doing so, having, as always when faced with anything new, an ill-defined fear of not being capable, or that my letters might shock her or seem naive.

Such was my carelessness that after two days, having left one of Marthe’s letters lying around on my desk, it disappeared; it reappeared the next day. Finding it upset my plans—I had taken advantage of Jacques’s leave and my being at home for long periods to make my family believe
that I was growing away from Marthe. For if initially I had bragged, keen that my parents should know I had a mistress, I was now beginning to wish there was less for them to know. Which was the moment my father discovered the real reason for my good behaviour.

I made the most of my free time to start going to art school again; because for some time I had been basing my nudes on Marthe. I don’t know if my father guessed; he expressed mischievous surprise however, and in a way that made me blush, at the fact that all my models looked the same. So I went back to the Grande-Chaumière and worked hard to put together a collection of drawings for the rest of the year, a collection I would be able to add to when the husband was next home.

I also saw René again, who had been expelled from Henri IV. He was now at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. I met up with him there every evening after finishing at La Grande-Chaumière. We saw each other in secret, because since his expulsion from Henri IV, and especially since Marthe appeared, his parents, who until recently had regarded me as a good example, had forbidden him to mix with me.

René, who thought that love and being in love must be a liability, teased me about my passion for Marthe. Unable to withstand his jibes, like a coward I told him that I wasn’t really in love. His admiration for me, which had been waning of late, instantly grew.

I began to fall asleep at night thinking of Marthe’s love. What tortured me most was the sensual starvation. It was the anxiety of the pianist without a piano, the smoker without cigarettes.

And yet René, who made fun of my affairs of the heart,
was smitten with a woman who he thought he liked but wasn’t in love with. This elegant creature, a Spaniard with blond hair, moved like a circus acrobat. René, who feigned indifference, was incredibly jealous of her. Turning pale at the same time as laughing, he begged me to do him a peculiar favour. To anyone who knows schoolboys, it was the archetypal schoolboy idea. He wanted to know if the woman was cheating on him. So what I had to do was make advances to her in order to find out.

This put me in an awkward position. My shyness took hold again. But not for anything in the world would I have wanted to appear shy, and in any case the woman helped me out of my predicament. She was so quick to make overtures to me that shyness, which prevents some things and precipitates others, prevented me from being faithful to either René or Marthe. I was hoping to at least enjoy myself, but I was like the smoker with his one favourite brand. All I was left with were regrets for cheating on René, to whom I swore that his mistress had turned down every advance.