When I Was Old (22 page)

The journalists thought I was moved while actually I was upset, upset above all at having to say thanks. At the Brussels Exhibition, for which I had reluctantly accepted the presidency of the Film Festival, I was given another decoration, Commander, I believe – I know nothing about it – of the Order of Leopold. And this time I blushed, furiously, because I had been given this distinction … at the distribution of the Festival prizes, as if in payment for having accepted this boring job!

I don't belong to any society. I have never been secretary, treasurer, honorary president of anything whatsoever.

I confess that I would like to send my resignation to that academy of which I am only a nominal member, to send back the two decorations which I have worn just
once and, at the same time, send back to France the Legion of Honour which I was given when I was in New York. (It was said that I had solicited it. It has been said of others. I know this is not so.)

This is how things happened. My friend Georges Charensol, of the
Nouvelles Littéraires
, wrote me that he and his friends had proposed me for the Legion of Honour; all he wanted me to do was to sign a form. On the face of it, it was an application. But I would have rejected Charensol and my friends at the
Nouvelles Littéraires
by not signing.

In short, I would like to be rid of these medals which were given me by people whom I don't respect, who represent a world that has always been foreign to me.

I am tempted to send a telegram to
La Wallonie
which is at the head of the rebel movement of the Belgian people to tell them that I am with them.

But these are theatrical gestures that go against my grain. Where is freedom? And isn't silence sometimes the more difficult option?

I begin to understand a terrible saying of Léon Blum's in the French Chamber in 1936: ‘Bourgeois, I hate you!'

I know, I have met, I still meet here, in Paris, in Cannes, in Venice, in Nice, in the luxury hotels, and in night clubs the people Léon Blum was speaking of and whom I knew only slightly at that period, because of whom there is fighting in the Congo, in Algeria, in Cuba, and, in some measure, all over the world, the people who are waiting for the end of the Belgian crisis in the hope that the government will be ‘tough' …

I even had one to dinner last week.

And I believe that I hate them too.

Or at least that I would hate them if I really thought them capable of the Machiavellianism of which they boast and if, in my heart of hearts, because of the close view I get of them, I did not know that they are pitiable.

But that they should draw me into their inner sanctums or cover me with their hardware …

I've given the medals I've received to my children to play with and make fun of. I swear, no matter what the circumstances, never to accept another ribbon, another medal, another title.

Yesterday, 30 December 1960, when everywhere in the world cavalry is motorized, and even hearses; when horses are no longer kept for the big White House parades (too expensive), etc., etc., in 1960, yes, yesterday, I saw mounted police charge a crowd
with drawn swords
.

I saw them on television. It happened in Brussels. It was sudden, anachronistic, a Detaille painting in motion.

No doubt Algerian paratroopers' machine guns are more murderous, and even the so-called practice grenades.

I would be surprised if those horsemen and those waving swords did not stay in the minds of tens of thousands of people who watched the spectacle on their screens like a sort of nightmare.

It is true that during the last war and after, torture was used in a perfectly official way, as in the Middle Ages.

However, the papers were amazed – and indignant – that some people, white or black, were dismissed during the recent and continuing troubles in the Congo.

I'm not speaking of us this morning, of D. and me. Chut! … Who knows? … I'm walking on tiptoe …

Good, excellent New Year's Eve. All the staff out, including the nurse, Pierre and Marie-Jo in bed. Johnny with us at the television until eleven thirty. D. and I to bed at two thirty. Good awakening. Good morning. Johnny, Pierre, and I going to Morges, then Lausanne, while Marie-Jo paints a canvas for a present for her brother.

Everyone out again. Nana comes in and stays in the house with Pierre while D., the two children and I go to lunch at the Lausanne-Palace. Almost perfect mood, perfect, finally, after a threat of storm.

It's a little like the time between two seasons. Such comparisons are overused, but one rediscovers them in experiencing them. Between our states of well-being – physical and mental – and the states of the sky, there are analogies, above all in the between-times, when the weather is neither good nor bad, when it is neither winter nor spring, neither summer or autumn.

Everything can change in a moment in one direction or the other. One feels worried, sometimes oppressed.
Perhaps, after all, the same laws govern these transformations. We make artificial ones for each kind, for man, for the different races, the different categories, the animals, the vegetables, the planets, when there is probably a certain unity that we miss.

That's encouraging. If there is not yet secure, stable good weather on the barometer this time, still, for as long as it lasts, it promises that this will come soon.

I'm beginning to relax, to think of my next novel. A Maigret? A non-Maigret? I would prefer the latter but perhaps I'd be playing safe to put off a real novel until March.

The children have been delightful, all three, and Marc telephoned us before going to spend New Year's Eve with a friend in Versailles.

D. was adorable. Should I say that my only fear is that she became a little too much so, too quickly? With each of my little illnesses, flus, etc., the doctors got me up a day or two too soon and I've had to go back to bed.

I don't want that to happen to her. When one has reached, as in her case, the depths of fatigue and inner discouragement – the kind when one blames oneself without wanting to admit it – convalescence is slower than for a serious illness.

I hope that hers will be rather pleasant, almost voluptuous.

Now I am sure of a recovery. And it is because it is no longer a question of more than days, of hours, that I note the stages. This is not literary, psychological, or medical abstraction. It's a need, because our whole life is at stake.
And I hope that she will only read these last pages when she is in top form – to smile at them.

Leave again for a drive with Pierre and Nana.

Lausanne empty as in a nightmare or a Chirico canvas of the Montparnasse period. Neither weekday nor Sunday. An impression of tension, of waiting. But tomorrow, at five minutes to eight the Place Saint-François will have its usual look, with its great banks devouring their hurrying employees.

Calm too, but without emptiness, at home, where D. has again made a step forward, and has almost regained her self-confidence. Just a little longer and she will be back to her real life.

A wish to invite K. (former chief of Geneva police, then called to the Congo by the UN to reorganize their police) to lunch and, afterwards, to chat peacefully by the fire. A little like passing an hour or two with Maigret.

K. and I speak the same language, or almost, and we understand each other in half sentences. It's rare that the desire comes to me to invite someone. Perhaps because he understands the workings of certain games, the need to assure myself that my own intuition hasn't deceived me?

I hope that he has read
L'Ours en Peluche
. Have forgotten to send him a copy. It is true that I never send them.
Would also like the advice of Dr D. of ‘Rives de Prangins',
*
*
with whom I also feel on an equal footing, although most of his professional knowledge and experiences are beyond me.

In a few minutes the children and their two little friends are going to give a concert for the parents of those friends and for us. I look forward to it with more pleasure than to a real show. Johnny's face, leaning over his drums, fascinates me, seems suddenly adult, and Marie-Jo becomes a different person, which makes me think I don't really know her, that there is an inner life in her which eludes me.

Yesterday Pierre finally began to say ‘Daddy' after having resisted it for so long. And, at the same time, as if it came to him overnight, he calls everyone by name.

Soon, if I have the time, I want to talk about D.'s and the children's future when I am no longer here. The question is raised, in too brief a form, in my will. I have a few little thoughts on the subject. It is true that it will no longer be my problem.

It's raining. The children are making music in the playroom. D. is in her boudoir. The secretaries are back in the office. Life has resumed its normal course after the holidays.

My last paragraph yesterday made me go back to the past. When Marc was born, in 1939, I was living in Nieul-sur-Mer, five or six kilometres from La Rochelle, one kilometre across the fields from La Richardière, where I had lived from 1932 to 1935, if I'm not mistaken.

As always, the truth is more complex. I had been living nearly six months of the year, sometimes more, in Porquerolles, in a small house oddly flanked by a minaret, and it was in that minaret overlooking the port that I had arranged my study. I had a fishing boat, with a pointed bow, which I had had built in Cagnes-sur-Mer, as many nets as a fisherman, and a sailor who spoke pirate's slang (of Neapolitan origin) named Tado.

In 1935, returning from a trip around the world (or 1936?), I rented and furnished, according to the taste of the decorators of the period, a conventional modern apartment in Neuilly at 3 Boulevard Richard-Wallace opposite the park of Bagatelle.

I had also rented the Château de la Cour-Dieu, in the forest of Orléans, near Ingrannes. Actually, it was the priory of a ruined Cistercian abbey. I had taken my horses, sulky, buggy, etc., there.

I had bought a clearing, a few kilometres away in the middle of the forest, with a dilapidated farm in it, with the idea of building the house of my dreams there, a huge one-storey house with a large interior court, stables, kennels, etc. I had even rented a hunting preserve and I was organizing beats twice a week.

Having wounded a young deer at the first beat and
being forced to finish it off, I gave up shooting. But I was obliged, by contract, to hold two beats every week.

What else was I doing at the same time? Today I am flabbergasted by that dispersion which left me nothing but confused memories. Ah yes, I was dressing in English style, was buying my hats in London, wearing a bowler in the afternoon, going to Le Fouquet's and, in winter, in Paris, I did not miss any chance to dress in tails and high hat. I was a member of the Yacht Motor Club of France, the Escholiers, the Sporting Club …

I don't recognize myself very well in this picture. I was even wearing a pearl in my necktie!

One day, disgusted, unable to work in Paris, I left in a car for the North of Holland to find a simple house somewhere along the seashore where I could live like a peasant. I used to say, I remember: the house one would have liked to be one's grandmother's.

Travelled south, in short stages along the North Sea, then the Channel. After Normandy, Brittany, the Vendée, finally the outskirts of La Rochelle, which I had left five years earlier.

And there, tears came to my eyes, as if I had returned to my native land. I looked for a house. I found one. I bought it. I began work on it. Tearing down walls, opening bricked-up windows, once more I found that it was the remainder of an old abbey, and there were niches for saints in what would be my study.

I gave up Cour-Dieu, but I kept the clearing where the workmen had not yet begun. I kept the apartment in Neuilly and ‘Les Tamaris' in Porquerolles.

Marc was born in Nieul in 1939 a few months before the war, and I, who had looked so hard for a nest, I wondered where I would live when he was of school age. I thought of everything, of climate, of studies, of the university. Of myself, who would be getting old when he was twenty. (I'm there now!)

I decided that soon I would look for a house in Aix-en-Provence or near there. I would be two jumps from the sea, from Porquerolles, in a region I loved, in a town of the size I like, and where there are excellent educational facilities. At least – I still hesitated – unless I took up residence in the United States, for it appeared to me that the time had come for a young man to be brought up in both the European and the American way.

In September the war broke out. In August 1940 I left for the Vendée in order to rest after the fatigue and emotion of working with refugees. I didn't yet know that I would never return to Nieul, that later I would give it to my first wife, that Marc was going to live at Fontenay-le-Comte first, three months in a house on the waterfront, two years in the Château de Terreneuve, then in the woods at Saint-Mesmin-le-Vieux, to end, with the Liberation, at Les Sables-d'Olonne.

After which several months in Paris, in my old lodgings at the Place des Vosges which my friend Ziza had looked after, and off to London, Canada, and the United States.

So that it was in Florida that Marc went to school for the first time, then in Arizona, then in California, and later in Connecticut, where I finally bought Shadow
Rock Farm, which I still own, and where we were to live for five years.

Marc did not come back to Europe, to Cannes, until he was sixteen years old, with a brother and sister born in America.

Two years later, he continued his studies in Switzerland before settling in Paris and getting married there.

I foresaw everything except …

In the end, reality was not so far removed from my projects, at least one of them.