When I Was Old (35 page)

So she had canvases, easels, paints, models. We rented a room at Bernheim's for a show, then for another …

My self-effacement went beyond the three years, up to the start of the Maigret series, and even, you might say, until the end of the Maigrets, since I consider these as semi-potboilers.

If she had achieved success at that time, what would have happened? I wonder and tremble. I am scrupulous by nature, and I think I might have kept to our agreement and effaced myself.

I never talked about it. Nor about Nieul. Or about the
fact that it was for her sake that I settled in Paris in 1935 or 1936, Boulevard Richard-Wallace, in an apartment that I considered hers, and where I always felt like a visitor.

This makes me realize even more the near impossibility of being entirely sincere in writing notebooks like these. I'm not distorting anything. I'm not inventing anything. But sometimes I'm insincere by omission, for fear of the consequences.

Often I feel I would like to write:

‘Today I made love to So-and-So …'

Because it would set the tone of the day. Because these acts are part of the whole. But even if I left out names, abbreviations would make it possible for someone to guess who was meant. These women will have children some day, perhaps. Some of them already have. Or else they will fall in love. Have I the right to upset someone just to indicate the tone of a day?

Others don't have such scruples, neither Gide nor Jouhandeau, for example, and I am tempted to envy them. At the same time, it seems to me that they are the ones whose sincerity is most suspect, because they give in to the temptation of playing a part and making others play parts.

In preparing this new edition of
Je me souviens
I could re-establish the truth by putting ‘I' in place of ‘we'. But would this be the decent thing to do? And wouldn't people believe it was done out of shabby revenge or resentment?

Tonight, Russian ultimatum to the Americans on Cuba.

America's reply. Cessation of peace talks in Laos. It's too much. Personally, I no longer react, I can no longer get excited, even feel interested. Doesn't the public feel the same? I hope so. It would contradict what I wrote yesterday on this subject, but so much the better.

Only in that case, if I were in the place of those who govern, I would begin to fear that after long apathy there might be danger of a terrible reaction.

Aren't there signs of this in France, where de Gaulle has put public opinion to sleep, hypnotized the Parliament?

We speak of millionaires, billionaires. The papers like to cite figures. And they mean nothing.

At one time, a man owned large flocks or small ones, or such-and-so many women, such-and-so many palaces, or even reigned over a huge or not so huge country. Or so much land, so many farms, so many slaves, so many serfs (so many souls, as they said in Russia).

Then he received so much income.

It's only in the past century, quite recently, that we've talked in millions, only since most of the world's currencies have become stable.

What is a millionaire today? In what? In old francs? In new francs? In marks? In dollars? In pounds sterling? It ranges all the way from poverty to real riches. So-and-So earns so much per film. Before or after taxes? There too the amount can range from one to several digits. How many servants has he? But real dollar millionaires in the United States have only a housekeeper, while lira millionaires in Italy have a dozen and live in historic palaces.

We go on talking about money out of habit, tradition, when money no longer represents anything real, much less anything stable. We might as well count in cowries or in beans. Yet it's in the name of these cowries that people uphold this policy or that, and incite if not massacres – for the present – at least good-sized killings.

Besides that, reading the classified advertisements in the French, American, Swiss, English, no matter what papers, is depressing:

‘Discreet loans to civil servants, no formalities …'

‘Two rooms with kitchen in a pleasant suburb …'

‘Credit facilities …'

‘Twenty per cent discount on all merchandise …'

Millions and hundreds of millions of people for whom ‘every penny counts', each franc or each cent, are looking for lodgings, food, clothing, with incomes that won't cover all these needs at once …

‘Mamma, my shoes leak …'

I knew how that was in my childhood.

‘I'll buy you new ones next month. This month your father needs trousers …'

There aren't enough cowries.

Today, civil servants are protest-marching in the streets of Paris. For two weeks the teachers were on strike. They threaten to go out again.

There aren't enough cowries for everybody.

Besides, when people have them they buy what they need. When they buy, prices go up. When prices go up …

And then, who would be rich if there were no poor people?

Since Friday, more ‘historic' days and nights, not only in Cuba, Laos, the Congo, or Angola, but in France and Algeria. Uprisings. Even the word ‘revolution' is spoken. And last night, while tanks patrolled Paris, arms were distributed to the populace.

I listen to the radio hourly, as everybody does. My reaction? I admit to a certain satisfaction because events prove I wasn't mistaken in what I foresaw, so my judgement isn't so far wrong.

We were going to spend ten days in Paris after the revision of my last novel. Our suite was reserved at the Georges V and engagements were made with friends. We hesitated, gave up the trip at the last minute, and are glad of it. Not because of personal danger, but rather for fear of being separated from our children, knowing they would be worried here with us there.

One sometimes wonders what So-and-So was doing during the Three Glorious Days or the Commune …

As for us, Friday evening we had some friends in, people who on the face of it shouldn't have been very entertaining, two professors from the Faculty of Medicine and two psychiatrists. We spent one of the pleasantest evenings we've had at Echandens.

We are often bored by people who are supposed to be bright or witty. At our house they can turn into dead weights, and we've passed tedious hours with them.

On Saturday, from seven thirty to four in the morning we had a bit of everything. Some serious discussions
which I'll remember. And also, some almost childlike gaiety: one of the psychiatrists (whose life has not been an easy one) at the piano, a professor at the drums, delighted to take our Johnny's place, another, his shirt pulled out of his pants and his socks pulled up over them, did Russian dances with me, while the head of the sanatorium played the triangle … A sort of gaiety that I haven't experienced in a long time. I went so far as to give a mock striptease …

Then stories, not just funny ones, but all true, throwing unexpected lights on human nature.

If students had appeared that night at our house, they would have been dumbstruck, probably, because the minimum age of the men was fifty. As it happened, each of the women, whether pretty or interesting, was a true wife and lover, in love with her husband.

Generals were invading Algeria. Another general, raised to power by them, accused them of treason …

We were having a jolly time putting everything in perspective, which is not necessarily the one History will choose for it.

We found this morning that for the first time, yesterday, French television broadcast all night appeals from de Gaulle, Debré, Malraux, etc., who all look like very small men to me.

Will History think otherwise? Will they be turned into heroes? It's possible. In that case, all of History will have to be revised.

As for us, we went to bed early, D. and I, stiff and exhausted by our unaccustomed frolics.

And this evening we're going to play bridge at another medic's house.

Unawareness? Lack of sense of proportion?

In my opinion, it's the opposite.

Generals explain themselves, posing as heroes. One and all, one against all, they try to rouse the rabble. Suddenly they appeal to the very people they usually despise and consider inconsequential.

My impression as a distant but contemporary witness? Of being present not at a tragedy, nor even at a comedy of character, but at a vaudeville skit.

Too bad men have to die, for whom these gentlemen don't care a shit.

I'm going to try to telephone Marc, who is there. That's my only worry. Let's hope he isn't ‘dope' enough, as D. says, to get involved.

I'd rather know that, like us, he did a striptease and danced Cossack dances between two discussions of biology.

Last night, in the course of two or three hours – in one hour, in fact – the famous revolt of the generals, which we have been told of in dramatic tones for the past four days, collapsed with only a few shots fired: three policemen wounded, we're told. But, we had been told previously, the ‘criminal' generals were the leading lights of the army, specialists in psychological warfare, whom
de Gaulle, at one time, chose for his most delicate missions.

So for three or four days airfields were closed, the people were told to be ready to intervene. Volunteers were given uniforms and arms, specialists called up. Paris was overrun by armoured units recalled from Germany. Last night I heard from Paris that a pass was required for travelling the roads of France.

Finally de Gaulle assumed complete control.

In an hour … With no real fighting!

I would do better to write nothing about it, not to be like the armchair strategists or prophets of the Café du Commerce, when actually I know nothing. Do contemporaries ever know the truth about what is happening? No more than judges or the public know of a court trial. Each has his small piece of the truth.

Later, memoirs will be published, white papers. Even in these there is only fragmentary or distorted truth, so that History is scarcely better served.

But quite possibly I'm wrong. This morning my feeling is still that of great fraud. I know some of the protagonists. Was it a matter of inflating a harmless uprising so as to seize the powers de Gaulle has always dreamed of ? Of putting an end to the protests of government employees and workers who were marching in the streets and threatening the government last week?

When the danger is past, will de Gaulle keep these emergency powers and use them against non-rebels?

This morning we are told it is all over. I wonder if it isn't just beginning. And if the people aren't going to
question many things, if they won't suspect many mysteries in this event, as I do.

The reaction may be long-lasting. The cry ‘Down with Fascism!' has been heard.

Do people realize that it is the Debrés, the Freys, etc., with their idea of a ‘single' party, of a ‘great traditional party', who are the Fascists in this affair?

Up to a certain point the deception is a common one in times like these, and that's why I do not hope for a return to normal in the near future. Nevertheless it seems to me that all this false glory, all this strictly verbal grandeur is doomed and will be swept away.

I even wonder if there isn't real revolution in the air, just the thing they wanted to suppress or avoid.

Tomorrow there will be an appeal for calm in the name of the negotiations at Evian or elsewhere. Then it will be another pretext, the prestige of France, the arrival of the Kennedys, the difficulties in Otan, what have you.

In the meantime, I am returning to my revision of
Je me souviens
, which I hope to finish today; regret time spent listening to this rather distorted news, trying to understand, to come to a conclusion.

Once more, it's not my department. I hate politics, but, like Romain Rolland's Clérambault, an antimilitarist who surprised himself by falling into step with a military band in August 1914, I respond in spite of myself because I always have a confused hope that the politicians are going to bite the dust, that the people will finally see the light and sweep them out.

To be replaced by what? By others, to be sure. History shows us that. So? What good is it to rejoice or mope?

Be satisfied with plying your trade and telling stories, with busying yourself with man, not men.

I know I'm wrong, my children, that later, when you come across the words ‘politics' on these pages, you'll smile indulgently:

‘There goes Daddy, off the track again.'

But now Johnny, at least, who follows the news on television with me, has the same reactions. On certain evenings I can feel him boiling with rage, and on certain others, like yesterday and the day before, the enormity of what he hears plunges him into a sort of discouraged dejection.

Isn't there anyone in France to write a new
J'accuse
? I admit I've wondered if I could resist the temptation, if I were French.

All politics irritate me, certainly, since a just and satisfying system has yet to be found.

But in the circumstances, it is no longer simply a matter of politics. It is a matter of a man who sets himself up, and whom others set up as an example and who strikes me as a real Tartuffe. I would like to have the time, the patience, the inclination to compare his contradictions listed in facing columns.

He was the one who once upon a time proclaimed the right to rebellion, the right to individual action, to the
use of plastic bombs, to gunfire or knife fighting in the Métro, and it was he again who spoke of the Algerian rebellion with complete scorn for three years.

And when I say complete … He has just faced a
coup d'état
himself – a rather modest, desperate one – and already he is announcing a merciless purge, recalling another purge to us, over which he presided and which must have caused nearly as many deaths in France as the German repression during the war if not more.