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He would meet her at ten o'clock. At about eleven they would go to the little hotel across the street from the paper. It was she who had insisted upon sleeping with him again after their return to Paris. There was some consolation at least in thinking that that arid day would, in a few hours, fade into a warm, pink night. Henri climbed into the car and started off in the direction of the paper. The night was still far off, and the afternoon would drag cheerlessly to its end. Listening to new jazz recordings, drinking with friends, smiling at women — yes, certainly, he would have enjoyed all that. But time was short; even now at the paper some people were ticking off the minutes. He would have liked to pull the car up along a quay, lean against the railing, watch the dappled water; or ride off into the gentle countryside surrounding Paris. He would have liked a great many things. But no. This year again the old stones of Paris would become covered with green without him. 'Never a breathing spell. Nothing exists but the future, a future which is always retreating. And that's what they call doing something!' Discussions, conferences — not a single one of those hours had been lived for itself. [...]
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'And what you're doing is no less a dismal farce,' Henri said. 'You want me to tell you something?' he added sharply. 'It's breaking your heart to think that all the adventure is over; you're just trying to prolong it. But good God! It wasn't the adventure that counted; it was the things we were defending.'
'Granted, we don't carry much weight,' Henri said. 'But at least we can speak out, defend our views, exert pressures ...'
'How well I remember!' Tournelle said bitterly. 'We wanted to save the honour of France so that she could speak to her allies with her head high. And there were people who got themselves slaughtered for that! A lot of blood spilled for nothing!'
'You're not going to tell me we shouldn't have resisted,' Henri said.
'I don't know. All I can say is that it didn't do us a hell of a lot of good!' Tournelle put his hand on Henri's shoulder. 'Don't repeat what I've said.'
Walking rapidly, he went through the corridors and crossed the courtyard. His heart was heavy. 'Poor das Viernas! Poor old men!' In his mind's eye, he saw their stiff collars, their derbies, that righteous anger in their eyes. 'France is our only hope,' they had said. But nowhere was there any hope, no more in France than anywhere else. He crossed the street and leaned against the railing of the quay. As seen from Portugal, France still shone with the stubborn glitter of a burnt-out star, and Henri had let himself be taken in by this. Suddenly he realized that he was living in the moribund capital of a very small country. The Seine was flowing in its bed; the Madeleine, the Chambre des Deputes were in their places, the Obelisk, too. One could easily have been led to believe that the war had miraculously spared Paris. 'That's what we wanted to believe,' Henri thought, turning the car into the Boulevard St Germain where the chestnut trees were faithfully blossoming. They had all let themselves be complacently fooled by those houses, those trees, those benches which so perfectly aped the past. But actually the once proud capital of the world had been utterly destroyed. Henri was nothing but an insignificant citizen of a fifth-rate power, and L'Espoir was a local sheet on the same level as a village weekly. Mournfully, he climbed the stairs to his office. France can't do anything for herself. Giving information to people who can do nothing, exciting their interest, arousing their indignation — what good could it do? He had written that series on Portugal with loving care, as if it could stir up public opinion from pole to pole. And Washington didn't give a damn, and the Quai d'Orsay was in no position to help. He sat down at his desk and reread the beginning of his article. What was the use? People would read it, nod their heads, throw the paper into a waste-basket, and that was it What difference did it make if L'Espoir remained independent or not, if it had more or fewer readers, or even if it went bankrupt? 'It isn't even worth the trouble to be stubborn over it!' Henri thought suddenly. Dubreuilh and Samazelle believed they, could make good use of the paper; they believed, too, that France, if she didn't remain isolated, still had an important role to play in the world. All hope was on their side; elsewhere, nothing but emptiness. 'Well? Why not ring and tell them I accept?' Henri said to himself. For a long moment he looked at the telephone on his desk. But his hand remained frozen. He went back to his article.
The fact was that with Lambert or Vincent he would not have tried to avoid the issue. Nadine needed help as much as they, but he had learned the hard way that coming to the aid of a woman always meant giving her a hold on him. They would somehow transform the least little token into an undying promise. He kept himself on the defensive.
'Spend the weekend with me.'
'But I can't,' he replied. Again a feeling of rancour rose in his throat; she was refusing him the body he so much wanted and was demanding his time, his attention ... 'You know I can't.'
'Because of Paula?'
'Exactly.'
'How can a man allow himself to be a slave the rest of his life to a woman he no longer loves?'
'I never told you I didn't care for Paula anymore.'
'You pity her and you feel guilty. It's nauseating, all that sentimental crap. When you don't enjoy seeing people any more, you let them drop, that's all.'
she is't wrong :/ but neither is he totally wrong to try to honor his commitment to her. what's awful is the in-between, the resentment he feels, the overflowing guilt
[...] They weren't the same streets. Then, they glittered with lights, they brightly streaked the capital of the world; today, the street lights shone far apart, and in their occasional light you noticed how narrow the streets were, how decrepit the houses, the City of Light had gone dark. If one day it should glitter again, the splendour of Paris would be that of other fallen world capitals — Venice, Prague, long-dead Bruges. Not the same streets, not the same world. Christmas Eve Henri had promised himself to put into words the sweetness of peace; but this peace was without sweetness. The streets were cheerless, Nadine's flesh grim; the springtime had nothing to offer him — the blue sky, the budding flowers obeying the season's routine, held no promise. Tell about the flavour of my life. But it no longer had any flavour because things no longer made sense. Yes, and that was why writing no longer made sense. Nadine was right about that, too. Those little lights along the Tagus — you can't enjoy describing them when you know they light a city dying of hunger. And starving people shouldn't serve as an excuse for writing. The past had been nothing but a mirage; the mirage vanished, what was left? Wretchedness, dangers, uncertain tasks, chaos. Henri had lost the world, had received nothing in return for it. He was nowhere, had nothing, was nothing; there was nothing he could speak about.
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For days on end I listened unflinchingly to the aggressive eulogies she showered on Joly. On her desk, Das Kapital lay open next to her chemistry book and her eyes wandered sadly from one volume to the other. She soon began examining all my acts and words in the light of historical materialism. There were quite a few beggars in the streets at the beginning of this cold springtime, and if I gave them a few sous she would say sneeringly, 'If you imagine that by giving that poor outcast a handout you'll change the face of the world ...'
'Oh, I'm not aiming so high. If it makes him happy, it's enough.'
'And you ease your conscience. Everybody wins.' She always attributed shabby motives to me. 'You think that by refusing to go out in the world and by being rude to people you're escaping your class. But you're just a shabbily dressed bourgeoise, that's all.'
lmao. classic nadine
'Oh, I know what it is to be harried by one's work,' Guite said. 'I never go out either. It's quite by chance that you see me here!' Her laugh insinuated that I was pleasantly deluded, that in truth she wasn't there at all. 'But this would be different — just a simple little dinner... And I'd invite only men,' she added in a confidential tone. 'I don't care for the company of women; I feel completely lost with them. Don't you?'
'No, I get along very well with women.'
She gave me a look of dismayed reproof. 'Curious, very curious .... It must be I who's abnormal.'
In her books she willingly proclaimed the inferiority of her sex. But she herself, she imagined, escaped it by the virility of her talent. And she believed she was even superior to men, since, gifted with the same qualities as they, she had in addition the singular and charming merit of being a woman. That trick irritated me. In a professional tone, I said, 'You're not at all abnormal. Almost all women prefer men.'
Her face froze solidly, and not too pointedly but deliberately she turned towards Huguette Volange. Poor Guite! She was torn between the desire to see justice rendered to her merits and to evade any reproach of narcissism. She therefore attempted to dictate to others what she wanted them to say about her. But if they didn't say it? Would she have to resign herself to being misunderstood? It was a painful dilemma.
oof
I was astonished at how little she understood me, but as a matter of fact I didn't understand her very well either. She believed that, for us, work was nothing but a means of achieving fortune and success, and I was vaguely convinced that all those snobs would have gladly traded their social position for intellectual talents and accomplishments. When I was a child, a teacher seemed to me a much greater person than a duchess or a millionaire, and through the years that hierarchy had not changed appreciably. Claudie, however, believed that the supreme reward for an Einstein would be to be received in her salon. We-could hardly reach any real understanding.