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Isabelle thinks—or at least that’s what she says—that Maurice did not mean a quarter of what he said. He has had affairs without telling me—that is perfectly usual. She had always told me a faithfulness lasting twenty years is an impossibility for a man. Clearly Maurice would have done better to tell me, but he felt completely bound by his promises. As for his grievances against me, he has no doubt just made them up: if he had married me unwillingly I should have sensed it—we should not have been so happy. She advises me to wipe the slate clean. She still thinks I have the winning position. Men choose the easiest solution—it is easier to stay with one’s wife than to plunge into a new life. She made me telephone an old friend of hers for an appointment. This friend is a gynecologist; she has great experience of marital problems, and Isabelle thinks she may be able to help me to understand my difficulties. Very well.
Jealous of his work: I must admit that that is not untrue. For ten years on end, through Maurice, I carried out an experiment that fascinated me—following the relationship of the doctor with the patient. I took part in it: I advised him. He saw fit to break this bond between us—such an important one for me. After that I confess that I was hardly very zealous about watching his progress passively and from afar. His progress left me cold: that was true. It is the human being I admire in him, not the scientist. But “castrating woman”—that is unfair. I only refused to feign enthusiasm I did not feel: he used to love my sincerity. I can’t bring myself to believe that it wounded his vanity. There is no small-mindedness in Maurice. Or is there, and has Noëllie found out the best way of exploiting it? Revolting idea. My head is filled with confusion. I thought I knew what kind of person I was: what kind of person he was. And all at once I no longer recognize us, neither him nor me.
When this happens to other people it seems to be a limited, bounded event, easy to ring around and to overcome. And then you find yourself absolutely alone, in a hallucinating experience that your imagination had not even begun to approach.
I am afraid of not sleeping and I am afraid of sleeping, on the nights that Maurice spends with Noëllie. That empty bed next to mine, these flat, cold sheets.… I take sleeping pills, but in vain; for I dream. Often in my dreams I faint with distress. I lie there under Maurice’s gaze, paralyzed, with the whole world’s anguish on my face. I expect him to rush toward me. He glances indifferently in my direction and walks off. I woke up and it was still night—I could feel the weight of the darkness; I was in a corridor; I hurried down it, and it grew narrower and narrower; I could scarcely breathe. Presently I should have to crawl and I should stay wedged there until I died. I screamed. And I began calling him more quietly, weeping as I did so. Every night I call him: not him—the other one, the one who loved me. And I wonder whether I should not prefer it if he were dead. I used to tell myself that death was the only irremediable misfortune and that if he were to leave me I should get over it. Death was dreadful because it was possible; a break was bearable because I could not imagine it. But now in fact I tell myself that if he were dead I should at least know whom I had lost and who I was myself. I no longer know anything. The whole of my past life has collapsed behind me, as the land does in those earthquakes where the ground consumes and destroys itself—is swallowed up behind you as you flee. There is no going back. The house has vanished, and the village and the whole of the valley. Even if you survive there is nothing left, not even what had been your living space on earth.
please just leave him!!!
Why doesn’t he love me anymore? The question is why did he love me in the first place. One never asks oneself. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. He loved me, that’s all. And for ever, since I should always be me. (And I have been astonished at this blindness, in other women. Strange that one can only understand one’s own case by the help of other people’s experience—experience that is not the same as mine, and that doesn’t help.)
Stupid things fleeting through one’s head. A film I saw when I was a child. A wife going to see her husband’s mistress. “For you it’s only fun. But I love him!” And the mistress is moved, and she sends the wife to take her place at the nocturnal rendezvous. In the darkness the husband takes her for the other one, and in the morning he comes back to her, looking shamefaced. It was an old silent film that the studio put on for laughs, but that stirred me a great deal. I can still see the wife’s long dress, and her bandeaux.
Talk to Noëllie? But it’s not just fun for her: it’s a major undertaking. She would tell me that she loved him too; and certainly she’s very fond of all that he can give a woman nowadays. For my part I loved him when he was twenty-three—an uncertain future—difficulties. I loved him with no security; and I gave up the idea of a career for myself. Anyhow I regret nothing.
I am torturing myself. What is the general opinion of me? Quite objectively, who am I? Am I less intelligent than I suppose? As for that, it is the kind of question it is no use asking anybody: no one would like to reply that I was a fool. And how can one tell? Everybody thinks he is intelligent, even the people I find stupid. That is why a woman is always more affected by compliments about her looks than by those about her mind—for she has inner certainties about her mind, those which everybody has and which therefore prove nothing. To know your limits you have to be able to go beyond them: in other words, you have to be able to jump right over your own shadow. I always understand what I hear and what I read: but perhaps I grasp it all too quickly, for want of being able to understand the full wealth and complexity of an idea. Is it my shortcomings that prevent me from seeing Noëllie’s superiority?
“The worst thing you did,” I said, “was to let me lull myself in a sense of false security. Here I am at forty-four, empty-handed, with no occupation, no other interest in life apart from you. If you had warned me eight years ago I should have made an independent existence for myself and now it would be easier for me to accept the situation.”
“But, Monique!” he cried, looking astonished. “I urged you as strongly as I possibly could to take that job as secretary of the Revue médicale seven years ago. It was right up your street and you could have reached a worthwhile position. You wouldn’t!”
The suggestion had seemed to me so untimely that I had almost entirely forgotten it. “I couldn’t see any point in spending the day away from the house and the children just for a hundred thousand francs a month,” I said.
“That was your answer then. I pressed you very hard.”
“If you had told me your real reasons—if you had told me I no longer meant everything to you and that I too should stand off a little myself, I should have accepted it.”
“I suggested your getting a job again when we were at Mougins. And again you refused.”
“At that time your love was enough for me.”
“It is not too late,” he said. “I can easily find you something to do.”
“Do you suppose that that would console me? Eight years ago I might have thought it less ludicrous—I should have had more chance of getting somewhere. But now.…”
oof
(i think the feminist/sociological response to this dilemma is, well, everyone should have something that's just for themselves)
“Still, you don’t love me as you did before; you’re fond of me, yes; but it’s no longer love as we knew it in our twenties.”
“It’s no longer the love of our twenties for you, either. When I was twenty I was in love with love at the same time that I was in love with you. I have lost the whole of that glowing, enthusiastic side of myself: that is what has changed.”
It was delightful talking with him, like two friends, as we used to do. Difficulties grew smaller; questions wafted away like smoke; events faded; true and false merged in a iridescence of converging shades. Fundamentally, nothing had happened. I ended up by believing that Noëllie did not exist.… Illusion: sleight of hand. In fact this comfortable talk has not changed anything in the very least. Things have been given other names: they have not altered in any way. I have learned nothing. The past remains as obscure as ever. The future as uncertain.
He argued with me, he pressed me, he looked wretched. He is used to my sadness of every day, but to deprive me of skiing—that crams him with remorse. (I am unfair: he is not used to it—he drips with guilty conscience, he takes pills to go to sleep, he looks like death warmed up. I am not touched by that; indeed I even rather resent it. If he tortures me, knowing what he is at and torturing himself at the same time, then he must be disgustingly fond of Noëllie.) We argued for a long while. I did not give way. In the end he looked so exhausted—drawn face, rings under his eyes—that I sent him to bed. He sank down into sleep as though into a refuge of peace.
I watch the drops of water running down the window-pane—a moment ago the rain was beating upon it. They don’t go down straight: they are like little creatures that for mysterious reasons of their own slant off to the right or the left, slipping between other motionles drops, stopping and then starting again as though they were in quest of something. It seems to me that I no longer have anything whatever to do. I always used to be busy. Now everything—knitting, cooking, reading, putting on a record—everything seems pointless. Maurice’s love gave every moment of my life a meaning. Now it is hollow. Everything is hollow—things are empty: time is empty. And so am I.
I asked Marie Lambert the other day whether she thought me intelligent. She looked me straight in the eye. “You are very intelligent.…”
“There is a but,” I said.
“Intelligence withers if it is not fed. You ought to let your husband find you a job.”
“The kind of work I could do would bring me nothing.”
“That is very far from certain.”