[...] Sometimes I don’t tell André about my moods, sorrows, unimportant anxieties; and no doubt he has his little secrets too; but on the whole there is nothing we do not know about one another. I poured out the China tea, piping hot and very strong. We drank it as we looked through our post: the July sun came flooding into the room. How many times had we sat there opposite one another at that little table with piping hot, very strong cups of tea in front of us? And we should do so again tomorrow, and in a year’s time, and in ten years’ time.… That moment possessed the sweet gentleness of a memory and the gaiety of a promise. Were we thirty, or were we sixty?

André’s hair had gone white when he was young: in earlier days that snowy hair, emphasizing the clear freshness of his complexion, looked particularly dashing. It looks dashing still. His skin has hardened and wrinkled—old leather—but the smile on his mouth and in his eyes has kept its brilliance. Whatever the photograph album may say to the contrary, the pictures of the young André conform to his present-day face: my eyes attribute no age to him. A long life filled with laughter, tears, quarrels, embraces, confessions, silences, and sudden impulses of the heart: and yet sometimes it seems that time has not moved by at all. The future still stretches out to infinity.

[...] In earlier days I never used to worry about old people: I looked upon them as the dead whose legs still kept moving. Now I see them—men and women: only a little older than myself. I had noticed this old lady at the butcher’s one day when she asked for scraps for her cats. “For her cats!” he said when she had gone. “She hasn’t got a cat. Such a stew she’s going to make for herself!” The butcher found that amusing. Presently she will be picking up the leavings under the stalls before the tall Negro sweeps everything into the gutter. Making ends meet on a hundred and eighty francs a month: there are more than a million in the same plight: three million more scarcely less wretched.

[...] from time to time a bewilderment comes over me. I remember my first appointment, my first class, and the dead leaves that rustled under my feet that autumn in the country. In those days retirement seemed to me as unreal as death itself, for between me and that day there lay a stretch of time almost twice as long as that which I had so far lived. And now it is a year since it came. I have crossed other frontiers, but all of them less distinct. This one was as rigid as an iron curtain.

What is there to do when the world has lost its savor? All that is left is the killing of time. I went through a wretched period myself, ten years ago. I was disgusted with my body; Philippe had grown up; and after the success of my book on Rousseau I felt completely hollow inside. Growing old filled me with distress. But then I began to work on Montesquieu; I got Philippe through his agrégation* and managed to make him start on a thesis. I was given a lectureship at the Sorbonne, and I found my teaching there even more interesting than my university scholarship classes. I became resigned to my body. It seemed to me that I came to life again. And now, if André were not so very sharply aware of his age, I should easily forget my own altogether.

He went out again, and again I stayed a long while on the balcony. I watched an orange-red crane turning against the blue background of the sky. I watched a black insect that drew a broad, foaming, icy furrow across the heavens. The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me. Yesterday evening I was going up the Boulevard Raspail and the sky was crimson: it seemed to me that I was walking upon an unknown planet where the grass might be violet, the earth blue. It was trees hiding the red glare of a neon-light advertisement. When he was sixty Andersen was astonished at being able to cross Sweden in less than twenty-four hours, whereas in his youth the journey had taken a week. I have experienced wonders like that. Moscow in three and a half hours from Paris!

There was still a question in her eyes—one that she did not like to put into words. I made the first move. “You know what I wanted to do—to start off with a consideration of the critical works published since the war and then to go on to suggest a new method by which it is possible to make one’s way into a writer’s work, to see it in depth, more accurately than has ever been done before. I hope I have succeeded.”

It was more than a hope: it was a conviction. It filled my heart with sunlight. A lovely day: and I was enchanted with these trees, lawns, walks where I had so often wandered with friends and fellow students. Some are dead, or life has separated us. Happily—unlike André, who no longer sees anyone—I have made friends with some of my pupils and younger colleagues: I like them better than women of my own age. Their curiosity spurs mine into life: they draw me into their future, on the far side of my own grave.

It is not a matter of energy, I said to myself as I left her: I just could not live without writing. Why? And why was I so desperately eager to make an intellectual out of Philippe when André would have let him follow other paths? When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.

[...] “You will like her: she is a woman who has a job.” At long intervals she works as a script girl. I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in for sport, dress well, run their houses faultlessly, bring up their children perfectly, carry on a social life—in short, succeed on every level. And they don’t really care deeply about anything at all. They make my blood run cold.

I argued a little longer, as mildly as possible, trying to persuade him of the value of his thesis and reminding him of earlier plans for papers and research. He answered politely, but my words had no hold on him. No, he did not belong to me anymore; not anymore at all. Even his physical appearance had changed: another kind of haircut; more up-to-date clothes—the clothes of the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. It was I who molded his life. Now I am watching it from outside, a remote spectator. It is the fate common to all mothers; but who has ever found comfort in saying that hers is the common fate?

[...] I went on, “Do you think that making money is an adequate goal in life?”

“I really scarcely know what our goals were, nor whether they were adequate.”

Did he really believe what he was saying, or was he amusing himself by teasing me? He does that sometimes, when he thinks me too set in my convictions and my principles. Usually I put up with it very well—I join in the game. But this time I was in no mood for trifling. My voice rose. “Why have we led the kind of life we have led if you think other ways of life just as good?”

“Because we could not have done otherwise.”

“We could not have done otherwise because it was our way of life that seemed to us valid.”

“No. As far as I was concerned knowing, discovering, was a mania, a passion, or even a kind of neurosis, without the slightest moral justification. I never thought everybody else should do the same.”

Deep down I do think that everybody else should do the same, but I did not choose to argue the point. I said, “It is not a question of everybody, but of Philippe. He is going to turn into a fellow concerned with dubious money-making deals. That was not what I brought him up for.”

Last year he used to take his pulse every ten minutes. It is true his blood pressure was a little high, but a course of treatment steadied it at seventeen, which is perfect for our age. He kept his fingers pressed against his cheek; his eyes were vacant; he was playing at being an old man, and he would end by persuading me that he was one. For a horrified moment I thought, Philippe has gone, and I am to spend the rest of my life with an old man! I felt like shouting, “Stop. I can’t bear it.” As though he had heard me, he smiled, became himself again, and we went to bed.

It was impossible. He shared our ideas. He had taken great risks during the Algerian war—that war which had torn our hearts and which now seems never to have taken place at all—he had got himself beaten up in anti-Gaullist demonstrations; he had voted as we voted during the last elections.…

“He says he has developed. He has come to understand that the French left wing’s negativism has led it nowhere, that it is done for, finished, and he wants to be in the swim, to have a grip on the world, accomplish something, construct, build.”

“I’m not ashamed at all. One has the right to reconsider one’s opinions.”

“Reconsider! Only six months ago and you were utterly condemning the regime’s entire cultural policy.”

“There you are, then! I’m going to try to change it.”

“Come, come, you aren’t of that caliber and you know it. You’ll play their little game as good as gold and you’ll carve yourself out a charming little career. Your motive is mere ambition, nothing more.…” I don’t know what else I said to him. He shouted, “Shut up, shut up.” I went on: he interrupted, his voice filled with hatred, and in the end he shouted furiously, “I’m not a swine just because I won’t share in your senile obstinacy.”

Irène gave me a dirty look. “I imagine your own life has always been perfect, and so that allows you to judge everybody else from a great height.”

I stiffened. “I have always tried to be honest. I wanted Philippe to be the same. I am sorry that you should have turned him from that course.”

She burst out laughing. “Anyone would think he had become a burglar, or a counterfeiter.”

I set off through the streets, and I walked as I often used to do when I wanted to calm my fears or rages or to get rid of mental images. Only I am not twenty anymore, or even fifty, and weariness came over me very soon. I went into a café and drank a glass of wine, my eyes hurting in the cruel glare of the neon. Philippe: it was all over. Married, a deserter to the other side. André was all I had left, and there it was—I did not have him either. I had supposed that each of us could see right into the other, that we were united, linked to one another like Siamese twins. He had cast himself off from me, lied to me; and here I was on this café bench, alone. I continually called his face, his voice, to mind, and I blew on the fire of the furious resentment that was burning me up. It was like one of those illnesses in which you manufacture your own suffering—every breath tears your lungs to pieces, and yet you are forced to breathe.

Do not make up your mind about the future in advance. Easy enough to say. I could see the future. It stretched away in front of me, flat, bare, running on out of sight. Never a plan, never a wish. I should write no more. Then what should I do? What an emptiness within me—all around me. Useless. The Greeks called their old people hornets. “Useless hornet,” Hecuba called herself in The Trojan Women. That was my case. I was shattered. I wondered how people managed to go on living when there was nothing to be hoped from within.

So I stayed at home, brooding. It was very hot, and even if I lowered the sun blinds I stifled. Time stopped flowing. It is dreadful—I feel like saying it is unfair—that it should be able to go by both so quickly and so slowly. I was walking through the gates of the lycée at Bourg, almost as young as my own pupils, gazing with pity at the old gray-haired teachers. Flash, and I was an old teacher myself; and then the lycée gates closed behind me. For years and years my pupils gave me the illusion that my age did not alter: at the beginning of each school year I found them there again, as young as ever; and I adapted myself to this unchanging state. In the great sea of time I was a rock beaten by waves that were continually renewed—a rock that neither moved nor crumbled. And all at once the tide was carrying me away, and would go on carrying me until I ran aground in death. My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. Strange anomaly of these two rhythms. My days fly galloping from me; yet the long dragging out of each one makes me weary, weary.

We drove home without speaking. It was wrong of me to grow cross about a trifle. I had always been quick-tempered: was I going to turn into a shrew? I should have to take care. But I could not get over my vexation. And I felt so unwell that I was afraid I might have sunstroke. I ate a couple of tomatoes and went to lie down in the bedroom, where the darkness, the tiles on the floor and the whiteness of the sheets gave a false impression of coolness. I closed my eyes; in the silence I listened to the tick-tock of a pendulum. I had said to André, “I don’t see what one loses in growing old.” Well, I could see now, all right. I had always refused to consider life as Fitzgerald’s “process of dilapidation.” I had thought my relations with André would never deteriorate, that my body of work would grow continually richer, that Philippe would become every day more and more like the man I had wanted to make of him. As for my body, I never worried about it. And I believed that even silence bore its fruit. What an illusion! Sainte-Beuve’s words were truer than Valéry’s. “In some parts one grows woody; in others one goes bad: never does one grow ripe.” My body was letting me down. I was no longer capable of writing: Philippe had betrayed all my hopes, and what grieved me even more bitterly was that the relationship between André and me was going sour. What nonsense, this intoxicating notion of progress, of upward movement, that I had cherished; for now the moment of collapse was at hand! It had already begun. And now it would be very fast and very slow: we were going to turn into really old people.

She put it down on the table, together with a cardboard box. There are not many very old photographs. Manette on her wedding day, in a long, severe dress. A group: she and her husband, their brothers, their sisters: a whole generation of which she is the only survivor. André as a child, looking stubborn and determined. Renée at twenty, between her two brothers. We thought we should never get over her death—twenty-four, and she looked forward to so much from life. What would she have got out of it in fact? How would she have put up with growing older? My first meeting with death: how I wept. After that I wept less and less—my parents, my brother-in-law, my father-in-law, our friends. That’s something else that aging means. So many deaths behind one, wept for, forgotten. Often, reading the paper, I see that someone else has died—a writer I liked, a colleague, one of André’s former associates, a political fellow worker, a friend we had lost touch with. It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.

André looked at me hard. “I don’t know that you are being altogether honest.”

“How do you mean?”

“You are setting it all on a moral plane, whereas it is primarily on the emotional plane that you feel you have been betrayed.”

“Both are there.”

[...] "Yet to a certain extent you were right in saying that I was putting it on,” said André. “I overdid it. When I saw all those fellows so very much more decrepit than I am and yet still taking things just as they come, without moaning about it at all, I told myself that it really would not do. I decided to pull myself together.”

“Oh, that’s it, then! I thought it was my not being here that had made you so good-tempered again.”

“What a notion! Far from it: it was largely on your account that I determined to take myself in hand. I don’t want to be an old bore. Old is quite enough: bore, no.”

I took his arm: I squeezed it. I had recovered the André I had never lost and that I never should lose. We walked into the garden and sat on a bench at the foot of a cypress. The moon and its little star were shining over the house.

We had always looked far ahead. Should we now have to learn to live a short-term life? We sat there side by side beneath the stars, with the sharp scent of the cypress wafting by us; our hands touched. For a moment time stopped still. It would soon start flowing again. What then? Should I be able to work or not? Would my bitterness against Philippe die away? Would the dread of aging take hold of me again? Do not look too far ahead. Ahead there were the horrors of death and farewells: it was false teeth, sciatica, infirmity, intellectual barrenness, loneliness in a strange world that we would no longer understand and that would carry on without us. Shall I succeed in not lifting my gaze to those horizons? Or shall I learn to behold them without horror? We are together: that is our good fortune. We shall help one another to live through this last adventure, this adventure from which we shall not come back. Will that make it bearable for us? I do not know. Let us hope so. We have no choice in the matter.