The Mandarins

‘The world is always changing. But before the war you let it change without getting yourself involved,’ Paula said.

Henri started up the stairway. ‘It isn’t before the war any more,’ he replied, yawning.

‘But why can’t we go back to living like we did then?’

‘Circumstances are different – and so am I.’ He yawned again. ‘I’m tired.’

Yes, he was tired, but when he lay down in bed beside Paula he couldn’t sleep. The champagne, the vodka, Dubreuilh, all conspired to keep him awake. No, he wouldn’t give him L’Espoir. That was so clear to him that it needed no justifying. Nevertheless, he wished he could find a few good reasons for his stand. Was he really an idealist? And exactly what did that mean? Naturally, and to a certain extent, he believed in people’s freedom, in their basic good will, in the power of ideas. You can’t possibly believe that the class struggle is outmoded, can you? No, he couldn’t believe it, but what, after all, did that mean? He turned over on his back. He felt like lighting a cigarette, but he was afraid of awakening Paula, who would have been only too happy to distract him in his sleeplessness. He didn’t move. ‘My God!’ he said to himself with a sharp feeling of anxiety. ‘How ignorant we really are!’ He read a great deal, but he had little real knowledge excepting in the field of literature. And even in literature … Until now it hadn’t bothered him – no need for any specialized knowledge to fight in the Resistance or to found a clandestine newspaper. He had believed that that was the way it would continue to be. Obviously he had been wrong. What is an opinion? What is an idea? What power do words have? On whom? And under what circumstances? If you publish a newspaper, you have to be able to answer those questions. And what with one thing leading to another, you eventually question everything. ‘You have to decide in ignorance,’ Henri said to himself. ‘Even Dubreuilh often acts blindly – Dubreuilh, with all his learning.’ Henri sighed; he was unable to resign himself to this defeat. There are degrees of ignorance, and the simple fact was that he was particularly ill-equipped for the political life. ‘Well, I’ll just have to start working at it,’ he said to himself. But if he really wanted to extend his knowledge, it would require years of study. Economics, history, philosophy – he would never be done with it! What a job! And all that just to come to terms with Marxism! Writing would be completely out of the question, and he wanted to write. Well? Whatever happened, one thing was sure: he wasn’t going to let L’Espoir fail simply because he wasn’t an expert on all the fine points of historical materialism. He closed his eyes. There was something unfair in this whole thing. He felt obliged, like everyone else, to take an active interest in politics. That being the case, it shouldn’t require a specialized apprenticeship; if politics was a field reserved for technicians, then they shouldn’t be asking him to get mixed up in it.

‘What I need is time!’ Henri thought as he awakened the next morning. ‘The only problem is finding enough time.’ The living-room door opened and closed again. Paula had already gone out; now, back again, she was tiptoeing about the room. He threw back the covers. ‘If I lived alone, I’d save hours.’ No more idle conversations, no more formal meals. While drinking his coffee in the little Cafe Biard on the corner, he would read the morning papers, would work right up to the moment when he would have to leave for the office; a sandwich would do for lunch, and his day’s work over, he would have a quick dinner and read late into the night. That way, he would be able to keep everything going at once – L’Espoir, his novel, his reading. ‘I’ll speak to Paula this morning,’ he told himself firmly.

‘Did you sleep well?’ Paula asked cheerfully.

‘Very well.’

She was arranging flowers in a vase on one of the tables and humming cheerfully to herself. Ever since Henri’s return, she made a point of being always cheerful, ostentatiously cheerful. ‘I made you some real coffee. And we still have a little fresh butter left.’

He sat down and spread a piece of toast with butter. ‘Did you eat?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You’re never hungry.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I eat; in fact I eat quite well.’

He bit into the toast. What could he do if she didn’t want to eat? After all, he couldn’t very well force-feed her. ‘You were up very early this morning,’ he said.

‘Yes, I couldn’t sleep.’ She placed a thick album with gilt-edged pages on the table. ‘I’ve been putting in the pictures you took in Portugal.’ She opened the album and pointed to the stairway of Braga. Nadine, smiling, was sitting on one of the steps. ‘You see, I’m not trying to escape the truth,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know.’

No, she wasn’t escaping the truth but, much more disconcerting, she saw through it. She turned back several pages. ‘Even in these old snapshots of you as a child you had that same distrustful sort of smile. How little you’ve changed!’ Before, he had enjoyed helping her collect and arrange his souvenirs; today it all seemed so futile. He was annoyed by Paula’s stubborn determination to exhume and embalm him.

‘Here you are when I first met you!’

‘I don’t look very bright, do I?’ he said, pushing away the album.

‘You were young; you were very demanding,’ she said. She stood in front of Henri and, in a sudden burst of anger, asked, ‘Why did you give an interview to Lendemain?’

‘Oh! Is the new issue out?’

‘Yes, I just bought a copy.’ She went to get the magazine at the other end of the living-room, brought it back, and threw it on the table. ‘I thought we’d decided you’d never grant any interviews.’

‘If you stick to all the decisions you make …’

‘But this was an important one. You used to say that when you start smiling at reporters, you’re ripe for the Académie Française.’

‘I used to say a lot of things.’

‘It really pained me when I saw pictures of you spread all over the cover,’ she said.

‘But you’re always so delighted when you see my name in print.’

‘First of all, I’m not delighted. And secondly, that’s quite different.’

Paula was not one to stop at a contradiction, but this particular one irritated Henri. She wanted him to be the ‘most glorious of all men’, and yet she affected a disdain for glory. She insisted upon dreaming of herself as long ago he had dreamed of her – proud, sublime. But all the while, of course, she was living on earth, like everyone else. ‘It’s not a very good life she has,’ he thought with a twinge of pity. ‘It’s only natural for her to need some sort of compensation.’

‘I wanted to help the kid out,’ he said in a conciliatory voice. ‘She’s just getting started and doesn’t know her way around yet.’

Paula smiled at him tenderly. ‘And you don’t know how to say no.’

There was no double meaning hidden behind her smile. He smiled. ‘You’re right. I don’t know how to say no.’

He placed the weekly on the table. On the front page, his picture smiled back at him. ‘Interview with Henri Perron.’ He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what Marie-Ange thought of him. Yet reading those printed words, he felt a little of the naïve faith of a peasant reading the Bible. It was as if he had succeeded at last in discovering himself through words he himself had fathered. ‘In the shadows of the pharmacy in Tulle, the magic of red and blue jars … But the quiet child hated the medicinal smells, the restricted life, the shabby streets of his birthplace … As he grew up the call of the big city became more and more pressing … He swore to raise himself above the bleak greyness of mediocrity; in a secret corner of his heart, he even hoped some day to rise higher than all others … A providential meeting with Robert Dubreuilh … Dazzled, disconcerted, torn between admiration and defiance, Henri Perron trades his adolescent dreams for the true ambitions of a man; he begins to work furiously … At twenty-five, a small book is enough to bring glory into his life. Brown hair, commanding eyes, a serious mouth, direct, open, and yet secret …’ He tossed the paper aside. Marie-Ange was no idiot; she knew him pretty well. And yet to titillate the working girls, she had made him into a small-time opportunist.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘There’s no sense in talking to reporters. All a life means to them is a career; work is nothing but the path to success. And what they mean by success is making a big splash and piling up a lot of money. You just can’t get them to think any other way.’

Paula smiled indulgently. ‘Did you notice the nice things she said about your book? Only she’s like all the others – they admire but don’t understand.’

‘As a matter of fact, they don’t admire as much as all that, you know. It’s the first novel published since the liberation; they’re practically forced to praise it.’

In the long run, the symphony of eulogies became annoying. It amply demonstrated the timeliness of his novel, but in no way said anything about its merits. Henri finally even came to the conclusion that the book owed its success to misunderstandings. Lambert believed he had meant to exalt individualism through collective action, and Lachaume, on the other hand, believed it preached the sacrifice of the individual to collectivism. Everyone emphasized the book’s moral character. And yet Henri had set the story in the Resistance almost by pure chance. He had thought of a man and of a situation, of a certain relationship between man’s past life and the crisis through which he was passing, and of a great many other things which none of the critics mentioned. Was it his fault or the readers’? The public, Henri was forced to conclude, had liked a completely different book from the one he believed he was offering them.

‘What are you planning to do today?’ he asked affectionately.

‘Nothing special.’

‘But what?’

Paula considered. ‘Well, I think I’ll ring up my dressmaker and get her to take a look at those beautiful materials you brought back.’

‘And after that?’

‘Oh, I always manage to find something to do,’ she said gaily.

‘By that you mean you have nothing at all to do,’ Henri said. He looked at Paula severely. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you during the last month. I think it’s a crime for you to spend your days vegetating inside these four walls.’

‘You call this vegetating!’ Paula said. She smiled gently, the way she used to long ago, and there was all the wisdom of the world in that smile. ‘When you love someone, you’re not vegetating.’

‘But loving isn’t a vocation.’

She interrupted him. ‘You’re wrong. For me, it is a vocation.’

‘I’ve been thinking over what I said to you on Christmas Eve,’ he said, ‘and I’m sure I was right. You’ve got to take up singing again.’

‘For years I’ve been living exactly the same way I do now,’ Paula said. ‘Why are you suddenly so concerned?’

‘During the war it was possible to be satisfied to just kill time. But the war is over now. Listen to me,’ he said authoritatively, ‘you’re going to tell old man Grépin that you want to go back to work. I’ll help you choose your songs; I’ll even try to write a few for you, and I’ll ask the boys if they’d care to try their hand at it, too. Come to think of it, that would be right up Julien’s alley! I’m sure he’d be able to write a few charming ballads for you, and Brugere could put them to music. Just wait and see the repertoire we’ll put together! Whenever you’re ready, Sabriro’ll give you an audition, and I guarantee he’ll get you star booking at the 45 Club. After that, you’re made!’

He realized he had spoken too volubly, with too much enthusiasm. Paula gave him a look of startled reproach. ‘And then what?’ she said. ‘Will I mean any more to you if you see my name on posters?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t be foolish! Of course not. But it’s better to be doing something than to do nothing. I try to write, and you ought to sing because you’ve got a real gift for it.’

‘I’m alive and I love you. To me, that’s not nothing.’

‘You’re playing with words,’ he said impatiently. ‘Why don’t you want to give it a try? Have you become so lazy? Or are you afraid? Or what?’

‘Listen,’ she said in a voice suddenly grown hard, ‘even if all those vanities – success, fame – still meant something to me, I wouldn’t start out on a second-rate career at the ripe age of thirty-seven. When I sacrificed that tour in Brazil for you, it was a final retirement. I have no regrets. Let’s just forget the whole thing.’

Henri opened his mouth to protest. Without consulting him, she had only too willingly decided to make that sacrifice, and now she seemed to be holding him responsible for it! He held his tongue and gave Paula a perplexed look. He had never been able to decide whether she really scorned fame or whether she was afraid of not being able to attain it.

‘Your voice is as beautiful as ever,’ he said. ‘And so are you.’

‘Not quite,’ she replied impatiently, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I know exactly how it would turn out. To make you happy, a handful of intellectuals would proclaim my genius for a few months. And then – good-bye. I might have been a Damia or a Piaf, but I missed my chance. Well, it’s too bad! Let’s drop it.’

She could never become a great star now, no doubt about that. But it would take only some small success to make her lower her sights. In any event, her life would certainly be less wretched if only she took an active interest in something. ‘And it would be ideal for me!’ he said to himself. He knew only too well that the problem concerned his own life even more than Paula’s.

‘Even if you can’t take the world by storm, it would still be worth it,’ he said. ‘You have your voice, your special talent. Don’t you think it would be interesting to try to get all you can out of it? I’m certain you’d find life a lot more satisfying.’

‘But I find it satisfying enough as it is,’ she replied, a look of exaltation brightening her face. ‘You don’t seem to understand what my love for you means to me.’

‘I do understand! But,’ he continued cuttingly, ‘you won’t do, for love of me, what I ask you to do.’

‘If you had good reasons for asking, I’d do it,’ she said gravely.

‘Actually, of course, you prefer your reasons to mine.’

‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘Because they’re better. You’ve been giving me a purely superficial point of view, worldly reasons that aren’t really your own.’

‘Well, as for your point of view, I honestly don’t see what it is!’ he said peevishly. He stood up; it was useless to continue the discussion. He would try instead to confront her with a fait accompli – bring her songs, make appointments for her. ‘All right, let’s drop it. But I’m telling you, you’re wrong.’

She hesitated a moment, smiled, and then asked, ‘Are you going to go to work now?’

‘Yes.’

‘On your novel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said.

He climbed the stairs. He was anxious to get back to his writing, and he was happy at the thought that his novel, at least, wasn’t going to be the slightest bit edifying. He still had no exact idea of what he was going to do; the only assignment he had set himself was to enjoy himself fully in being sincere. He spread his notes in front of him – almost a hundred pages. It was good to have put them away for a month; now he would be able to reread them with a fresh eye. He plunged into them joyfully, happy to rediscover memories and impressions formed into careful and smooth-flowing sentences. But after a while he began to worry. What was he going to do with all this stuff? These scribblings had neither head nor tail, even though they did have something in common – a certain feeling, a climate, the climate of the pre-war era. And that suddenly bothered him. He had thought vaguely, ‘I shall try to give the flavour of my life.’ As if such a thing were a perfume, labelled, trade-mark-registered, always the same, year after year. But the things he had to say about travelling, for example, were all in terms of a young man of twenty-five, the young man he had been in 1935; they had nothing at all to do with what he had experienced in Portugal. The story of his affair with Paula was equally dated; neither Lambert, not Vincent, nor any of the boys he knew would have any similar reactions today. And besides, with five years of living under the German occupation behind her, a young woman of twenty-seven would be very different from Paula. There was one solution: deliberately to place the book around 1935. But he had no desire to write a ‘period’ novel recreating a world that no longer was. On the contrary, what he had hoped for in jotting down those lines was to throw himself life and whole on to paper. Well then, he would have to write the story in the present, transposing the characters and events. ‘Transpose – what an annoying word! what a stupid word!’ he said to himself. ‘It’s preposterous, the liberties one takes with the characters in a novel. They’re transported from one century to the next, pulled out of one country and pushed into another, the present of one person is glued to the past of a second. And all of it is larded with personal fantasies. If you look closely enough, every character in a novel is a monster, and all art consists in preventing the reader from looking too closely. All right then, let’s not transpose. Let’s make up characters out of whole cloth, characters who have nothing at all in common with Paula, with Louis, with myself. I’ve done it before. Only this time it was the truth about my own experiences that I wanted to tell …’ He pushed aside the stack of notes. Yes, it was a bad idea, this setting things down haphazardly. The best way was to proceed as usual, to begin with an outline, with a precise purpose. ‘But what purpose? What truth do I want to express? My truth. But what does that really mean?’ He looked dully at the blank page. ‘It’s frightening, plunging into empty space with nothing to clutch at. Maybe I have nothing more to say,’ he thought. But instead it seemed to him that he had never really said anything at all. He had everything to say, like everyone else, always. But everything is too much. He remembered an old couplet painted on a plate: ‘We enter, we cry, and that is life; we cry, we leave, and that is death.’ What more was there to add? ‘We all live on the same planet, we are born from a womb, and one day we’ll serve to fatten worms. Yes, we all have the same story. Why then should I consider it mine alone and decide that it’s up to me to tell it?’ He yawned; he had had too little sleep, and that blank page made him feel dizzy. He was sunk in apathy. You can’t write anything apathetically; you’ve got to climb back to the surface of life where the moments and individuals count, individually. But if he shook off that torpor all he would find was worry. ‘L’Espoir – a local sheet. Was it true? When I try to influence opinion, am I simply being an idealist? Instead of sitting here dreaming in front of this piece of paper, I’d do a lot better to start studying Marx seriously.’ Yes, it had become urgent now. He had to set up a schedule and stick to it. He should really have done it long ago. His excuse to himself had been that he was caught up in the tide of events and was forced to give his attention to more pressing problems. But he had also wasted time; ever since the liberation he had been in a state of euphoria, a totally unjustified euphoria. He got up. He was incapable of concentrating on anything at all this morning; his conversation with Dubreuilh the night before had shaken him too much. Besides, he had correspondence to catch up on; he was anxious to find out from Sézenac whether Preston would be able to get them the paper they wanted; and he still hadn’t gone to the Quai d’Orsay to deliver das Viernas’ letter. ‘I’ll take care of that straight away,’ he decided.

‘May I see Monsieur Tournelle for a moment? My name is Henri Perron. I have a message for him.’

The secretary handed Henri a printed form. ‘Please write your name and address and the reason for your visit,’ she said.

He took out his fountain pen. What possible reason could he give? Interest in a wild dream? He knew how futile the whole business was. He wrote: ‘Confidential’.

‘There you are,’ he said.

With an indulgent air, the secretary took the form and walked towards the door. Her smile and her dignified walk made it very clear that the administrative assistant to a cabinet minister was a person much too important to barge in on without an appointment. Henri looked pityingly at the thick white envelope he was holding in his hand. He had played out the comedy, and now it was no longer possible to escape reality. Poor das Viernas would soon find himself the victim of a cruel reply, or of silence.

The secretary reappeared. ‘Monsieur Tournelle will be happy to see you as soon as he has a moment. In the meantime you can leave your message with me and I’ll see that he gets it at once!’

‘Thank you,’ Henri said, handing her the envelope. Never had it seemed more absurd to him than in the hands of that competent young woman. All right, that was it. He had done what he had been asked to do; whatever happened after that no longer concerned him. He decided to stop off at the Bar Rouge. It was a few minutes past noon and Lachaume would surely be there; Henri wanted to thank him for his review. Opening the door, he caught sight of Nadine seated with Lachaume and Vincent.

‘Where have you been hiding?’ she said in a sulky voice.

‘I’ve been working.’ He sat down beside her and ordered a drink.

‘We were just talking about you,’ Lachaume said cheerfully. ‘About your interview in Lendemain. You did right in bringing things out in the open. I mean about allied policy in Spain.’

‘Why don’t you do it?’ Vincent asked.

‘We can’t. At least not just now. But it’s good someone did it.’

‘That’s really funny!’ Vincent said.

‘You just don’t want to understand anything,’ Lachaume said.

‘I understand only too damned well.’

‘No, you don’t, not at all.’

Henri sipped his drink and listened idly. Lachaume never let an opportunity slip by to explain the present, the past, and the future as reviewed and revised by the Party. But this couldn’t be held against him. At twenty, in the Maquis, he had discovered adventure, comradeship, and Communism. And that was excuse enough for his fanaticism. ‘I like him because I did him a favour,’ Henri thought ironically. He had hidden him in Paula’s studio for three months, had obtained false papers for him, and in parting had made him a present of his only overcoat.

‘By the way,’ Henri said abruptly, ‘I’d like to thank you for your review. It was really wonderful.’

‘I said exactly what I thought,’ Lachaume replied. ‘Besides, everyone agrees with me – it’s one hell of a book.’

‘Yes, it’s funny,’ Nadine said. ‘For once all the critics agree. It’s as if they were burying someone or awarding a prize for virtue.’

‘You might have something there!’ Henri said. ‘The little viper,’ he thought with amused bitterness, ‘she found just the words I didn’t want to say, not even to myself.’ He smiled at Lachaume. ‘You’re dead wrong on one point, though. My man will never become a Communist.’

‘What else do you expect him to become?’

Henri laughed. ‘Just what I’ve become!’ he said.

Lachaume laughed in turn. ‘Precisely!’ He looked Henri in the eyes. ‘In less than six months, the SRL will no longer exist and you’ll have realized that individualism doesn’t pay. You’ll join the Communist Party.’

Henri shook his head. ‘But I do more for you as I am. You’re delighted I brought the Spanish thing out in the open instead of your having to do it. And what good would it do if L’Espoir rehashed the same stuff L’Humanité prints? I’m doing much more useful work trying to make people think, asking questions that you don’t ask, telling certain truths that you don’t tell.’

‘But you ought to be doing that work as a Communist,’ Lachaume said.

‘They wouldn’t let me!’

‘Of course they would. It’s true there’s too much factionalism in the Party just now, but that’s because of circumstances. It won’t last forever.’ Lachaume paused a moment and then said, ‘Don’t repeat this, but some of my friends and I are hoping to start a magazine of our own pretty soon, a magazine with a little scope, in which everything will be discussed with complete freedom.’