The Mandarins. Simone Beauvoir de
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