Sagan Françoise

Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

Françoise Sagan

BONJOUR TRISTESSE AND A CERTAIN SMILE

Translated and with Notes by Heather Lloyd

With an Introduction by Rachel Cusk

Contents

Introduction

BONJOUR TRISTESSE

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

A CERTAIN SMILE

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Part Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Translator’s Note

Notes

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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

BONJOUR TRISTESSE AND A CERTAIN SMILE

Françoise Sagan, born Françoise Quoirez in 1935, was the daughter of a prosperous industrialist. She was only eighteen and had failed her foundation-year examinations at the Sorbonne when she completed her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse. For its publication in 1954 she replaced her original surname by a nom de plume taken from Proust’s character the Princesse de Sagan. As a coming-of-age novel, Bonjour Tristesse was a huge succès de scandale. The fact that it had been written by a young woman of impeccably bourgeois credentials was also a source of fascination to the French public and, as well as attracting critical acclaim, Sagan rapidly gained celebrity status. Her eagerly awaited second novel, A Certain Smile, followed in 1956. Sagan’s other works of fiction include Those Without Shadows, Aimez-vous Brahms …?, La Chamade, The Heart-Keeper, Sunlight on Cold Water, Scars on the Soul, The Unmade Bed, The Painted Lady, The Still Storm, Painting in Blood, Silken Eyes and Incidental Music. She also wrote for the theatre and produced several collections of personal reminiscences. Her work has been widely translated. Françoise Sagan died in 2004.

Heather Lloyd divides her time between Scotland and south-west France. She was previously Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow where she taught French literature of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. As well as a study of Bonjour Tristesse, she has published work on Françoise Sagan as an incarnation of literary celebrity.

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967. After spending much of her childhood in Los Angeles, she finished her education in England, reading English at New College, Oxford. Her much praised debut novel, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993.This was followed by The Temporary (1995); The Country Life, which earned the 1997 Somerset Maugham Award; A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001); The Lucky Ones, shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Novel Award; In the Fold (2005); Arlington Park (2006), shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction; The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009); and The Bradshaw Variations (2009). In 2003 Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty Best of Young British Novelists. Her most recent book is Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012).

Introduction

New readers are warned that the introduction reveals details of the plot.

It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can sometimes become fate. The fiction lays a fetter on the life. To the reader, as often as not, it will all seem to be part of the same story. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in The Great Gatsby. Albert Camus, more eerily, foretold precisely the manner of his death in La Chute. Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters: the suspicion that literature occurs entirely within the bounds of personality is confirmed. A kind of disappointment afflicts our feelings about writers, as it does not those about other artists. It is as though they, with their mortal grasp on the faculty of imagination, have crushed our illusions about human destiny. They have described existence, but they have failed to transcend it. They have failed to provide us with a happy ending.

The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death in 2004 were full of the sense of this failure. She had become, we were told, a tragic, pitiable figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, published when she was eighteen. In that book, Bonjour Tristesse, she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of post-war Europe on the cusp of the sixties. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and the amorality of her life that interested the obituary-writers. For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine Cécile, Françoise Sagan never escaped. Bonjour Tristesse concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving invariably forms part of the legend of her life, received severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed. The disappointment among the obituary-writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny is palpable.

If there is hedonism, if there is amorality in Bonjour Tristesse, then it is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense Sagan is far more of a classicist than her Existentialist brethren Sartre and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioural norms, but in Bonjour Tristesse those norms are as much psychical as societal. Cécile, a motherless seventeen-year-old whose permissive, feckless father has provided the only yardstick for her values and personal conduct, offers Sagan a particularly naked example of the human sensibility taking shape. Cécile’s encounters with questions of right and wrong, and with the way those questions cut across her physical and emotional desires, constitute an interrogation of morality that it is difficult to credit as the work of an eighteen-year-old author. What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it necessary? Is it intrinsic to human nature? Is it possible to lack a moral sense, and if so does that discredit morality itself? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this brief and disturbing novel.

Cécile and her father, Raymond, have decided to rent a summer villa on the Côte d’Azur for two months. Raymond is bringing his girlfriend, Elsa, along for the holiday, though Cécile is anxious that the reader should not disapprove: ‘I should explain the situation right away, as it could give the wrong impression. My father was forty and had been a widower for fifteen years.’ Notice that it is Raymond who has been bereaved, not Cécile herself: she tells us only that she had been at boarding school until two years earlier. Later, she remembers her father’s embarrassment at her ugly uniform and plaited hair when he came to collect her from the station. It is as though they had not seen each other in the intervening years; as though Cécile, between the ages of two and fifteen, was an orphan. ‘Then, once we were in the car, there had been his burst of sudden, triumphant joy because I had his eyes and his mouth and because I was going to be for him the dearest, most marvellous of toys.’

At the villa the trio are contentedly idle. They swim and sunbathe; they are untroubled by the sense of duty or compunction. Raymond does beach exercises to diminish his belly. The beautiful, vapid, red-haired Elsa badly burns her skin. Cécile, who has recently failed her exams at the Sorbonne, lies on the beach running sand through her fingers: ‘I told myself that it was trickling away like time, and that it was facile to think like that and that it was pleasant having facile thoughts. It was summertime.’ One day, a young man capsizes his sailing boat in their creek – this is Cyril, an ardent, good-looking, conventional university student who offers to teach Cécile how to sail, and is the ideal prospect for a summer romance.

Chance, impulse, happenstance: this is how life unfolds in the unexamined world of Raymond and Cécile. They do not concern themselves with order and structure, the imposition of the will, the resistance to certain desires and the aspiration towards certain goals. Even Elsa merely submits to the sun’s power to burn her. Is this the correct way to live? The question does not arise; there is no one to ask it. Until, that is, Raymond announces one evening that he has invited a woman named Anne Larsen to stay. The first thing we learn about Anne is that she was a friend of Cécile’s dead mother. With the mother, the whole lost world of order, nurture and morality is powerfully invoked. Anne, it is clear, is the emissary of that world: ‘I knew that, as soon as Anne arrived, complete relaxation would no longer be possible,’ says Cécile. ‘Anne gave things a certain shape and words a certain sense that my father and I preferred to disregard. She set the standards for good taste and discretion and you couldn’t help detecting what these were in her sudden with-drawals, her lapses into pained silence or her use of particular expressions.’ Anne is beautiful, sophisticated, successful; and unlike Cécile, Raymond and Elsa, she is an adult, with an adult’s power of censure and moral judgement.

Cyril, too, is an adult – he is shocked by Raymond and Elsa’s ménage, and apologizes to Cécile for kissing her. ‘You have no protection against me … For all you know I could be a complete bastard,’ he says in a way that suggests he is anything but that. When Anne arrives, it is clear that she means to take Raymond and Cécile in hand. It is clear, too, that she is in love with Raymond, and that Raymond has reached for her in a bid to escape the pleasurable anomie of his circumstances and the childlike emotional world that he inhabits with Cécile. Elsa is dispatched; the mature, glacial, controlling Anne is installed. Soon she and Raymond announce their plans to marry; immediately, Anne begins to impose her will on Cécile. She orders her to eat more, to study in her room instead of going to the beach, to cease outright her relations with Cyril. Is this love or is it hatred? Is it nurture or is it control? Is it common sense, or the jealousy of a constricted older woman for her uninhibited step-daughter? Is it what Cécile has missed out on by not having a mother of her own, or what her motherlessness has exposed her to?

Sagan records clearly the effect the change in regime has on Cécile: ‘Yes, that was what I held against Anne: she prevented me from liking myself … because of her I was entering a world of reproaches and guilt … For the first time in my life this “self” of mine seemed to divide in two.’ In one sense, then, morality is a form of self-hatred; it is a wound one assuages by wounding others in precisely the same way. But Anne has done something else – she has stolen Cécile’s father, her one source of unconditional love. Raymond is now ‘growing away’ from his daughter; he ‘was abandoning me and rendering me defenceless’. Cécile the divided girl is forced into immorality: she wishes to get rid of Anne and regain Raymond. Her actual powerlessness gives rise to fantasies of power, and these thoughts cause her to oscillate between hatred and terrible guilt. Here, then, is another indictment of morality, as it is lived by Anne. Anne has fomented violence in Cécile’s pacific nature. By controlling and censuring her, and by interfering with her source of love, she has given her the capacity to do wrong.

This is a masterly portrait of primal human bonds and needs that cannot but be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children, and the psychical consequences of different forms of upbringing. One day, Anne locks Cécile in her room, after an argument about schoolwork. At first Cécile panics, and flings herself at the door like a wild animal. Then her heart is hardened, her duplicity sealed: ‘I lay down on my bed and carefully drew up a plan.’ The form her revenge takes occupies the final section of the book, and is almost theatrical in its psychological grandeur. Cécile chooses as her tools her father’s childishness, Anne’s intransigence, Elsa’s vanity and Cyril’s responsible nature, and with them she forges a plot in which each of the four is utterly at her mercy. As a dramatist she experiences, for the first time, complete power over others. Her plot is tragic and bitter, but it plays uninterrupted to its end. Neither right nor wrong, neither conformity nor permissiveness, neither love nor hatred winds up the victor of this moral battle: it is insight, the writer’s greatest gift, that wins.

Sagan’s second novel, A Certain Smile, is in many ways a sequel to Bonjour Tristesse. Several of the familiar themes are there: the search for and betrayal of the lost mother; the double nature of father/lover and lover/brother; the defence of boredom or nothingness as a moral position more truthful than conventionality. Dominique, a law student at the Sorbonne, meets Luc, the married uncle of her boyfriend, Bertrand. Luc and his gentle, kindly wife, Françoise, take Dominique under their wing, for she is uncared-for and alone, the daughter of distant provincial parents rendered more remote by their unassuageable grief over the death some years earlier of ‘a son’, as Dominique expresses it. Like Cécile, Dominique struggles to maintain the dignity of her own reality, to assert its truth, however abnormal other people might claim to find it. ‘I was fine, and yet, inside of me, like some warm, living creature, there was always that hankering for languor, solitude and sometimes exaltation.

Luc quickly begins to make advances towards Dominique, even as Françoise is enveloping her in mother-love. Dominique profits from their attention, but can find no moral path through it, for the two forms of affection – sexual and parental – are confused. Luc proposes that Dominique come away with him and have a brief affair, at the end of which he will return to Françoise. Once again, the father-figure is identified with an aberrant morality that results in the girl’s betrayal of the mother-figure. More importantly, he denies her emotional reality: according to Luc, his affair with Dominique can proceed only on the basis that she does not love him. The nature of love is the novel’s central preoccupation. The uncanny maturity that made Sagan’s name as a novelist is most strongly in evidence in her fearless and astute portrayal of love as a psychical event that has its roots in family life and the early formation of personality. To the modern reader, Luc’s conduct towards Dominique has strong undercurrents of abuse: her violent emotional trauma in the aftermath of the affair, and the novel’s exquisitely ambivalent ending in which the subjective death and rebirth of Dominique is described, go far beyond poignancy or even frankness. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ Dominique finds her-self repeating, without knowing why. Sagan’s sense of emotional tragedy is indeed that of the great dramatists.

‘Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters,’ Sagan said in an interview, shortly before the publication of A Certain Smile. In Bonjour Tristesse, this structural tenet is illustrated almost sculpturally by Cécile’s description of the three adults standing on the stairs the night Raymond transfers his affections from Elsa to Anne: ‘I recall the scene exactly. Immediately in front of me I was looking at Anne’s golden neck and perfect shoulders. A little lower down stood my father with a dazzled expression on his face and with his hand outstretched. And already fading into the distance was the silhouette of Elsa.’ These two novels, so spare and rigorous, so artistically correct, so thorough in their psychological realism, are the highest expression of the triangular purity of their author’s strange and beautiful esthétique.

Rachel Cusk, 2008

BONJOUR TRISTESSE

Farewell to sadness

Sadness hello

You are written in the lines on the ceiling

You are written in the eyes that I love

You are not the same as wretchedness

For the poorest lips reproach you

With a smile

Sadness hello

Lovers’ bodies love you

You are the force in love

And what’s lovely in you looms

Like some disembodied thing

Just a look that’s disappointed

Sadness you are fair of face

Paul Éluard, La Vie immédiate^1

PART ONE

One

This strange new feeling of mine, obsessing me by its sweet languor, is such that I am reluctant to dignify it with the fine, solemn name of ‘sadness’. It is a feeling so self-indulgent and complete in itself that I am almost ashamed of it, whereas I had always looked upon sadness as being a worthy emotion. Before, I did not know what sadness was, though I knew what it was to be languorous, to have regrets and, more rarely, to feel remorse. Today it is as if I am enfolded in some silken thing, soft and enervating, that sets me apart from others.

In the summer in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy. The ‘others’ were my father and Elsa, his mistress. I should explain the situation right away, as it could give the wrong impression. My father was forty and had been a widower for fifteen years. He was a youthful man, full of life and possibilities, and two years previously, when I had left boarding school, I could not have failed to realize that he was living with a woman, though it took me longer to accept that it would be a different one every six months! But soon his charm, my easy-going new life and my own disposition brought me round to the idea. He was a light-hearted individual, a good businessman, someone who was always curious but who quickly tired of things, and he was attractive to women. I found him an easy person to love, and I loved him dearly, for he was kind, generous, lively and full of affection for me. I cannot imagine a better or more amusing friend. At the start of the summer he was even good enough to ask me whether it would be a nuisance to me during the holidays to have the company of Elsa, his current mistress. I could not but give him an encouraging reply because I knew his need for women and I also knew that having Elsa would not be a problem for us. She was a tall, red-headed girl, a mixture of playmate and sophisticate, who hung out in the cinemas and bars of the Champs-Élysées. She was very sweet, rather dim and quite unpretentious. Besides, my father and I were so pleased just to be going away that we had no objection to anything. He had rented a large white villa on the Mediterranean, a gorgeous, secluded house that we had been dreaming of since the beginning of the warm weather in June. It stood on a promontory overlooking the sea and was hidden from the road by a pine wood. A goat-track led down to a little sun-drenched inlet edged with rust-coloured rocks where the sea swayed back and forth.

The first few days were glorious. We spent hours on the beach, overwhelmed by the heat and gradually acquiring a healthy golden tan, except for Elsa, who was having a terrible time, going red and peeling. My father worked through various complicated leg exercises with the aim of getting rid of a small paunch that did not suit his image as a lady-killer. I was in the water from dawn. It was cool, clear water and I would get thoroughly immersed in it and tire myself out with uncoordinated exertions in an attempt to wash away all the murk and dust of Paris. I would stretch out on the sand, take up a handful and then let it trickle through my fingers in a gentle yellow stream. I told myself that it was trickling away like time, and that it was facile to think like that and that it was pleasant having facile thoughts. It was summertime.

On the sixth day I saw Cyril for the first time. He was hugging the coast in a little sailing boat and he capsized at the mouth of our inlet. I helped him rescue his belongings and, as we laughed together, I learnt that he was called Cyril, that he was a law student and that he was spending his holidays with his mother in a neighbouring villa. He had a typically Latin face, very brown, very open, and he had a sensible, reliable look about him that I immediately liked. Yet I normally avoided university students, whom I considered to be coarse and preoccupied with themselves and, above all, preoccupied with their own youth: to them just being young was a drama in itself, or an excuse for being bored. I did not like young people. I much preferred my father’s friends, men of forty, who spoke to me with courtesy and affection, and treated me with the gentleness of a father or lover. But I liked Cyril. He was tall and could sometimes appear handsome, with a type of handsomeness that inspired confidence. I did not share my father’s aversion to ugliness, which often led us to associate with stupid people. Even so, whenever I was faced with people who were without any physical charm, I experienced a sort of uneasiness, a sense of remoteness; the fact that they were resigned to being unattractive struck me as being an unseemly failing on their part. For, after all, what was our aim in life, if not to be attractive to others? I still do not know today whether this desire to captivate stems from a surfeit of energy, or whether what lies behind it is a desire to control, or a covert, unacknowledged need to feel reassured and confirmed in oneself.

On departing, Cyril offered to teach me to sail. I went back in for dinner quite absorbed in thinking about him, and I took little or no part in the conversation; indeed I barely noticed that my father was agitated. After dinner we stretched out on reclining chairs on the terrace, as we did every evening. The sky was studded with stars. I gazed up at them, vaguely hoping that they would be in advance of the season and would begin to fall, streaking through the sky. But it was only the beginning of July, too early for shooting stars. In the gravel of the terrace the cicadas were singing. There must have been thousands of them, drunk with the heat and the moonlight, uttering that strange cry of theirs all night long. I had had it explained to me that all they were doing was rubbing one outer wing against the other, but I preferred to believe in a song coming from their throats, as guttural and instinctive as the call of cats in the mating season. We were completely at ease; all that prevented me from succumbing to the gentle onslaught of sleep were the tiny grains of sand between my skin and my blouse. It was at that point that my father gave a little cough and sat up on his recliner.

‘I’ve news for you,’ he said. ‘Someone is coming to stay.’

I closed my eyes in despair. We were having too peaceful a time of it, it just couldn’t last!

‘Quick, tell us who it is!’ exclaimed Elsa, who was always keen to hear about what was going on socially.

‘It’s Anne Larsen,’ said my father, and he turned to face me.

I just looked at him, too astonished to react.

‘I told her to come if her season’s collections left her exhausted and, well, she’s coming.’

I would never have thought it. Anne Larsen had been an old friend of my mother’s and had had very little to do with my father. Even so, when I had left boarding school two years previously, my father, having no idea what to do with me, had packed me off to her. Within a week she had dressed me tastefully and had given me some lessons in life. As a result I had become imbued with a passionate admiration for her, which she had skilfully deflected on to a young man of her acquaintance. So it was to her that I owed my introduction to elegance and my first flirtation, and I was most grateful to her for that. At forty-two she was a very attractive woman, much sought-after, with a beautiful face that was proud, world-weary and aloof. This aloofness was the only thing that could be held against her. She was pleasant yet distant. Everything about her denoted an unwavering will and a serenity that was actually intimidating. Although she was divorced and, in that sense, free, she was not known to have lovers. In any case, we did not move in the same circles: she spent her time with people who were sharp, intelligent and discreet, whereas the people we spent time with were noisy and insatiable – all that my father asked of them was that they be either good-looking or amusing. I think she rather despised us – my father and me – because of our fondness for entertainment and frivolity, in the same way that she despised anything taken to extremes. The only things that connected us were business dinners (she worked in fashion and my father in advertising), the memory of my mother and my own efforts to keep in touch, for, even though she intimidated me, I greatly admired her. In short, her sudden arrival seemed somewhat inconvenient, bearing in mind Elsa’s presence and Anne’s views on education.

After asking a host of questions about Anne’s social standing, Elsa went up to bed. I remained alone with my father and came and sat on the steps, at his feet. He leant forward and placed his hands on my shoulders.

‘Why are you so skinny, my pet? You look like a little wildcat. I’d rather have a beautiful, blonde-haired daughter, quite buxom, with china-blue eyes and …’

‘That’s not the issue,’ I said. ‘Why have you invited Anne? And why has she accepted?’

‘Maybe she wants to see your old father. You never know.’

‘You’re not the type of man that Anne is interested in,’ I said. ‘She’s too intelligent, she has too much self-respect. And what about Elsa? Have you thought of her? Can you imagine the conversations Anne and Elsa would have? I can’t!’

‘I didn’t think of that,’ he confessed. ‘I admit it’s a horrifying thought. Cécile, my pet, what if we just went back to Paris?’

He was laughing softly and rubbing the back of my neck. I turned to look at him. His dark eyes were gleaming. They had funny little wrinkles round the edges and his mouth turned up slightly. He looked like a faun. I began to laugh along with him, as I always did when he created complications for himself.

‘My old accomplice,’ he said. ‘What would I do without you?’

And I knew, from the conviction and tenderness in his voice, that without me he would have been unhappy. Late into the night we talked of love and its complications. In my father’s eyes these were purely imaginary. He categorically rejected all notions of fidelity, earnestness or commitment, explaining to me that they were arbitrary and sterile. Coming from anyone else, these views would have shocked me. But I knew that, in his case, they did not rule out either tenderness or devotion, these being feelings which he entertained all the more readily because he believed them to be, indeed knew they were, transient. I was greatly attracted to the concept of love affairs that were rapidly embarked upon, intensely experienced and quickly over. At the age I was, fidelity held no attraction. I knew little of love, apart from its trysts, its kisses and its lethargies.

Two

Anne was not due to arrive for another week. I made the most of those last few days of real holiday. We had rented the villa for two months but I knew that, as soon as Anne arrived, complete relaxation would no longer be possible. Anne gave things a certain shape and words a certain sense that my father and I preferred to disregard. She set the standards for good taste and discretion and you couldn’t help detecting what these were in her sudden withdrawals, her lapses into pained silence or her use of particular expressions. It was both energizing and exhausting, and ultimately it was humiliating, because I sensed that she was right.

On the day of her arrival it was decided that my father and Elsa would go to meet her at the station in Fréjus.2 I categorically refused to take part in the expedition. In desperation my father picked all the gladioli in the garden to be able to present them to her as she got off the train. I merely advised him not to get Elsa to carry the bouquet. Once they had gone, at three o’clock, I went down to the beach. It was oppressively hot. I stretched out on the sand and fell half asleep, only to be woken by the sound of Cyril’s voice. I opened my eyes: in the heat, the sky was a white blur. I made no reply to Cyril; I did not want to talk to him or anyone else. The strength of that summer heat kept me pinioned to the sand, with arms that felt heavy and a dry mouth.

‘Are you dead?’ he asked. ‘From a distance you looked abandoned, like a piece of flotsam.’

I smiled. He sat down beside me and my heart began to beat with a dull thud because, in sitting down, he had brushed my shoulder with his hand. A dozen times in the previous week my brilliant maritime manoeuvres had thrown us entwined together right into the water without my feeling remotely disturbed. But today all it took was that heat and my drowsiness and his clumsy movement for something within me to come gently adrift. I turned to face him. He was looking at me. I was beginning to get to know him: he was sensible and more virtuous than perhaps was usual for someone of his age. That was why our family situation – I mean, the odd threesome that we formed – was shocking to him. He was either too kind or too shy to tell me so, but I sensed it in the resentful sidelong glances he cast at my father. He would have liked me to be tormented by the situation. But I wasn’t; the only things tormenting me just then were his looking at me and the thumping of my heart. He leant towards me. I had a vision of the last few days of the week just gone, recalling the sense of trust and the serenity I had experienced in his company, and I felt a pang of regret as his wide, rather full mouth came close.

‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘we were so happy …’

He kissed me gently. I looked up at the sky. Then, eyes tight shut, I saw under my lids only bursts of red light. Long minutes passed, filled with heat, giddiness, the taste of our first kisses and our amorous sighs. The sound of a car horn caused us to separate as if we were being caught red-handed. I left Cyril without a word and went back up towards the house. I was astonished at the thought of their having got back so soon, since Anne’s train was not due to have arrived yet. But I found her on the terrace just getting out of her own car.

‘This is like the house of Sleeping Beauty!’ she exclaimed. ‘How brown you are, Cécile! I’m so pleased to see you.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘But have you just come all the way from Paris?’

‘I decided to drive here and now I’m exhausted.’

I showed her to her room. I opened the window in the hope of catching sight of Cyril’s boat but it had disappeared. Anne had sat down on the bed. I noticed the little shadows round her eyes.

‘This is a gorgeous villa,’ she said, breathing a sigh. ‘Where is the master of the house?’

‘He’s gone to fetch you at the station with Elsa.’

I had put her case down on a chair and, turning back in her direction, I received a shock. Her face had suddenly crumpled and her mouth was trembling.

‘Elsa Mackenbourg? He’s brought Elsa Mackenbourg here?’

I could think of nothing to say by way of reply. I looked at her, dumbfounded. That face of hers, which I had only ever seen so calm and controlled, now lay open to my astonished scrutiny. She was staring at me through the fog of images that my words had conjured up for her. At length she actually saw me and she turned her head away.

‘I should have let you know in advance,’ she said, ‘but I was in such a hurry to get away, I was so tired …’

‘And now …’ I continued mechanically.

‘Now what?’ she said.

She was looking at me in a disdainful, interrogatory way, as if nothing had happened.

‘Now you’ve arrived,’ I said lamely, rubbing my hands together, ‘I’m very pleased you’re here, I really am. I’ll wait for you downstairs; if you’d like a drink, the bar has everything.’

I stammered my way out of the room and went down the stairs with my thoughts in a whirl. Why had she looked like that? Why that troubled voice and that faltering of hers? I sat down on a recliner and closed my eyes. I tried to remember Anne’s many faces, faces that had looked severe or reassuring, that had expressed irony, effortlessness or authority. I was both touched and irritated at having, for the first time, seen her appear vulnerable. Could it be that she loved my father? Was it even possible for her to love him? There was nothing about him that matched her tastes. He was weak-willed, frivolous, at times supine. But perhaps she was simply tired after her journey or filled with moral indignation. I spent an hour surmising.

At five o’clock my father arrived back with Elsa. I watched him get out of the car. I tried to work out whether Anne could ever love him. He walked briskly towards me with his head tilted back a little. He was smiling. I decided that it was quite possible for Anne to love him, indeed for anyone to love him.

‘Anne wasn’t there,’ he called to me. ‘I hope she hasn’t fallen out of the train.’

‘She’s in her room,’ I said. ‘She came by car.’

‘Really? But that’s wonderful! Would you mind just taking the bouquet up to her?’

‘Did you buy me flowers?’ called Anne’s voice. ‘That’s too kind of you!’

She was making her way downstairs to meet him, relaxed and smiling, in a dress that gave no appearance of having just been unpacked. I was sad to think that she had come down only on hearing the car, when she might have done so a little sooner to talk to me, even if it had only been about my exam, which, as it happened, I had failed. I drew some comfort from that last consideration.

My father, having rushed forward, was kissing her hand.

‘I spent a quarter of an hour on the station platform clutching this bunch of flowers with a silly smile on my face. Thank heavens you’re here! Do you know Elsa Mackenbourg?’

I looked away.

‘We must have met somewhere,’ said Anne, all charm. ‘My room is lovely. It’s extremely kind of you to have invited me here, Raymond. I was very tired.’

My father was in high spirits. As he saw it, everything was going well. He was talking extravagantly and opening bottles. But I kept seeing Cyril’s passionate face alternating with that of Anne’s, both faces marked by intense emotion, and I wondered if the holidays would be as straightforward as my father had said they would be.

That first dinner was very lively. My father and Anne talked about their mutual acquaintances who, although few in number, were colourful characters. I was enjoying it all very much until Anne declared that my father’s business partner had the brain of a flea. This was someone who drank a lot, but he was kind, and my father and I had had some memorable dinners with him.

I protested, saying: ‘Lombard is funny, Anne. I’ve seen him be very amusing.’

‘Even so, you must admit that he’s inadequate, and even his humour …’

‘His type of intelligence isn’t perhaps very common but …’

She interrupted me patronizingly:

‘What you call types of intelligence quite simply amounts to normal intelligence at different ages.’

I was very taken by the elegant finality of her formulation. Certain phrases strike me as having a subtle, intellectual resonance that I find captivating, even if I cannot entirely fathom their meaning. What Anne had just stated made me want to have a little notebook and pencil to hand. I told her so. My father burst out laughing.

‘At least you don’t bear grudges.’

I couldn’t possibly do that, for Anne was not malicious. I felt that she was too utterly aloof to be malicious; the judgements she passed did not have the precise, cutting edge of spite. But they were all the more crushing for it.

That first evening Anne did not seem to notice Elsa’s absent-mindedness, whether feigned or not, in going straight to my father’s bedroom. She had brought me a sweater from her collection but would hear no word of thanks. She was bored by expressions of thanks, and as mine were never equal to my actual enthusiasm for a particular gift, I did not waste my breath.

‘I think Elsa is very sweet,’ she said, as I was about to leave.

She was looking straight at me, without smiling; she was seeking out some thought of mine that she wanted at all costs to eradicate. I was to forget her earlier reaction.

‘Yes, yes, she’s – um – a charming girl, really nice,’ I stammered.

She broke into a laugh and I went off to bed feeling very irritated. I fell asleep thinking of Cyril, who was perhaps in Cannes dancing with girls who were anything but nice.

I realize that I have been forgetting – indeed, that I have had to forget – the most important things: the ever-present sea with its incessant rhythm, and the sun. Nor can I bear to recall the four linden trees in the courtyard of a provincial boarding school and their scent, or my father’s smile as he stood on the station platform two years earlier when I left boarding school – a smile of embarrassment because I had plaits and was wearing a horrid dark-coloured dress. Then, once we were in the car, there had been his burst of sudden, triumphant joy because I had his eyes and his mouth and because I was going to be for him the dearest, most marvellous of toys. I knew nothing, and he was going to show me Paris and introduce me to a life of luxury and indulgence. I do believe that most of the things I took pleasure in during that period simply came down to money – the pleasure of fast driving, of having a new dress, of buying records and books and flowers. I am still not ashamed of enjoying those shallow pleasures, and anyway I only call them shallow because I’ve heard people say they are. It would come more naturally to me to regret or disown any distress or fits of mysticism I may have had. My love of pleasure and happiness constitutes the only consistent aspect of my character. Perhaps I haven’t read enough. At boarding school you don’t read, apart from ‘improving’ books. In Paris I didn’t have time to read: when my classes were over, friends would drag me off to the cinema; they were astonished that I didn’t know the names of the actors in the films. Or they would whisk me off to sit in the sun on café terraces; I revelled in the pleasure of being part of the crowd and having a drink and being with someone who would look into your eyes, take your hand and then lead you away from that same crowd. We would walk through the streets as far as my house. There he would draw me into a doorway and kiss me. I discovered the pleasure to be had from kissing. I am not able to put a specific boy’s name to these memories – whether it was Jean or Hubert or Jacques, which are names familiar to all nice young girls. In the evening I would advance in years and would accompany my father to parties that I had no business being at, all sorts of parties that I found entertaining and at which, being so young, I was myself a source of entertainment. When we got home my father would drop me off and, more often than not, would drive his girlfriend back to her place. I wouldn’t hear him come back in.

I don’t want to give the impression that he made any great show of pursuing his love affairs. All he did was simply not conceal them from me, or, to be more precise, he refrained from telling me things that, although they might have sounded acceptable, would have been untrue and would have been said merely to justify the frequency with which such-and-such a girlfriend had breakfast at our house or to justify her moving in with us – albeit, I’m glad to say, temporarily! In any case, I could not have remained in the dark for long as to the nature of his relationship with his lady ‘guests’, so-called, and he was no doubt anxious to retain my trust, especially since, by doing so, he avoided having to go to troublesome lengths to concoct stories. His calculation was excellent. Its only flaw was that for a time it gave rise in me to a certain disillusioned cynicism where love was concerned, which, in view of my age and experience, must have appeared rather more amusing than impressive. I liked to repeat to myself elegant formulations, including Oscar Wilde’s: ‘Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.’3 I made this dictum my own with total conviction, and much more firmly, I believe, than if I had put it into practice. I thought that my life could be modelled on it, that it could draw inspiration from it, that it could blossom out from it like a kind of morality tale in reverse. I forgot that there are times in life when nothing happens and when things don’t cohere. I forgot about everyday goodness. Ideally I envisaged a life of baseness and moral turpitude.

Three

Next morning I was woken by a warm, slanting ray of sunshine that flooded my bed with light and brought to an end the strange, somewhat confused dreams that I had been wrestling with. Still half asleep, I tried to brush the implacable heat away from my face, then gave up. It was ten o’clock. I went down to the terrace in my pyjamas and found Anne there, glancing through magazines. I noticed that she was lightly but immaculately made-up. It seemed she never allowed herself to be really on holiday. She paid no attention to me so I settled down quietly on a step with a cup of coffee and an orange and started into this delicious morning fare: I bit into the orange and its sweet juice spurted into my mouth. That was followed straight away by a gulp of scalding black coffee and then again came the coolness of the fruit. The morning sun was warming my hair and smoothing out the marks that the sheet had left on my skin. In five minutes I would be going for a swim. Anne’s voice made me jump.

‘Cécile, are you not eating?’

‘I prefer just a drink in the morning because …’

‘You need to gain three kilos to be presentable. Your cheeks are hollow and your ribs are showing. Go and get yourself some bread and butter.’

I begged her not to force me to eat bread and butter, and she was about to explain to me why it was essential that I do when my father appeared in his luxurious polka-dot dressing gown.

‘What a charming scene!’ he joked. ‘Two little brown girls in the sun chatting away about bread-and-butter matters.’

‘Alas, there’s only one little girl,’ said Anne, laughing. ‘I’m the same age as you, my dear Raymond.’

My father leant forward and took her hand.

‘As severe as ever,’ he said tenderly, and I saw Anne’s eyelids flutter as if they had been unexpectedly caressed.

I took the opportunity to make myself scarce. On the stairs I met Elsa. It was obvious that she had just got out of bed. Her eyelids were swollen and her lips were pale against the crimson of her sunburnt face. I nearly stopped her, I nearly told her that Anne was downstairs with a flawless, well-cared-for face and that she was going to tan prudently, with no ill effects. I nearly warned her to be on her guard. But she would no doubt have taken it badly. She was twenty-nine, thirteen years younger than Anne, and, as she saw it, that gave her a major advantage.

I fetched my swimsuit and ran to the inlet. To my surprise Cyril was there already, sitting on his boat. He came towards me looking serious and took my hands.

‘I would like to apologize for yesterday,’ he said.

‘It was my fault,’ I replied.

I did not feel in any way embarrassed by what had happened and I was astonished by his air of solemnity.

‘I feel very bad about it,’ he went on, pushing the boat into the water.

‘There’s really nothing to apologize for,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Yes, there is.’

I was already in the little boat. He was standing up to his knees in the water, leaning with both hands on its gunwale as if he were making a plea in court. I realized that he would not climb in until he had had his say, so I paid him the attention required. I knew his face well, I could make sense of it. It occurred to me that, being twenty-five, he perhaps saw himself as a seducer of minors, and that made me laugh.

‘Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘I felt bad about it yesterday evening, you know. You have no protection against me, not in your father, nor in that woman. You have no example to go by. For all you know I could be a complete bastard, and you would be just as likely to trust me.’

There wasn’t even anything ridiculous about him. I felt that he was kind, and ready to love me, and that I would love to love him. I put my arms around his neck and laid my cheek against his. He had broad shoulders and his body felt hard against mine.

‘You’re very nice, Cyril,’ I murmured. ‘You’ll be like a brother to me.’

He put his arms round me with an angry little exclamation and gently pulled me out of the boat. He held me close to him, raised up so that my head was on his shoulder. At that moment I loved him. In the morning light he was as golden-skinned, as kind and gentle as I was myself. He was protecting me. When his mouth sought mine I began to tremble with pleasure, as he did, and we kissed without remorse or shame, simply searching each other out and murmuring from time to time. I broke free and swam towards the boat, which was drifting away. I plunged my face into the water to cool it down and regain my composure. The water was emerald. I was filled with a sense of perfect happiness and freedom from care.

At half past eleven Cyril went off and my father and his women appeared along the goat-track. He was walking between the two of them, supporting them, proffering a hand to each in turn with an unaffected graciousness that was all his own. Anne was still wearing her towelling robe. She removed it in leisurely fashion before our watching eyes and lay down on it. She had a slim waist and perfect legs, and was virtually without a blemish. This was no doubt the result of years of care and attention. I automatically shot my father a look, my eyebrow raised in approval. To my great surprise he did not return my look, but closed his eyes. Poor Elsa was in a terrible way and was plastering herself with oil. I reckoned it would take my father less than a week to … Anne turned her head towards me:

‘Cécile, why do you get up so early here? In Paris you would lie in bed till noon.’

‘I had studying to do there,’ I said. ‘It wore me out.’

She didn’t smile. She only ever smiled when she wanted to, never out of politeness like everyone else.

‘And what about that exam of yours?’

‘I flunked it!’ I said brightly. ‘I totally flunked it!’

‘You absolutely must pass it in October.’

‘Why must she?’ broke in my father. ‘I never had any qualifications myself and I live a life of luxury.’

‘You had some private means to begin with,’ Anne reminded him.

‘My daughter will always find a man to keep her,’ said my father gallantly.

Elsa started to laugh, then stopped when she saw the three of us looking at her.

‘She has got to study during these holidays,’ said Anne, closing her eyes to shut off further conversation.

I cast a despairing look in my father’s direction. He responded by giving me an embarrassed little smile. I had a sudden vision of myself faced with pages of Bergson,4 with those lines of black print jumping out at me and the sound of Cyril’s laughter drifting up. The very thought horrified me. I dragged myself over to Anne and called out to her softly. She opened her eyes. I leant over her with an anxious, pleading face, sucking in my cheeks even more to give myself the look of an overworked intellectual.

‘Anne,’ I said, ‘you can’t do this to me. You can’t make me work in this heat and in the holidays – they could do me so much good.’

She looked at me intently for a moment, then smiled enigmatically and turned her head away.

‘It’s my duty to do “this” to you, even in this heat, as you say. I know you – you’ll only hold it against me for a couple of days and you’ll pass your exam.’

‘There are some things there’s no getting used to,’ I said, no hint of laughter in my voice.

She responded with a look of amused arrogance and I lay back down on the sand, feeling very worried. Elsa was holding forth about the various festivities taking place along the Riviera, but my father was not listening to her. From his position at the apex of the triangle formed by their bodies, he kept looking at Anne’s upturned profile and her shoulders with that rather fixed, unruffled gaze of his, one that I recognized. His hand was opening and closing on the sand in a gentle, regular, tireless movement. I ran down to the sea and plunged in, lamenting the holidays that we might have had and were now not going to have. We had all the makings of a drama: there was a seducer, a vamp and a woman who knew her own mind. I caught sight of a beautiful shell-like object on the sea bed, a pink and blue stone. I dived down to get it. It was worn all smooth and I kept it in my hand until lunch. I decided it was a lucky charm and that I would hang on to it all summer. I don’t know why I haven’t lost it, because I lose everything. I am holding it today; it is pink and warm and it makes me want to weep.

Four

What surprised me most during the days that followed was how extremely nice Anne was to Elsa. Elsa’s conversation was sprinkled with numerous idiotic remarks but Anne never responded to them by uttering any of those curt phrases that she had such a knack for, and that would have made poor Elsa look ridiculous. I inwardly commended her for her patience and generosity, without realizing how much shrewdness was involved. My father would quickly have tired of any such savage little game. Instead, he was grateful to her and could not do enough to express his appreciation. In any case, this gratitude of his was only a cover. There was no doubt that, when he spoke to her, it was as to a highly respected woman, a second mother to his daughter. He even played that card by seeming constantly to put Anne in charge of me, making her to a certain extent responsible for the kind of person I was, as if to bring her closer and bind her to us more tightly. But he would look at her and motion to her as to a woman he did not know but whom he desired to know – to know, that is, in an intimate way. It was the same kind of considerateness as that I sometimes detected in Cyril, which made me want simultaneously to run from him and to lead him on. I must have been more impressionable than Anne. She responded to my father with an indifference and a serene good grace that put my mind at rest. I reached the stage of thinking that I had been mistaken that first day. I failed to see that this sheer good grace of hers was hugely appealing to my father. And above all there were her silences … silences that seemed so natural and so elegant. They formed a sort of antithesis to Elsa’s constant chirruping, like the contrast between sun and shade. Poor Elsa, she really did not suspect anything. She went on being loud and over-excited and still just as wilted-looking from the sun.

One day, however, she must have realized. She must have intercepted a glance from my father. I saw her murmur something in his ear before lunch. For a moment he looked surprised and put out, but then he nodded with a smile. At coffee, Elsa stood up, walked over to the door, turned towards us in a languorous way – greatly inspired, it seemed to me, by American movies – and, injecting into her intonation ten years’ worth of French amorousness, said:

‘Are you coming, Raymond?’

My father stood up, blushing almost, and followed her out, extolling the virtues of the siesta. Anne had not moved. Smoke curled up from the cigarette she held between her fingers. I felt obliged to say something.

‘People maintain that a siesta is very restful but I don’t think that’s true …’

I stopped myself immediately, conscious of the ambiguity of what I was saying.

‘Please,’ said Anne coldly.

She had not even taken my comment to be ambiguous. She had straight away seen it as being a joke in poor taste. I looked at her. She was wearing a deliberately calm, relaxed expression, which I found disturbing. Perhaps at that moment she was madly jealous of Elsa. A cynical idea for cheering her up occurred to me and I was pleased by it, as I was by all my cynical ideas. Bolstered by a sort of confidence and a sense of colluding with myself that was quite intoxicating, I could not resist putting my thoughts into words:

‘Mind you, with Elsa being so sunburnt, that kind of siesta can’t be much fun for either of them.’

I would have done better not to have spoken.

‘I detest that kind of remark,’ said Anne. ‘At your age it’s worse than stupid, it’s tiresome.’

I promptly lost my nerve.

‘I only said it as a joke. I’m sorry. I’m sure that they’re very happy really.’

She turned to face me with a weary look. I immediately apologized. She closed her eyes and began to speak in a low, patient voice:

‘Your idea of love is a rather simplistic one. Love isn’t a series of isolated sensations …’

It struck me that that was just what all my experiences of love had been: a sudden surge of emotion at someone’s gaze or gesture or kiss … Radiant moments without any underlying connection, that was all the memory I had of them.

‘It’s something different,’ Anne was saying. ‘It’s about constant tenderness, gentleness, missing a person … Things you wouldn’t understand.’

She made an evasive gesture and picked up a magazine. I would have preferred it if she had shown anger at my emotional deficiency, or had abandoned that air of resigned indifference. It struck me that she was right, that I lived on an animal level, letting myself be led by the wishes of others, and that I was a poor, weak creature. I despised myself, and it was terribly painful to me because I wasn’t used to that, to passing judgement on my actions, so to speak, as to whether they were good or bad. I went up to my room and mused a bit. The sheets were warm beneath me. I could still hear Anne’s words: ‘What’s different about it is missing a person.’ Had I ever missed anyone?

I can no longer recall the various events of that fortnight. As I’ve said already, I didn’t want to face up to there being any precise threat to our happiness. I do of course recall very clearly the rest of the holiday because I brought to bear on it all my attention and all that I was capable of. But as for those first three weeks, which were, in fact, three happy weeks … Which day was it that my father looked very conspicuously at Anne’s mouth? Was it the day he reproached her out loud for her aloofness, while pretending to laugh at it? Or when in all seriousness he compared her subtlety to the half-wittedness of Elsa? My peace of mind rested on the stupid notion that, if they had been bound to love each other, having known each other for fifteen years, they would have started sooner. ‘What’s more,’ I said to myself, ‘if it has to happen, my father will be in love for three months and Anne will carry away from it a few passionate memories and a mild sense of humiliation.’ Yet surely I knew that Anne was not a woman whom you could abandon just like that? But Cyril was there and he was all I needed to think about. In the evenings we would often go out together to nightclubs in Saint-Tropez, where we would dance to the swooning rhythms of a clarinet, murmuring words of love that I had forgotten by the following morning but that at the time had sounded so sweet. During the day we went sailing round the coast. My father sometimes came with us. He thought a lot of Cyril, especially since the latter had let him win in a race they had had, doing crawl. He called him ‘Cyril, my boy’ and Cyril called him ‘sir’, but I sometimes wondered which of the two was the true adult.

One afternoon we went to tea with Cyril’s mother. She was a placid, smiling old lady who talked to us about the difficulties she had experienced as a widow and a mother. My father commiserated with her, looked across to Anne to indicate that he recognized what was being described and complimented the lady profusely. I must say he was always confident of being able to put his time to good use. Anne gazed upon the spectacle with an amiable smile. On our return she declared the lady to be charming. I burst out in imprecations against old ladies of that type. They each bestowed an indulgent, amused smile on me, which made me furious.

‘You don’t realize how pleased with herself she is,’ I cried. ‘She congratulates herself on the life she has had because she feels she has done her duty and …’

‘But it’s true,’ said Anne. ‘She has fulfilled her duties as a wife and mother, as the saying goes …’

‘And what about her duty as a whore?’ I said.

‘I dislike coarseness,’ said Anne, ‘even when it’s meant to be clever.’

‘But it’s not meant to be clever. She got married just as everyone gets married, either because they want to or because it’s the done thing. She had a child. Do you know how children come about?’

‘I’m probably less well informed than you,’ said Anne sarcastically, ‘but I do have some idea.’

‘So she brought the child up. She probably spared herself the anguish and upheaval of committing adultery. She has led the life of thousands of other women and she thinks that’s something to be proud of, you understand. She found herself in the position of being a young middle-class wife and mother and she did nothing to get out of that situation. She pats herself on the back for not having done this or that, rather than for actually having accomplished something.’

‘What you’re saying doesn’t make much sense,’ said my father.

‘You get lured into it,’ I cried. ‘Later on you can say to yourself “I’ve done my duty” but only because you’ve done nothing at all. If, with her background, she had become a street-walker, then she would have deserved some credit.’

‘Your ideas may be fashionable,5 but they’re worthless,’ said Anne.

That was perhaps true. I believed what I was saying but it was true that I had heard other people say those things. Even so, the life my father and I led tended to support the theory and, in casting scorn on it, Anne was being hurtful to me. One can be just as much attached to frivolity as to anything else. But Anne did not consider me to be a creature capable of thought. All at once it seemed urgent, indeed essential, to disabuse her. I did not think that the opportunity would present itself to me so soon, nor that I would know how to grasp it. Anyhow, I was the first to admit that in a month’s time I would have a different opinion on any given subject and that my convictions would not last. I could hardly be said to have high ideals.

Five

And then one day things came to a head. One morning my father decided that we were going to spend the evening in Cannes, gaming and dancing. I remember how pleased Elsa was. In the familiar atmosphere of casinos she expected to rediscover her identity as a femme fatale, which had become somewhat diminished by the sunburn and by the semi-isolation in which we lived. Contrary to my expectations, Anne put up no objection to these worldly pleasures; she even seemed quite pleased at the prospect. So it was without any sense of unease that, once dinner was over, I went up to my room to put on an evening dress – the only one that I possessed, in fact. My father had chosen it for me. It was made of some exotic material, probably rather too exotic for me, because my father, whether from inclination or habit, liked to dress me up as a femme fatale. I found him downstairs, resplendent in a new dinner jacket, and I put my arms around his neck.

‘You are the most handsome man I know!’

‘Apart from Cyril,’ he countered, without really believing what he said. ‘And you’re the prettiest girl that I know.’

‘After Elsa and Anne,’ I said, without believing it myself.

‘Since they’re not down yet and have taken the liberty of making us wait, come and dance with your rheumaticky old father.’

I felt again the elation I always experienced before we went out places together. There was really nothing of the ageing father about him. As we danced I breathed in that familiar smell of his, made up of eau de cologne, warmth and tobacco. He danced in time, with his eyes half-closed and with a happy little smile, as irrepressible as my own, playing at the corners of his lips.

‘You’ll have to teach me to bebop,’6 he said, forgetting his rheumatism.

He stopped dancing in order to acknowledge the arrival of Elsa with an automatically murmured compliment. She was coming slowly down the stairs, wearing her green dress and the knowing smile of a woman of the world, the smile she wore for going to casinos. She had, to her credit, done the best she could with her dried-out hair and sunburnt skin but the result was not brilliant. Fortunately she did not seem to realize this.

‘Shall we go?’

‘Anne’s not here,’ I said.

‘Go upstairs and see if she’s ready,’ said my father. ‘It will be midnight at this rate by the time we get to Cannes.’

I went up the stairs, getting entangled in my dress, and knocked on Anne’s door. She called to me to come in but I stopped on the threshold. The dress she was wearing was grey but it was the most amazing grey, almost white, and the light clung to it with the kind of iridescence that the sea takes on at dawn. She seemed, that evening, to combine together everything that was attractive about maturity.

‘You look magnificent!’ I said. ‘Oh Anne, what a dress!’

She smiled at herself in the mirror, in the way you smile at someone you are about to leave.

‘This grey is a complete success,’ she said.

‘You are a complete success,’ I said.

She took hold of my ear and looked at me. She had dark blue eyes. I saw them light up in a smile.

‘You’re a nice little girl,’ she said, ‘even though you can sometimes be tiresome.’

She left the room ahead of me without paying any attention to my own dress, which I was glad about and yet mortified by at the same time. As she descended the stairs ahead of me, I saw my father come to meet her. He stopped at the bottom of the staircase with his foot on the first step and his face raised in her direction. Elsa too was watching her come downstairs. I recall the scene exactly. Immediately in front of me I was looking at Anne’s golden neck and perfect shoulders. A little lower down stood my father with a dazzled expression on his face and with his hand outstretched. And already fading into the distance was the silhouette of Elsa.

‘Anne,’ said my father, ‘you are amazing!’

She smiled at him briefly and picked up her coat.

‘We’ll meet up once we’re there,’ she said. ‘Cécile, are you coming with me?’

She let me drive. The road at night was so beautiful that I drove slowly. Anne did not speak. She did not even seem to notice the trumpets blaring away on the radio. When my father’s convertible overtook us on a bend she did not raise an eyebrow. I felt that I was already a mere onlooker to a performance in which I could no longer play any part.

At the casino, thanks to my father’s manoeuvrings, we soon got split up. I found myself at the bar with Elsa and someone she knew, a tipsy South American. He was involved in theatre and, in spite of being in a state of inebriation, was still interesting for the passion he brought to it. I spent nearly an hour with him, most agreeably, but Elsa was bored. She knew one or two of the big names but was not interested in theatrical technique. All of a sudden she asked me where my father was, as if I might have had some idea, and then she went off. That seemed to make the South American sad for a moment but another whisky got him going again. My mind was nowhere, I was in a state of complete euphoria, having, out of politeness, joined him in his libations. Things got funnier still when he wanted to dance. I had to hold him round the waist and get my feet out from under his, all of which required a lot of energy. We were laughing so much that, when Elsa tapped me on the shoulder and I saw her look of foreboding, I nearly told her to go to hell.

‘I can’t find him,’ she said.

She looked distraught. Her powder had worn off, leaving her face all shiny, and her features were drawn. She was a pitiful sight. I suddenly felt very angry with my father. He was being incredibly rude.

‘Ah, I know where they are,’ I said, smiling as if what it amounted to was something quite natural that she could easily have envisaged without feeling anxious. ‘I’ll be back.’

Deprived of my support, the South American collapsed into Elsa’s arms and seemed to be better off for it. I reflected sadly that she was more generously endowed than I was and that I couldn’t begrudge her that. It was a large casino. I went all round it twice, in vain. I checked the terraces and finally thought of the car.

It took me a little while to find it in the grounds. They were sitting in it. I arrived from behind and caught sight of them through the rear window. I saw them in profile, very close together and looking very serious, strangely beautiful in the lamplight. They were facing each other and they must have been speaking in low voices because I saw their lips moving. I wanted to make myself scarce, but the thought of Elsa made me open the car door.

My father had his hand on Anne’s arm. They barely looked at me.

‘Are you enjoying yourselves?’ I asked politely.

‘What is it?’ said my father, sounding irritated. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘And what are you doing? Elsa has been looking everywhere for you for the last hour.’

Anne turned to face me, slowly, as if with regret.

‘We’re going home. Tell her I was tired and that your father has taken me back. When you’ve finished enjoying yourselves you can go back in my car.’

I was almost speechless and trembling with indignation.

‘When we’ve finished enjoying ourselves! But you don’t realize! It’s disgusting!’

‘What is disgusting?’ asked my father in astonishment.

‘You take a red-headed girl to the seaside, to sun that she can’t cope with, and when she’s all peeling you abandon her. It’s too easy! And what am I supposed to say to Elsa?’

Anne had turned back towards him wearily. He was smiling at her and wasn’t listening. I could not have been more exasperated.

‘I’m … I’m going to tell her that my father has found another lady to go to bed with and that she should get lost, is that it?’

The exclamation my father gave and the slap I got from Anne were simultaneous. I hastily withdrew my head. She had hurt me.

‘Apologize!’ said my father.

I stood motionless by the car door, my thoughts in a whirl. I always think of dignified responses when it is too late.

‘Come here,’ said Anne.

She did not seem to threaten, so I approached. She put her hand on my cheek and spoke gently and slowly, as if I were rather stupid.

‘Don’t be nasty. I am very sorry on Elsa’s account. But you are tactful enough to sort this out in the best possible way. Tomorrow we’ll explain. Did I hurt you badly?’

‘No, not at all,’ I said politely. This sudden gentleness of hers and my earlier vehemence made me want to burst into tears. I watched them drive off, feeling completely drained. The only thing that consoled me was the notion of my own tactfulness. I walked slowly back to the casino, where I found Elsa with the South American clamped to her arm.

‘Anne wasn’t feeling well,’ I said breezily. ‘Daddy has had to take her back. Shall we have something to drink?’

She looked at me without replying. I tried to find something to say that sounded convincing.

‘She was feeling sick,’ I said. ‘It’s awful, her dress got all stained.’

This detail seemed highly authentic to me but Elsa began to weep, softly and sadly. I watched her, completely at a loss.

‘Cécile,’ she said, ‘oh Cécile, we were so happy!’

Her sobs redoubled. The South American began to weep too, and to repeat: ‘We were so happy, so happy!’ At that moment I detested Anne and my father. I would have done anything to stop poor Elsa from weeping and her mascara from running and the South American from sobbing.

‘Nothing is final yet, Elsa. Come back with me,’ I said.

‘I’ll come back soon for my cases,’ she sobbed. ‘Goodbye, Cécile, we got on really well.’

I had only ever talked to her about the weather or fashion but, even so, it seemed as if I were losing an old friend. I turned away abruptly and ran to the car.

Six

The following morning was dreadful, no doubt on account of the whiskies of the night before. I awoke in darkness to find myself lying crooked across my bed, with a dry mouth and unbearably clammy limbs. A ray of sunlight filtered through the chinks in the shutter, with specks of dust floating up in it in serried ranks. I had no wish either to get up or to stay in bed. I wondered if Elsa would come back and how Anne and my father would be looking that morning. In an attempt to get up I forced myself to think about them but my efforts came to nothing. When I finally managed to, I found myself standing on the cool, tiled floor of the bedroom, aching and not thinking straight. The mirror offered me a sad reflection and I leant against it and contemplated that strange face with its dilated eyes and swollen mouth – my face. Could those lips, those ill-proportioned features, those odious, arbitrary limitations of mine mean that I was weak and characterless? And if I really were limited, how did I know this so clearly, in spite of being what I was? I found amusement in detesting myself and the wolfish face in the mirror, hollow and crumpled from debauchery. Looking into my eyes, I began to repeat the word ‘debauchery’ silently to myself, and all of a sudden I saw myself smile. What debauchery had there in fact been? A few wretched drinks, a slap in the face and some sobbing. I brushed my teeth and went downstairs.

My father and Anne were already on the terrace, sitting next to each other with their breakfast tray in front of them. I muttered a greeting and sat down opposite them. At first I was so embarrassed I did not venture to look at them, but their silence forced me to raise my eyes. Anne’s features were drawn – that was the only evidence of a night of passion. They were both smiling and looking happy. I was impressed by that. Happiness has always seemed to me to be a validation, to represent a successful outcome.

‘Sleep well, did you?’ my father asked.

‘So-so,’ I replied. ‘I drank too much whisky last night.’

I poured myself a cup of coffee, took a sip, then immediately put my cup down. There was a certain quality to their silence, a sense of anticipation that made me uneasy. I was too tired to be able to bear it for long.

‘What’s going on? There’s something mysterious about you.’

My father lit a cigarette, trying to appear nonchalant as he did so. Anne was looking at me, for once clearly embarrassed.

‘I’d like to ask you something,’ she said at last.

I imagined the worst:

‘Not another mission involving Elsa?’

She turned her face away to look at my father.

‘Your father and I would like to get married,’ she said.

I stared first at her, then at my father. For a moment I expected some sign to come from him, a wink of the eye that would have made me indignant but would at the same time have reassured me. He was looking down at his hands. I was saying to myself: ‘This can’t be true,’ but I knew already that it was true.

‘That’s a very good idea,’ I said, playing for time.

I just could not understand: here was my father, so stubbornly opposed to marriage and to being tied down, having made up his mind in the course of one night. Our whole life was being changed by this. We were losing our independence. At that moment I had a glimpse of how life would be with the three of us: it would be a life suddenly brought into balance by Anne’s intelligence and refinement, the kind of life that I envied her for, with intelligent, discreet friends … happy, sedate gatherings … All at once I despised raucous dinner parties, South Americans, the Elsas of this world. I was overcome by a sense of pride and superiority.

‘That’s a very, very good idea,’ I said again, and I smiled at them.

‘My little kitten, I knew you’d be pleased,’ said my father.

He was relaxed and delighted. The effects of love-making had redefined Anne’s features and her face seemed gentler and more open than I had ever seen it.

‘Come here, kitten,’ said my father.

Holding out his hands, he drew me to them both. I was half-kneeling in front of them while they looked on at me fondly and stroked my head. For my part, I kept thinking that even though my life just then was maybe at a turning-point, to them I was in fact nothing but a kitten, an affectionate little creature. I sensed them hovering above me, united by a past and a future, by ties, unknown to me, that could not bind me. I deliberately closed my eyes, laid my head on their laps, laughed along with them and resumed my role. In any case, I was happy, wasn’t I? Anne was a fine person. To my mind there was nothing mean-spirited about her. She would guide me, she would take responsibility for my life, in every circumstance she would show me which path to follow. I would reach my full potential and so would my father.

My father got up to fetch a bottle of champagne. I was sickened. He was happy, that was the main thing, but I had so often seen him happy on account of a woman.

‘I was rather frightened of you,’ said Anne.

‘Why?’ I asked.

To hear her, I had the impression that my veto could have prevented the marriage of two adults.

‘I was afraid that you were frightened of me,’ she said, and she began to laugh.

I began to laugh too, because I was indeed a little frightened of her. She was conveying to me both that she knew and that my fear was groundless.

‘Does it not seem ridiculous to you, two old people getting married like this?’

‘You’re not old,’ I said, summoning up the required conviction, for my father was on his way back, doing a little waltz while cradling a bottle in his arms.

He sat down next to Anne and put his arm round her shoulders. She responded by moving close to him in a way that made me lower my eyes. It was no doubt for just that that she was marrying him, for the way he laughed, for his firm, reassuring arm, for his liveliness and warmth. Being forty must bring with it the fear of loneliness, perhaps the last stirrings of desire … I had never thought of Anne as a woman, more as an abstraction. I had seen her as being composed of confidence, elegance and intelligence, though never of sensuality or weakness. I could understand my father’s pride: the haughty, aloof Anne Larsen was marrying him. Did he love her and would he be capable of loving her for long? Could I distinguish between this tenderness and the tenderness he felt for Elsa? I closed my eyes. The heat was making me drowsy. There we were on the terrace, all three of us, full of reservations, of secret fears and of happiness.

Elsa did not come back just then. A week went by very quickly, seven happy, very pleasant days – the only ones there were to be. We drew up elaborate plans for furnishings, we drew up timetables. My father and I took pleasure in making these timetables tight and difficult to keep to, with the recklessness of people who have never known what timetables are. In any case, did we ever believe in them? Coming home every day to the same place at half past twelve to have lunch, eating at home in the evening and staying in afterwards: did my father really believe that was possible? However, he was cheerfully burying his bohemianism; he was commending the virtues of order and of a bourgeois lifestyle, elegant and well-organized. But doubtless, for him as well as for me, all this merely amounted to castles in the air.

Whenever I want to put myself to the test, I like to ruminate on what I remember of that week. Anne was relaxed, confident and very sweet and my father loved her. I would see them come downstairs in the morning, leaning on each other for support, laughing together, with rings under their eyes, and I swear I would have loved that to have lasted for the rest of their lives. In the evening we often went along the coast to take our aperitif on the terrace of some café. Everywhere we went people took us to be a normal, united family. I was used to going out alone with my father and attracting smiles from people, or looks of ill will or pity, so I was delighted to revert to a role more suitable for my age. The wedding was due to take place in Paris after the holidays.

Poor Cyril had observed with some astonishment the changes taking place in our domestic arrangements. But he was delighted at the prospect of a legitimate outcome. We went out in the boat together, we kissed as the desire took us, and sometimes, while he was pressing his mouth against mine, I saw Anne’s face again, that morning face of hers with its softened contours. I saw the kind of leisureliness and happy nonchalance that love gave to her movements and I envied her. You get tired of just kissing, and no doubt if Cyril had loved me less than he did I would have become his mistress during that week.

At six o’clock, on our way back from the islands,7 Cyril would drag the boat on to the sand. We would make our way to the house through the pine wood and to warm ourselves up we invented games of cowboys and Indians, and races where he let me have a head start. He would regularly catch up with me before we reached the house, throw himself on me with a shout of victory, roll me over in the pine needles and pin me down and kiss me. I can still remember the taste of those breathless, inept kisses and the sound of Cyril’s heart beating against mine in rhythm with the breaking of the waves on the sand … One, two, three, four heartbeats and the gentle sound on the sand; one, two, three … one … He would draw breath again and his kisses would become precise and pressing. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea but instead of that in my ears there was the rushing, relentless patter of my own blood.

The sound of Anne’s voice caused us to break apart one evening. Cyril was stretched out alongside me as we lay half-naked in the reddish glow and shadows of the setting sun and I can understand how that could have misled Anne. She spoke my name curtly.

Cyril leapt to his feet, full of shame, of course. Then I stood up, more slowly, watching Anne. She turned to Cyril and, looking right through him, said quietly:

‘I am not expecting to see you ever again.’

He did not reply, but leant over and kissed my shoulder before retreating. His gesture astonished and touched me – it was like a pledge. Anne was looking at me with a fixed stare in that same serious, detached way, as if she were thinking of something else. That irritated me. If she was indeed thinking of something else, it was wrong of her to have so much to say for herself. I went up to her pretending to be embarrassed, but it was purely out of politeness. Mechanically she removed a pine needle from my neck and all at once seemed to see me properly. I saw her don her fine mask of scorn, that expression of weariness and disapproval which made her look remarkably beautiful and which I found rather frightening.

‘You ought to know that indulging in that kind of pastime usually lands a girl in a clinic,’ she said.

She was standing there staring at me as she spoke, and I was extremely vexed. She was one of those women who can speak while standing perfectly still. I, on the other hand, needed to be sitting in an armchair and it helped to have an object to grasp, like a cigarette; it helped if I swung one leg to and fro and watched it as it swung …

‘Don’t let’s exaggerate,’ I said, smiling. ‘All I did was to kiss Cyril. That’s not going to land me in a clinic.’

‘I don’t want you to see him again,’ she said, as if she assumed I was lying. ‘Don’t protest. You’re seventeen, I’m to a certain extent responsible for you now and I am not going to allow you to ruin your life. In any case, you have work to do, and that will take up your afternoons.’

Turning her back on me, she set off towards the house, walking as if unconcerned. In my consternation I was nailed to the spot. She meant what she said. Any arguments or denials on my part would be met by that aloofness of hers that was worse than contempt, suggesting that I did not exist or that I was something to be quashed, and not myself, Cécile, whom she had always known, that it was someone else and not me whom she could have contemplated punishing in this way. My only hope lay in my father. He would react as he always did: ‘Who is this boy, kitten? Let’s hope he’s handsome and fit. Be on your guard against scoundrels, girly.’ He just had to react in that way, otherwise my holiday would be over.

Dinner was a nightmare. At no time had Anne said to me: ‘I won’t mention anything to your father, I’m not a carrier of tales. But you must promise me to work hard.’ That kind of bargaining was alien to her. I was glad about that but at the same time resentful towards her, for if she had been like that it would have allowed me to despise her. She steered clear of that mistake as of others, and it was only after the soup course that she appeared to remember the incident. ‘I’d like you to give your daughter some sensible advice, Raymond. I came across her in the wood with Cyril this evening and they seemed to be on the very best of terms.’

My father tried to make a joke of this, poor man.

‘What’s this you’re telling me? What were they doing?’

‘I was kissing him,’ I insisted forcefully. ‘Anne thought …’

‘I thought nothing at all,’ she interrupted. ‘But I do think it would be a good idea if she were to stop seeing him for a while and do some work on her philosophy.’

‘Poor little thing,’ said my father. ‘After all, Cyril’s a nice boy, isn’t he?’

‘Cécile is also a nice little girl,’ said Anne. ‘That’s why I’d be heartbroken if anything were to happen to her. And considering the complete freedom that she has here, and the fact that she’s constantly in that boy’s company and that they have nothing much to do, something happening to her seems inevitable to me. Does it not to you?’

At those words ‘does it not to you?’ I looked up, while my father, very vexed, lowered his eyes.

‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Yes, after all, you ought to do some work, Cécile. You don’t want to have to redo your philosophy, do you?’

‘What do I care?’ I replied tersely.

He looked at me and then immediately looked away again. I was thoroughly disconcerted. I realized that insouciance is the one thing that can provide inspiration for our lives and yet have no argument to offer in its own defence.

‘Come on, now,’ said Anne, taking hold of my hand across the table. ‘You’re going to swap being a wild creature of the woods for being a good scholar, just for a month. That’s not so serious, is it?’

They were both looking at me and smiling; from their point of view it was obvious. I gently withdrew my hand.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is serious.’

I said it so softly that they either did not hear me or did not choose to hear. The next morning I came across a sentence from Bergson that took me several minutes to understand.

However disparate cause and effect may initially appear to be, and although a rule of conduct is far from being a pronouncement on the nature of things, it is always through contact with the creative principle in the human species that one feels oneself drawing the strength to love humanity.8

I repeated this sentence over to myself, quietly at first, so as not to get worked up over it, then out loud. I rested my head in my hands and I studied the sentence closely. I finally understood it and I felt just as unmoved and powerless as when I had read it the first time. I was unable to continue. I studied the subsequent lines with the same concentration and in the same well-disposed way and suddenly something like a tempest rose up within me and threw me on to the bed. I thought of Cyril who was waiting for me in the sun-drenched inlet, I thought of the gentle rocking of the boat and of the taste of our kisses, and I thought of Anne. What I was thinking made me sit up on my bed, my heart beating fast, and I said to myself that it was stupid and monstrous, that I was nothing but a spoilt, lazy child and that I had no right to think the way I did. So it was in spite of myself that I continued with my reflections. I reflected that she was detrimental to us and dangerous and that she had to be got rid of. I remembered the breakfast that I had just sat through with gritted teeth. I had been appalled and disconcerted by my sense of resentment, which was an emotion that I despised and ridiculed myself for ever feeling. Yes, that was what I held against Anne: she prevented me from liking myself. I was, by my very nature, made for happiness and affability and light-heartedness, but because of her I was entering a world of reproaches and guilt, a world in which I was getting lost because I was not used to introspection. And what was she bringing me? I took stock of how strong she was: she had wanted my father and she had got him; she was gradually going to make of us the husband and daughter of Anne Larsen, which meant that we would become civilized, well-mannered, happy people. For she would make us happy. I could well imagine how easily we, unstable creatures that we were, would yield to the attraction of having structure in our lives and of not having to shoulder responsibility. She was much too efficient. My father was already growing away from me. I was obsessed, tortured, by the embarrassed expression he had had at table and by how he had turned his face away. It made me want to weep when I remembered how we used to be in league with each other, how we would laugh together as we drove back home at dawn through the deserted streets of Paris. All that was over. I in my turn was going to be influenced, reshaped and given direction by Anne. I would not even mind. She would act with intelligence, ironic humour and gentleness. I was incapable of resisting her. In six months I would no longer even want to.

I absolutely had to pull myself together, I had to get my father and our old way of life back. Those two merry, mixed-up years that I had just spent, those two years that I had been so quick to disown the other day, suddenly appeared to me decked out in all their charm. I had been free to think, to think the wrong thoughts or not to think very much at all; I had been free to choose my own life, to choose myself. I cannot say that I had been free ‘to be myself’ because I was merely putty, but I had been free to refuse to be moulded.

I know that it would be possible to ascribe complicated motives to this change in me, that it would be possible to endow me with magnificent complexes, such as an incestuous love for my father or an unhealthy passion for Anne. But I know the real causes: the heat, Bergson, Cyril or at least the absence of Cyril. I thought about this all afternoon as I passed through a succession of states of mind that were all unpleasant but all the result of this one realization, that we were at Anne’s mercy. I was not accustomed to reflecting on things, it made me irritable. At table, as had been the case in the morning, I did not open my mouth. My father felt obliged to make a joke of it:

‘That’s what I like about young people, their enthusiasm, their conversation …’

I gave him a fierce, harsh look. It was true that he liked young people, and to whom else had I talked but to him? We had talked about everything, about love, about death, about music. Now he himself was abandoning me and rendering me defenceless. I looked at him and thought: ‘You don’t love me as you used to. You are betraying me,’ and I tried to make him understand this without actually speaking. I was in full dramatic mode. Becoming suddenly alarmed, he returned my look, understanding perhaps that it was no longer a game and that our relationship was in danger. I saw him grow rigid, as if questions were occurring to him. Anne turned to me.

‘You’re not looking well. I feel bad about making you work.’

I did not reply – I hated myself too much for making such a drama out of things, and a drama that I could no longer call a halt to. We had finished dinner. On the terrace, in the rectangle of light projected from the dining-room window, I saw Anne’s hand, a living, elongated hand, reach out to find my father’s hand. I thought of Cyril. I wished he could have taken me in his arms on that terrace, criss-crossed with cicadas and moonlight. I wished I could have been caressed, consoled and reconciled with myself. My father and Anne were silent. They had before them a night of love. I had Bergson. I tried to weep, to feel sorry for myself, but in vain. I was already feeling sorry for Anne, as if I were certain of vanquishing her.

PART TWO

One

I am surprised at how clear my memories are from that point. I was acquiring a heightened awareness both of other people and of myself. I had always taken for granted the luxury of being spontaneous and casually self-centred. I had always simply lived life. But those few days had been disturbing enough to make me start to reflect on things and to observe myself as I lived. I experienced all the throes of introspection without, even so, becoming reconciled with myself. I said to myself: ‘This feeling I have towards Anne is stupid and pitiful, and it is brutal of me to want to part her from my father.’ But after all, I thought, why should I stand in judgement over myself? I was who I was, so had I not the right to experience events in whatever way I wished? For the first time in my life this ‘self’ of mine seemed to divide in two and I was quite astonished to discover such a duality within me. I found good excuses for my feelings, I thought I was being sincere when I murmured them over to myself, yet all of a sudden that other ‘self’ came to the fore, challenging my own arguments and telling me loudly that, for all their apparent validity, I was deluding myself. But wasn’t it in fact that other self that was deceiving me? Was not this lucidity the ultimate form of mistakenness? I debated with myself in my room for hours on end in an effort to work out whether the fear and hostility that Anne was currently inspiring in me were justified or whether I was merely a selfish, spoilt little girl in the mood for some so-called independence.

In the meantime I was getting a little thinner every day. On the beach I did nothing but sleep and at mealtimes, in spite of myself, I maintained an uneasy silence which eventually they found embarrassing. I would look at Anne, I would watch her closely all the time, and all through the meal I would be saying to myself: ‘The way she gestured to him, isn’t that love, and isn’t it a kind of love he’ll not find again? And the way she smiled at me with that trace of anxiety in her eyes, how could I resent her for it?’ But all of a sudden she would be saying: ‘When we go back, Raymond …’ That’s when the thought that she was going to share our lives and have a hand in them made me bristle. She seemed then to consist only of coldness and cunning. I would say to myself: ‘She is cold, whereas we are warm-hearted. She is authoritarian, whereas we are independent. She is aloof – other people don’t interest her, but they fascinate us. She is reserved, whereas we are very merry. Only we two are truly alive and she is going to insinuate herself between us with her impassiveness. She is going to warm herself by gradually drawing from us our lovely, carefree warmth. She is going to rob us of everything, like a beautiful serpent.’ I would repeat to myself ‘a beautiful serpent … a beautiful serpent!’ Then she would offer me bread and suddenly I would come to and exclaim to myself: ‘But this is ridiculous! It’s Anne, intelligent Anne, the person who has taken care of you. Being cold is just the way she is, you can’t see any calculation behind it. Her aloofness protects her from a thousand sordid little things, it is proof of her nobility.’ A beautiful serpent … I would feel myself grow pale with shame, I would look at her, I would silently beg her to forgive me. She would sometimes catch sight of me looking at her and then surprise and uncertainty would cause her face to cloud over and make her cut short whatever she was saying. She would instinctively look towards my father and he would look back at her, be it with admiration or desire, without understanding what it was that was causing her anxiety. In a word, I gradually succeeded in making the atmosphere unbearable and I hated myself for it.

My father suffered as much as it was possible for him to suffer, which, being the man he was, was not very much, for he was mad about Anne, mad with pride and pleasure, and that was all he lived for. One day, however, when I was dozing on the beach after our morning swim, he sat down next to me and looked at me. I felt his gaze weighing on me. I was about to stand up and suggest to him, with the air of false jollity that was becoming a habit with me, that we go back into the water, when he put his hand on my head and, raising his voice, called ruefully:

‘Anne, come and look at this grasshopper, she’s so thin. If this is the effect work has on her, she really must stop.’

He thought that he was resolving the issue and no doubt ten days earlier it would have been resolved. But I was much too deep into complications, and the hours set aside for study in the afternoons were no longer a problem for me, given that I had not opened a book since Bergson.

As Anne approached, I remained lying face down on the sand listening to the sound of her steps. She sat down on the other side of me and murmured:

‘It certainly doesn’t seem to agree with her. However, she really needs to apply herself to her work instead of going round in circles in her room.’

I had turned over and was now looking at them. How did she know that I wasn’t working? Perhaps she had even read my thoughts: I believed her to be capable of anything. The idea of it frightened me.

‘I am not going round in circles in my room,’ I protested.

‘Are you missing that boy?’ my father asked.

‘No, I’m not!’

That was not quite true. But it was true that I had not had time to think about Cyril.

‘Still, you’re not well,’ said my father sternly. ‘Anne, do you see her? She’s like a chicken that has been gutted and put in the sun to roast.’

‘Cécile, dear,’ said Anne, ‘make an effort. Work a little and eat a lot. That exam is important …’

‘I don’t give a damn about my exam!’ I cried. ‘Do you understand? I don’t give a damn!’

I looked at her despairingly, straight in the eye, to get her to see that there was more than an exam at stake. What she needed to do was to say to me: ‘Well then, what’s the matter?’ She needed to badger me with questions and force me to tell her everything. And if she did that she would win me over, she would decide whatever she wanted for me, but that way I would no longer be plagued by these sour, depressing feelings of mine. She was looking at me attentively, I saw the Prussian blue of her eyes cloud over with concentration and reproach. And I realized that it would never occur to her to question me and thereby to relieve me, because not only would the idea never cross her mind but in her judgement it wasn’t the done thing. I realized that she didn’t attribute to me any of the thoughts that were destroying me or, if she did, it was with scorn and aloofness, which in any case was all that they deserved. Anne always attached to things their exact importance. That was why I would never, ever, be able to do business with her.

I threw myself down on the sand again with great force, I rested my cheek on the soft warmth of the beach, I sighed and I trembled a little. Anne’s hand, relaxed and steady, came to rest on the back of my neck and held me still for a moment until my nervous trembling stopped.

‘Don’t make life complicated for yourself,’ she said. ‘You used to be so happy and always on the go, you’re usually so scatter-brained, and now you’re becoming sad and cerebral. That’s just not you.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m really a healthy, irresponsible young creature full of fun and silliness.’

‘Come and have lunch,’ she said.

My father had moved away from us. He hated that kind of discussion. On the way back along the track he took my hand and held it. His hand was firm and comforting. It had wiped away my tears after my first unhappy experience of love, it had held my hand at moments of peacefulness and perfect happiness and had squeezed it surreptitiously at times when we were conspiring together and were assailed by fits of giggles. That hand on the steering wheel or clutching the keys, of an evening, while searching in vain for the keyhole, that hand on a woman’s shoulder or holding a cigarette, it could no longer be of any help to me. I squeezed it very tightly. Turning towards me, he smiled.

Two

Two days passed. I was exhausting myself going round in circles. I could not rid myself of the one thought that haunted me: Anne was going to turn our lives upside down. I made no attempt to see Cyril again; he would have reassured me and would have brought me some happiness, and I didn’t want that. I even took a certain satisfaction in asking myself questions to which there were no answers, in remembering days just gone and dreading those that were to come. It was very hot. My room was in semi-darkness with the shutters closed, but it wasn’t enough to relieve the unbearable oppressiveness and mugginess in the air. I lay on my bed with my head tilted back, looking up at the ceiling, and moving just enough to locate a cool part of the sheet. I didn’t sleep but I would play records on the record player at the foot of my bed, slow records, with no tune, just rhythm. I was smoking a lot. I thought I was being decadent and I liked the idea. But this game-playing wasn’t enough to delude me: I was sad and disoriented.

One afternoon the maid knocked at my door and informed me cryptically that ‘there was someone downstairs’. I immediately thought of Cyril and went down. But it wasn’t him, it was Elsa. She clasped my hands effusively. Looking at her, I was astonished at her newfound beauty. She finally had a tan, a smooth, pale tan, and she was very well groomed and radiating youthfulness.

‘I’ve come to get my cases,’ she said. ‘Juan bought me some dresses these last few days, but it wasn’t enough.’

I wondered for a moment who Juan was, and moved on. I was pleased to see Elsa again. She had about her the aura of a kept woman and of bars and convivial parties, which reminded me of happier days. I told her that I was glad to see her again and she assured me that we had always got on well together, since we had a lot in common. I concealed a slight shudder at this and suggested we should go up to my room, which would save her from running into my father and Anne. When I mentioned my father she could not repress a little nod of the head and it occurred to me that she perhaps still loved him – Juan and his dresses notwithstanding. It also occurred to me that, three weeks earlier, I would not have picked up on that nod.

In my room I listened to her talk in glowing terms of the sophisticated, exhilarating life that she had been leading on the Riviera. I was vaguely aware of some strange notions suggesting themselves to me, partly inspired by her new appearance. She finally stopped talking of her own accord, perhaps because of my silence, then walked about a bit and, without turning round, asked casually whether ‘Raymond was happy’. I had the impression that the ball was in my court and I immediately understood why. At that moment a lot of different plans got all muddled up in my head, various schemes formed, I felt myself sinking under the weight of my own arguments. But, just as quickly, I realized what I had to say to her.

‘“Happy”,’ I replied, ‘that’s saying a lot. Anne won’t let him believe otherwise. She’s very cunning.’

‘Very!’ sighed Elsa.

‘You’ll never guess what she’s persuaded him to do … She’s going to marry him.’

Elsa turned towards me with a horrified look.

‘Marry him? Raymond wants to get married, he of all people?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Raymond is getting married.’

A sudden desire to laugh caught me by the throat. My hands were shaking. Elsa seemed completely at a loss, as if I had dealt her a blow. She couldn’t be allowed to reflect on things and come to the conclusion that, after all, it was to do with his age and that he couldn’t spend his whole life with good-time girls. I leant forward and, to make more of an impression, suddenly dropped my voice.

‘It just mustn’t be allowed to happen, Elsa. He is suffering already. It’s just not possible, you understand that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

She seemed fascinated. It made me want to laugh, and my shaking got worse.

‘I’ve been waiting for you to come,’ I said. ‘You’re the only one who can contend with Anne. Only you have the necessary class.’

It was quite obvious that she wanted nothing more than to believe me.

‘But if he’s marrying her,’ she countered, ‘it’s because he loves her.’

‘Come on,’ I said softly, ‘it’s you he loves, Elsa. Don’t try to make me believe that you don’t know that.’

I saw her blink, and she turned away to hide her pleasure and the hope that I was giving out to her. I was acting in a sort of daze and I sensed exactly what I had to say.

‘She bamboozled him, you understand, with talk about the stability of marriage, and about family life and morality, and he got taken in by her.’

I was overcome by what I was saying, for I was actually expressing my own feelings, no doubt in a crude, elementary form, but it corresponded to what I believed.

‘If the wedding goes ahead, the lives of all three of us will be ruined, Elsa. My father must be protected, he’s just a big baby … a big baby …’

I repeated ‘a big baby’ very forcefully. It seemed to me to be verging rather too much on melodrama but already Elsa’s lovely green eyes were clouding over with pity. I finished up as if it were a hymn:

‘Help me, Elsa. I say this for your sake, for my father’s sake and for the sake of the love you have for each other.’

Inwardly I concluded: ‘And for the sake of anyone else you care to think of.’

‘But what can I do?’ asked Elsa. ‘The situation strikes me as being impossible.’

‘If you think it’s impossible, then just give up,’ I said, in what is known as a broken voice.

‘What a trollop!’ murmured Elsa.

‘That’s the very word for it,’ I said, and it was my turn to look away.

Elsa was being reborn before my very eyes. She had been made a fool of and she was going to show that scheming woman just what she, Elsa Mackenbourg, was capable of. And my father loved her, she had always known that. Even when she had been with Juan she hadn’t been able to forget Raymond’s charm. It’s true that she had never mentioned marriage to him, but at least she hadn’t bored him, she hadn’t tried to …

‘Elsa,’ I said, for I could endure her no longer, ‘go and see Cyril and ask him from me to put you up. He’ll sort it out with his mother. Tell him that I’ll come and see him tomorrow morning. We’ll all three of us discuss the situation then.’

At the door I added, as a joke: ‘It’s your destiny you’re fighting for, Elsa.’

She gravely assented, as if she didn’t have a dozen possible destinies, as many destinies as there were men who would keep her. I watched her as she tripped off lightly into the sun. I estimated that it would take my father a week to find her desirable again.

It was half past three. I reckoned my father would be asleep in Anne’s arms and that Anne herself would be drifting into sleep, completely fulfilled and lying there in disarray, luxuriating in a warm glow of physical pleasure and pure happiness … I began very quickly to draw up plans, without pausing for a moment to think of myself. I was walking back and forth in my room, going over to the window to look out over a perfectly calm sea lying flat on the sands, then I would come back to the door and turn round again. I planned, I calculated, I gradually overcame all objections. I had never realized how agile the mind can be and what leaps it can make. I felt dangerously cunning and, on top of the wave of self-disgust that had engulfed me from the moment of my first exchanges with Elsa, there came a surge of pride, a feeling of being in league with myself and a sense of loneliness.

I need hardly say that all this collapsed when the time came for our swim. I was quivering with remorse in Anne’s presence, I didn’t know what to do to make amends. I carried her bag, I rushed forward to hand her her towelling robe when she came out of the water, I showered her with consideration and friendly remarks. This sudden change of behaviour, coming as it did after my taciturnity of the previous few days, did of course surprise and, indeed, please her. My father was delighted. Anne kept smiling her thanks and replying gaily to me. I remembered Elsa’s exclamation: ‘What a trollop!’ and my response: ‘That’s the very word for it.’ How could I have said that? How could I have endorsed Elsa’s rubbish? Tomorrow I would advise her to leave, having admitted to her that I had been mistaken. Everything would resume as before and I would take that exam of mine after all. The baccalaureate was bound to come in useful.9

‘That’s so, isn’t it?’

I was addressing Anne.

‘It’s useful to have the baccalaureate, isn’t it?’

She looked at me and burst out laughing. I followed suit, happy to see her so cheerful.

‘You are incredible,’ she said.

It was true that I was incredible, and she would have found me even more incredible if she had known what I had been planning to do! I was dying to tell her, so that she would see just how incredible I was! ‘Just think that I was getting Elsa in on the act – she was pretending to be in love with Cyril and was staying in his house, and we would see them go past in his boat, we would bump into them in the woods or along the coast. Elsa has become beautiful again. Oh, of course, she doesn’t have your beauty, but, you know, she’s got that flamboyant look that makes men’s heads turn. My father wouldn’t have stuck it for long. He has never accepted the idea that a beautiful woman who has once belonged to him might get over him so quickly and, as it were, before his very eyes, especially not with a younger man. So you understand, Anne, even though it’s you he loves, he would have very soon wanted to get her back, to give himself reassurance. He’s very vain, or not very sure of himself, whichever way you like to think of it. Elsa, on my orders, would have done whatever it took. One day he would have deceived you, and you would not have been able to bear that, would you? You are not one of those women who are happy to share. So you would have left, and that was what I wanted. Yes, it’s stupid, I know, I resented you because of Bergson, because of the heat; I imagined that … I daren’t even talk to you about it because it’s all so abstract and ridiculous. Because of the baccalaureate I could have made you fall out with us, you, my mother’s friend, our friend. And it is useful to have the baccalaureate, isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t it what?’ said Anne. ‘Is it useful to have the baccalaureate?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

All things considered, it was best not to say anything to her. She might not have understood. There were things that Anne didn’t understand. I threw myself into the water in pursuit of my father, I wrestled him, I rediscovered the pleasures of playfulness, of being in the water and of having a clear conscience. Tomorrow I would change over to a different room. I would move into the attic with my schoolbooks. But I wouldn’t take Bergson – let’s not exaggerate! I would do two good hours of study on my own, working away in the silence with the smell of paper and ink. I imagined myself being successful in October, my father’s amazed laughter, Anne’s approval and ahead of me a degree. I would be intelligent and cultured and a bit detached, like Anne. Perhaps I had intellectual potential. Hadn’t I drawn up a logical plan in the space of five minutes? It was despicable, sure, but it was logical. And as for Elsa, I had ensnared her by appealing to her vanity and her sentimentality. She had come just to fetch her case and in the space of a few moments I had wanted her as my prize. It was funny, really, I had got Elsa in my sights, had glimpsed her weak spot and had taken careful aim before speaking. I had recognized for the first time what an extraordinary pleasure it is to be able to probe people, to expose them, to bring them into the light of day and, there, to touch them. I had sought to discover what drove an individual, in the same cautious way as when you go to put your finger on a spring, and the desired response had been immediately triggered. Got you! I had no experience of that. I had always been too impulsive. Whenever I had affected another person, it had always been inadvertently. But I had suddenly now glimpsed the whole marvellous mechanism of human reflexes and all the power of language. What a pity that this had come about in the service of untruth! One day I would love someone with a passionate love and I would seek out a way to him, just like that, cautiously, gently and with trembling hand.

Three

The next day, as I made my way to Cyril’s villa, I felt much less sure of myself intellectually. To celebrate my recovery I had drunk too much at dinner the previous evening and had been more than merry. I had been explaining to my father that I was going to do a literary degree, that I would be associating with learned people and that I wanted to become famous and a real bore. To launch me he would have to use all the tricks of the advertising trade and the scandalmongers. We swapped preposterous ideas and roared with laughter. Anne laughed too, but less loudly and in an indulgent way. At times she stopped laughing altogether, when my ideas about being launched went beyond the boundaries of the literary world, not to say the bounds of decency. But my father was so clearly happy at our being back together again and telling our silly jokes that she said nothing. In the end they put me to bed and tucked me up. I thanked them in a heartfelt way and asked what I would do without them. My father really didn’t know. Anne seemed to have quite strong ideas on that topic but, just as I was begging her to tell me them and she was bending over me, I was overtaken by sleep. In the middle of the night I was sick. Waking up was worse than any previous bad experience of waking up that I had ever had. With my thoughts unfocused and my resolve wavering, I made my way to the pine wood, taking in nothing of the morning sea or the frenzied seagulls.

I found Cyril at the entrance to the garden. He bounded towards me, took me in his arms and clasped me fiercely to himself, murmuring incoherently:

‘My sweetheart, I was so worried … It’s been such a long time … I didn’t know what you were doing or whether that woman was making you unhappy … I didn’t know that I could be so unhappy myself … I sailed past the inlet every afternoon at least once, sometimes twice. I didn’t know I loved you so much …’

‘Neither did I,’ I said.

The fact was that I was both surprised and touched. I was sorry I felt so sick and unable to express my emotion.

‘How pale you are,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look after you now. I won’t let you be ill-treated any longer.’

I could recognize Elsa’s imagination at work. I asked Cyril what his mother thought of her.

‘I introduced her as a friend who was an orphan,’ said Cyril. ‘Elsa’s very nice, actually. She’s told me everything about that woman. It’s strange, she has such a fine face, so full of class, yet she’s a scheming manipulator.’

‘Elsa has exaggerated a lot,’ I said feebly. ‘In fact I was going to tell her that …’

‘And I’ve got something to tell you too,’ interrupted Cyril. ‘I want to marry you, Cécile.’

I had a moment of panic. I had to do something, say something. If only I hadn’t felt so fearfully sick …

‘I love you,’ Cyril was saying into my hair. ‘I’m dropping law. I’ve had an attractive job offer from an uncle of mine … I’m twenty-six, I’m not a little boy any more, I’m talking seriously. What do you say?’

I was desperately searching for something eloquent but non-committal to say in reply. I did not want to marry him. I liked him but I did not want to marry him. I did not want to marry anyone. I was tired.

‘It can’t be,’ I stammered. ‘My father …’

‘I’ll deal with your father,’ said Cyril.

‘Anne won’t want it,’ I said. ‘She claims that I’m not an adult. And if she says no, my father will say no too. I’m so tired, Cyril. All this emotion is wearing me out. Let’s sit down. Here comes Elsa.’

She was coming down in her dressing gown, all fresh and radiant. I felt dull and scrawny. They both had a healthy, blooming, excited look about them, which depressed me even more. She made me sit down, fussing over me as if I had just come out of prison.

‘And how is Raymond?’ she asked. ‘Does he know that I’m back?’

She had the happy smile of a woman who has forgiven all and who has cause for hope. I couldn’t tell her that my father had forgotten her any more than I could tell Cyril that I didn’t want to marry him. I closed my eyes. Cyril went to fetch coffee. Elsa talked on and on, she clearly considered me to be someone very discerning whom she could trust. The coffee was very strong and very fragrant. The sun cheered me up a little.

‘I’ve tried my hardest but I haven’t found a solution,’ said Elsa.

‘There is none,’ said Cyril. ‘It’s an infatuation, he’s under her spell. There’s nothing to be done.’

‘Yes, there is,’ I said. ‘There is a way. You just haven’t any imagination.’

It flattered me to see them hanging on my words. They were ten years older than me and they had no idea! I said airily:

‘It’s a question of psychology.’

I talked for a long time, explaining my plan to them. They raised the same objections as I had outlined to myself the day before and I took keen pleasure in refuting them. It was quite gratuitous but, by dint of trying to convince them, I in turn became excited about it. I proved to them that it could be done. It only remained for me to prove to them that it ought not to be done, but I couldn’t find such logical arguments for that.

‘I don’t like this kind of scheming,’ Cyril said. ‘But if it’s the only way of getting to marry you, I’ll sign up to it.’

‘It’s not strictly speaking Anne’s fault,’ I said.

‘You know very well that if she stays, you’ll marry the person she wants you to,’ said Elsa bluntly.

That was perhaps true. I could see Anne on my twentieth birthday introducing me to a young man, also a graduate, with a brilliant future ahead of him, intelligent, sensible and very likely to be faithful. Rather like Cyril, in fact. I began to laugh.

‘Please don’t laugh,’ said Cyril. ‘Tell me you’ll be jealous when I’m pretending to be in love with Elsa. How were you able to envisage such a thing? Do you love me?’

He was speaking in a low voice. Elsa had tactfully moved away. I looked at Cyril’s strained brown face and his sombre eyes. It gave me a strange feeling to think that he loved me. I looked at his lips, red and full, so close to mine … I didn’t feel intellectual any more. He brought his face still closer and our lips, touching, met in a kiss. I sat there with my eyes wide open and with his mouth resting on mine, warm and firm and slightly tremulous. He pressed his mouth a bit more against mine to stop it trembling, then he parted his lips and his kissing became serious. It quickly became urgent and skilful, too skilful … It was dawning on me that I was better suited to kissing a boy in the sunshine than to studying for a degree. I drew away from him a little, gasping.

‘We must live together, Cécile. I’ll go along with the Elsa plan.’

I wondered if my reckoning was correct. I was the driving force, I was directing these theatricals and I could always call a halt to them.

‘You have strange ideas,’ said Cyril with his little crooked smile that made his lip curl up to give him the appearance of a bandit, a very handsome bandit.

‘Kiss me,’ I murmured, ‘quick, kiss me.’

So that is how I set the comedy in motion, in spite of myself, offhandedly and out of curiosity. Sometimes I think I would prefer to have done it deliberately, with hatred and vehemence, so that I could at least blame myself for it, rather than blaming my indolence and the sun and Cyril’s kisses.

After an hour, feeling rather worried, I left the conspirators. I still did have several arguments to fall back on for reassurance: my plan could turn out to be a bad one, my father’s passion for Anne could very well extend to faithfulness. What was more, neither Cyril nor Elsa could do anything much without me. I was sure to find some way of calling a halt to this play-acting if my father appeared likely to be taken in by it. It was amusing, in any case, to see whether my psychological reckonings were correct or not.

And besides, Cyril loved me and wanted to marry me. This thought in itself was enough to make me euphoric. If he could wait for me for a year or two, just long enough for me to grow up, I would accept his offer. I could already see myself living with Cyril, sleeping next to him, never leaving him. We would go for lunch every Sunday with Anne and my father, one happy family, and we could maybe even include Cyril’s mother, which would also contribute to making the meal a family occasion.

I ran into Anne on the terrace as she was on her way down to the beach to join my father. She greeted me in that sardonic way in which you greet people who have been drinking the night before. I asked her what she had been going to say to me the previous evening before I fell asleep, but she laughingly refused to tell me, on the grounds that it would annoy me. My father was just coming out of the water. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, and to me he looked superb. I went for a swim with Anne. She swam gently, with her head out of the water so as not to get her hair wet. Then we all three stretched out side by side on the sand, face down, quiet and at peace, with me in the middle.

It was then that the boat hove into view in full sail at the far end of the inlet. My father saw it first.

‘So our dear Cyril could hold out no longer,’ he said, laughing. ‘Shall we forgive him, Anne? Basically he’s a nice boy.’

I raised my head, scenting danger.

‘But what’s he doing?’ said my father. ‘He’s sailing round the inlet. Ah! He’s not alone …’

Anne had also looked up. The boat was going to pass in front of us and then go in the opposite direction. I made out Cyril’s face. Inwardly I begged him to go away.

My father’s exclamation made me jump, even though I had been expecting it for a couple of minutes:

‘Good heavens, it’s Elsa! What’s she doing there?’

He turned to Anne:

‘That girl is extraordinary! She must have got that poor boy in her clutches and got herself adopted by the old lady.’

But Anne wasn’t listening to him. She was watching me. I saw that and I buried my face in the sand, full of shame. She stretched out her hand and laid it on my neck.

‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘Do you resent me for this?’

I opened my eyes. She was gazing down at me anxiously, almost imploringly. For the first time she was looking at me as if I were a person with thoughts and feelings and she was doing so the very day that … I groaned and brusquely turned my head towards my father to shake off that hand. He was watching the boat.

‘My poor little girl,’ Anne’s voice went on quietly. ‘My poor little Cécile. It’s my fault in a way. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so strict. Do you believe me when I say that I didn’t wish to cause you distress?’

She was gently stroking my hair and the back of my neck. I didn’t move. I had the same impression as I did when, on the beach, the sand disappeared from beneath my feet, sucked away by a receding wave. A longing for defeat and gentleness had overcome me and no other feeling, not anger, not desire, had ever swept me up as this one did. I wanted to abandon the play-acting, to entrust my life to her, to put myself in her hands for the rest of my days. I had never before experienced such an intense and overwhelming sense of helplessness. I closed my eyes. It seemed to me as if my heart were ceasing to beat.

Four

My father had displayed no emotion other than astonishment. The maid had explained to him that Elsa had come to fetch her suitcase and had left again immediately. I don’t know why she didn’t mention our conversation to him. She was a local woman with a very romantic outlook on life and she must have thought our situation quite spicy, especially with the changes to the bedroom arrangements that she had had to deal with.

Anyway, my father and Anne, being racked with remorse, showed me every consideration and a kindness which, although at first it was unbearable, I quickly learnt to appreciate. The fact was that, even though it was all my doing, I did not find it very pleasant to be always running into Cyril and Elsa arm in arm, showing every sign of being in perfect harmony. I could no longer go sailing but I could see Elsa sailing past with her hair all wind-swept, as mine had been. I had no difficulty in assuming an impassive and deceptively detached expression when we met them. For we met them everywhere, in the wood, in the village, on the road. Anne would glance at me and talk to me about something else. She would put her hand on my shoulder to comfort me. Have I said that she was kind? I don’t know whether her kindness was a refined expression of her intelligence or quite simply of her aloofness but she always had the right word or gesture, and if there had been any real suffering involved, I could not have had better support.

So I let myself drift on without too much concern, for, as I’ve said, my father was showing no sign of jealousy. That was proof to me of his attachment to Anne and it annoyed me somewhat because it also showed up the futility of my plans. One day we were going to the post office, he and I, when we passed Elsa. She appeared not to see us and my father turned round to look at her, giving a little whistle, as if she were someone he didn’t know.

‘I say, she’s got terribly attractive-looking, has Elsa.’

‘Love suits her,’ I said.

He looked at me in surprise.

‘You seem to be taking that better than before …’

‘What do you expect?’ I said. ‘They’re the same age so it was more or less inevitable.’

‘If it hadn’t been for Anne, it wouldn’t have been at all inevitable.’

He was furious.

‘Don’t imagine that some cheeky young devil could take a woman away from me if I didn’t consent to it.’

‘Age does come into it,’ I said solemnly.

He shrugged his shoulders. When we got back I saw that he was preoccupied. Perhaps he was thinking that, yes, Elsa was young and so was Cyril, and that marrying a woman of his own age meant that he would no longer fall into the category of men who were ageless. I couldn’t help feeling triumphant. When I saw the little wrinkles in the corners of Anne’s eyes and the slight creasing round her mouth I did feel angry with myself. But it was so easy to follow my impulses and to repent later …

A week went by. Cyril and Elsa, who did not know how matters were progressing, must have been expecting me every day. But I didn’t dare go to see them. They would have forced me to come up with more ideas and I wasn’t keen on that. In any case, in the afternoons I was going up to my room, supposedly to work. In point of fact, I was doing nothing. I had found a book on yoga and I was getting down to that with great conviction, sometimes succumbing to the most awful fits of giggles, but silently, because I was afraid that Anne might hear. In fact I told her that I was working very hard. I pretended for her benefit to be disappointed in love and to be finding consolation in the thought of one day becoming an accomplished graduate. I got the impression that she thought well of me for that and I took to quoting Kant^10 at mealtimes, which quite clearly dismayed my father.

One afternoon I had swathed myself in bath towels in order to achieve a more Hindu look. I had placed my right foot on my left thigh and I was staring at myself in the mirror, not in a self-satisfied way but in the hope of attaining the higher state of the Yogi, when there was a knock at the door. I assumed it was the maid and, as nothing ever alarmed her, I called to her to come in.

It was Anne. She stood stock-still for a moment in the doorway and then she smiled.

‘What do you think you’re playing at?’

‘At yoga,’ I said. ‘But I’m not playing. It’s a Hindu philosophy.’

She went over to the table and picked up my book. I began to get alarmed. It was open at page one hundred and the other pages were covered with notes in my handwriting, such as ‘can’t be done’ or ‘exhausting’.

‘You are very conscientious,’ she said. ‘And what has become of this great essay on Pascal^11 that you’ve talked to us about so much?’

It was true that I had enjoyed holding forth at mealtimes on something Pascal says that I pretended to have thought about and worked on. I hadn’t written a word, of course. I stayed perfectly still. Anne looked at me intently and the truth suddenly dawned on her.

‘It’s your own business if you don’t work and if you play the fool in front of the mirror,’ she said. ‘But if you then take delight in lying to your father and me, that’s more serious. I must say, your sudden burst of intellectual activity did surprise me …’

She made her exit, leaving me petrified in my bath towels. I didn’t understand her reference to ‘lies’. I had talked about essays to please her, yet out of the blue she was heaping scorn on me. I had become accustomed to her new attitude towards me, and now the calm, humiliating nature of her disdain filled me with rage. I got out of my attire, pulled on trousers and an old blouse and rushed from the house. The heat was overpowering but I began to run, propelled by a kind of fury that was all the more violent for my suspecting that I was ashamed. I ran all the way to Cyril’s and I stopped, breathless, at the entrance to his villa. In the afternoon heat the houses seemed strangely deep, silent and turned in on their secrets. I went up to Cyril’s bedroom, which he had shown me the day we had gone to see his mother. I opened the door. He was asleep, stretched out across his bed with his cheek resting on his arm. I stood looking at him for a full minute. For the first time ever he appeared defenceless to me, a touching sight. I called out to him in a low voice. He opened his eyes and, on seeing me, sat up immediately.

‘Is it you? Why are you here?’

I signalled to him not to speak so loud. If his mother were to come and find me in her son’s room, she might think … and who wouldn’t think …? Panic seized me and I made for the door.

‘Where are you going?’ cried Cyril. ‘Come back, Cécile!’

He had caught me by the arm and was laughingly holding me back. I turned towards him and looked at him. He went pale, as I myself must have been pale, and he let go of my wrist, but only to take me in his arms and carry me along with him. In my confusion I kept thinking that this had been bound to happen. And then began love’s merry dance, where fear goes hand in hand with desire and where, too, there is tenderness and rage and then that brutal hurt giving way to the triumph of pleasure. With Cyril’s gentleness playing its part, I had the good fortune to discover it that day.

I stayed close to him for an hour, dazed and amazed. I had always heard love being spoken of as something quite straightforward. I had myself spoken of it crudely, with the ignorance of youth, but it seemed to me now that I would never again be able to speak of it in that way, in that detached and coarse manner. Cyril, lying beside me, was talking about marrying me and having me next to him for as long as he lived. My silence worried him. I sat up and looked at him and called him ‘my lover’. He leant forward. I pressed my mouth on the vein that was still throbbing in his neck, murmuring ‘My darling Cyril, my darling’. I don’t know if it was true love that I felt for him at that moment – I have always been fickle and I don’t believe in seeing myself as anything other than what I am – but at that moment I loved him more than I loved myself, I would have given my life for him. He asked me as I was leaving if I felt reproachful towards him, which made me laugh. How could I feel reproachful towards him for giving me such happiness?

I made my way slowly back through the pines, exhausted and numbed. I had asked Cyril not to come with me, it would have been too dangerous. I was afraid that the blatant hallmarks of pleasure might be legible on my face, in the shadows under my eyes and the fullness of my lips, and in my trembling. Anne was on a recliner in front of the house, reading. I had a good story ready to explain my absence but she asked me no questions, she never asked me any questions. So I sat down near her without saying anything, remembering that we had fallen out. I stayed motionless, with my eyes half-closed, attentive to the rhythm of my breathing and the quivering of my fingers. From time to time the memory of Cyril’s body as it had been at certain moments left me feeling drained.

I took a cigarette from the table and struck a match on the matchbox. It went out. I lit a second one carefully, for there was no wind and the only thing quivering was my hand. It went out as soon as it touched my cigarette. I groaned and took a third one. And then, I don’t know why, that match became of vital importance to me. Perhaps it was because Anne, suddenly no longer aloof, was watching me intently and with no hint of a smile. At that moment, time and our surroundings vanished and all that remained was the match with my finger on it, the grey matchbox and Anne’s gaze. My mind went into a spin and my heart began to beat furiously; I tightened my fingers round the match, it flared and while I was eagerly bending my face towards it, my cigarette caught the tip of it and put it out. I let the box fall to the ground and closed my eyes. Anne’s harsh, interrogating gaze was bearing down on me. All that I prayed for, and from whatever quarter, was that the waiting should be over. Anne took my face in her hands while I kept my eyelids tight shut for fear she might see the look in my eyes. I could feel tears oozing out, tears of exhaustion, embarrassment and pleasure. At that point, as if she were forgoing any attempt to question me, in a gesture of appeasement which seemed to convey that she suspected nothing, Anne ran her hands down my face and released me. Then she put a lighted cigarette into my mouth and immersed herself in her book again.

I have imposed a certain meaning on that gesture of hers, or I have tried to. But today, whenever I need a match, I come back to that strange moment and to the gap between myself and what I was trying to do, to Anne’s gaze weighing on me and to that emptiness all around, the intensity of the void …

Five

The incident that I have just described was to have its consequences. Like all those who react to things in a very considered way and are very sure of themselves, Anne could not bear to compromise over her principles. That gesture of hers, the gentle way in which she had released her firm hands from around my face, was for her just such a compromise. She had guessed something that she could have made me confess to, and at the last minute she had given in to pity or retreated into aloofness. For it was just as hard for her to take charge of me and knock me into shape as it was for her to accept my shortcomings. It was her sense of duty that prompted her to assume the role of guardian and teacher. In marrying my father she was at the same time becoming responsible for me. I would have preferred her constant disapproval, if I may call it that, to have been the result of her irritation or of some other feeling that went only skin-deep, because in that case habit would quickly have got the better of it. People get used to the faults of others when they don’t believe it is their duty to correct them. Within six months she would no longer have felt anything but weariness where I was concerned, an affectionate weariness. That is exactly what I would have wanted. But she wasn’t going to feel that way, because she would see herself as being responsible for me, and in a sense she would indeed be responsible for me, since fundamentally I was still pliable – pliable yet headstrong.

So she was annoyed with herself and she let me know it. A few days later at lunch, and still on the topic of the holiday revision that I found so intolerable, an argument erupted. I was rather too outspoken, even my father took offence at it, and in the end Anne locked me in my room, all without having raised her voice. I was unaware of what she had done and, feeling thirsty, I went over to the door and made to open it. When it wouldn’t open I realized it was locked. I had never been locked up before in my life and I was genuinely panic-stricken. I rushed to the window but there was no getting out that way. I turned back, truly horrified, and threw myself against the door, hurting my shoulder very badly in the process. I tried to force the lock, clenching my teeth, as I didn’t want to call for anyone to come and open up for me. I sacrificed my nail clippers in the attempt. So there I was, standing in the middle of the room with nothing to show for my pains. I stood perfectly still, conscious of a sense of peace and tranquillity coming over me as my thoughts became clearer. It was my introduction to cruelty: the idea of it took root in me and became stronger the more I thought. I lay down on my bed and carefully drew up a plan. My ferocity was so much out of proportion to what had given rise to it that I got up two or three times in the course of the afternoon to leave the room and was each time astonished to come up against the locked door.

At six o’clock my father came to open up for me. I got up automatically when he entered the room. He looked at me without a word and I smiled at him in the same automatic way.

‘Do you want us to have a talk?’ he asked.

‘What about?’ I said. ‘You hate that kind of thing and so do I, that way of having things out that leads nowhere …’

‘That’s true.’ He seemed relieved. ‘You must be nice to Anne, you must be patient.’

That word surprised me: me, patient with Anne? He was standing the problem on its head. The fact was that he thought of Anne as a woman he was imposing on his daughter, rather than the other way round. There was all still to play for.

‘I’ve been very unpleasant,’ I said. ‘I’m going to apologize to Anne.’

‘You are … um … happy, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said lightly. ‘And then if we don’t get on too well with Anne, I shall just get married a bit sooner, that’s all.’

I knew he was bound to be hurt by that suggestion.

‘That’s not anything we want to consider. You’re not Snow White.12 Could you bear to leave me so soon? We would only have had two years together.’

The idea was as unbearable to me as it was to him. I could easily have seen myself there and then weeping on his shoulder and talking about lost happiness and high-flown emotions. But I could not make him party to my plans.

‘I’m really exaggerating, you know. Anne and I get on well, in fact. And with allowances on both sides …’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

He must have been thinking, as I was, that the allowances were unlikely to be reciprocal but would be made by me alone.

‘You understand,’ I said. ‘I am well aware that Anne is always right. Her life is much more of a success than ours, much more meaningful …’

He made as if to protest in spite of himself, but I carried on.

‘In a month or two I’ll have taken Anne’s ideas completely on board, there’ll be no more silly arguments between us. It just needs a little patience.’

He was looking at me, clearly baffled. And he was also fearful. He was losing an accomplice for his future escapades and he was also losing a bit of his past.

‘You mustn’t exaggerate,’ he said feebly. ‘I admit that the kind of life you’ve led with me was perhaps not suitable for your age, nor … um … for mine either, but it wasn’t a foolish or unhappy life, it really wasn’t. Basically we haven’t been too … um … miserable, we really haven’t, or out of kilter, these last two years. We don’t have to disown our way of life just like that, merely because Anne looks at things rather differently.’

‘We don’t have to disown it,’ I said with conviction, ‘but we do have to abandon it.’

‘So it seems,’ said the poor man, and with that we went downstairs.

I made my apologies to Anne without any trouble. She said that they were unnecessary and that the heat must have been to blame for our argument. I felt indifferent towards her, and perfectly cheerful.

I met up with Cyril in the wood as arranged. I told him what he had to do. He listened to me with a mixture of fear and admiration. Then he took me in his arms, but it was too late, I had to go back. I was surprised at how hard it was for me to part from him. If he had been seeking a means of binding me to him, he had certainly found it. My body responded to him, became fully itself and blossomed when close to his. I kissed him passionately, I wanted to hurt him, to leave my mark on him so that he would not be able to forget me for one instant that evening and would dream of me that night. For the night would be endless without him, without him close to me, without his lover’s skill, his sudden passion and his long caresses.

Six

The next morning I took my father on a walk with me along the road. We talked cheerfully of trivial things. As we headed back towards the villa, I suggested to him that we might go through the pine wood. It was exactly half past ten; I was on time. My father walked ahead of me: the path was narrow and covered in brambles which he pushed aside for me as we went, so that I wouldn’t scratch my legs. When I saw him come to a sudden halt, I knew that he had seen them. I went up to him. Cyril and Elsa were asleep, lying stretched out on the pine needles, giving every appearance of bucolic bliss. It was just what I had told them to do, but when I saw them like that I felt heartbroken. Elsa’s love for my father and Cyril’s love for me could not stop them from being each as beautiful and young as the other, or now so close together. I glanced over at my father: he stood motionless, gazing at them as if mesmerized and looking abnormally pale. I took him by the arm.

‘Don’t let’s waken them, let’s go.’

He cast a last glance at Elsa lying back in all her youthful beauty, all gold-skinned and red-haired, and with a slight smile playing on her lips, the smile of the young nymph who has at last been overtaken. Turning on his heel, he began to stride away.

‘The trollop,’ he was muttering, ‘the trollop!’

‘Why do you say that? Isn’t she free to do as she pleases?’

‘That’s not the point. Do you like it, seeing Cyril in her arms?’

‘I don’t love him any more,’ I said.

‘And I don’t love Elsa either,’ he cried out furiously. ‘But it does something to me, even so. After all, I’ve – er – lived with her! That makes it much worse …’

I knew that made it worse! He must have felt the same urge as I had, to rush forward, to part them, to reclaim what was, or had once been, his.

‘If Anne could hear you now …’

‘What? If Anne could hear me? Obviously she wouldn’t understand or she’d be shocked, that’s only natural. But what about you? You’re my daughter, aren’t you? Don’t you understand me any more? Are you shocked too?’

How easy it was for me to steer his thoughts! I was rather alarmed at knowing him so well.

‘I’m not shocked,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got to face up to things. Elsa has a short memory, she likes Cyril, she’s lost to you. Especially after what you did to her. People don’t forgive things like that.’

‘If I wanted to …’ my father began, and then stopped as if afraid to go on.

‘You wouldn’t succeed,’ I said emphatically, as if it were quite natural to be discussing his chances of getting Elsa back.

‘But I’m not thinking of it,’ he said, coming to his senses.

‘Of course not,’ I said with a shrug of the shoulders.

The shrug meant: ‘Impossible, dear chap, you’re out of the running.’ He said nothing further to me on the way back to the house. When he got there he took Anne in his arms and held her close for a few moments with his eyes closed. Smiling and surprised, she made no objection. I left the room and went to lean against the wall in the hallway, trembling with shame.

At two o’clock I heard Cyril’s faint whistle and I went down to the beach. He made me get into the boat straight away and headed out to sea. There were no other boats, no one was thinking of going out in that sun. Once we were on the open sea he lowered the sail and turned to face me. We had hardly said a word.

‘About this morning …’ he began.

‘Be quiet,’ I said, ‘oh, do be quiet …’

He gently pushed me down on to the tarpaulin. We were soaked, running with sweat; we were clumsy and in a hurry. The boat swayed rhythmically beneath us. I lay looking at the sun just above me. And suddenly I heard Cyril’s whispering, masterful yet tender. The sun was becoming detached from the sky. It was bursting open and falling on me. Where was I? It was as if I were at the bottom of the ocean, I was lost in time, I was in extremes of pleasure … I cried out to Cyril but he made no reply – there was no need.

Then came the coolness of the salt water. We were laughing together, dazzled, languid, grateful. We had sun and sea, laughter and love. Would we ever experience them again as we did that summer, with all the vividness and intensity lent to them by fear and remorse?

As well as the very real physical pleasure that I got from love, I also experienced a kind of intellectual pleasure from thinking about it. The expression ‘to make love’ has an attraction all of its own which, if you analyse it, springs from the meaning of the individual words. I was charmed by the fact that the verb ‘to make’, with its clear-cut, material connotations, was associated with the poetic abstraction of the word ‘love’. I had used the phrase before quite unblushingly, without the least embarrassment and without noticing how it could be savoured. Now I felt that I was becoming easily embarrassed. I would lower my gaze whenever my father looked at all intently at Anne, whenever she laughed that new, little, husky and unseemly laugh of hers, which made both my father and me turn pale and stare out of the window. If we had told Anne that her laugh was like that, she would not have believed us. She did not behave as if she were my father’s mistress but, rather, as if she were a dear friend. Yet at night, no doubt … I refused to entertain such thoughts, I hated notions that unsettled me.

The days passed. I rather forgot about Anne and about my father and Elsa. Love made me live with my eyes wide open, yet with my head in the clouds; I was pleasant and peaceable. Cyril asked me whether I was not afraid of conceiving a child. I told him that I was relying on him and he seemed to find that quite natural. Perhaps that was why I had given myself to him so readily, because he would not leave it to me to take responsibility and hence, if I had a child, he would be to blame. He took upon himself what I could not bear to take on: responsibilities. In any case, I found it difficult to imagine myself pregnant, given my slim, firm body. For once I congratulated myself on having an adolescent’s frame.

But Elsa was growing impatient. She constantly plied me with questions. I was always afraid of being discovered in her company or in Cyril’s. She arranged things so that wherever my father was, she was; she ran into him everywhere. Then she would congratulate herself on imagined triumphs and on glimpsing what she said were repressed impulses of his that he couldn’t conceal. This was a girl who, frankly, because of what she was, was well used to the idea of love as a commercial exchange. So I was astonished to see her become so romantic and get so excited by details such as a look or a gesture, she being someone who had been moulded to suit the precise requirements of men in a hurry. The fact is that she was not used to having a role that involved any form of subtlety, and the role that she was now playing must have seemed to her the height of psychological refinement.

Even if my father was gradually becoming obsessed with Elsa, Anne did not seem to notice. He was more tender and attentive towards her than ever and that frightened me, because I put his attitude down to unconscious remorse. The important thing was that nothing should happen over the remaining three weeks. We would return to Paris, Elsa would go on her way and, assuming they were still decided on it, my father and Anne would get married. In Paris there would be Cyril and, just as she had been unable to stop me from loving him here, Anne would not be able to stop me from seeing him. He had a room there well away from where his mother lived. I could already imagine the window opening on to the amazing pink and blue Parisian skies, pigeons cooing on the rail outside and Cyril and me on the narrow bed …

Seven

A few days later, my father was contacted by a friend of ours suggesting that we meet up in Saint-Raphaël for an aperitif. He couldn’t wait to tell us, as he was delighted at the thought of being able to escape briefly from the self-imposed and rather artificial isolation in which we were living. So I informed Elsa and Cyril that we would be at the Bar du Soleil at seven o’clock and that, if they wanted to come along, they would see us there. As ill luck would have it, Elsa knew the friend in question, which made her doubly eager to go. Foreseeing complications, I tried to put her off but I was wasting my time.

‘Charles Webb adores me,’ she said with childlike simplicity. ‘If he sees me, he’s bound to urge Raymond to come back to me.’

Cyril didn’t care whether he went to Saint-Raphaël or not. The main thing for him was to be where I was. I saw it in his expression and I couldn’t help feeling proud.

So that afternoon around six o’clock we set off in Anne’s car. I loved her car: it was an impressive American convertible more in line with her professional image than her personal taste. It was certainly to my taste, being full of shiny fittings and very quiet and cut off from the outside world, and it tilted when it went round bends. What’s more, all three of us sat in the front, and nowhere did I feel fonder of anyone than in a car. There we were, the three of us squashed up together, laying ourselves open to the same pleasures of speed and wind, and perhaps even to the same death. Anne drove, as if to symbolize her place in the family that we were going to become. I had not been in her car since the evening in Cannes, and that made me think.

We met Charles Webb and his wife at the Bar du Soleil. He specialized in theatre advertising and his wife specialized in spending the money he made, which she did at an incredible rate by lavishing it on young men. He was absolutely obsessed with the idea of making ends meet and he pursued money relentlessly, hence he had an anxious, impatient side to him that was somewhat unseemly. He had been Elsa’s lover over a long period because, for all her good looks, she was not a particularly grasping woman and he liked the fact that she was quite relaxed where money was concerned.

As for his wife, she was a nasty individual. Anne did not know her and I saw her lovely face quickly take on that disdainful, mocking expression she usually assumed in company. Charles Webb talked a lot, as usual, all the while looking across at Anne in an inquisitive way. He was clearly wondering what she was doing with that womanizer Raymond and his daughter. I felt full of pride at the thought that he was soon going to find out. My father leant over to him as he was drawing breath and, out of the blue, said:

‘I’ve news for you, old chap. Anne and I are getting married on the fifth of October.’

Webb looked from one to the other, quite dumbstruck. I was delighted. His wife, who had always had a soft spot for my father, seemed disconcerted.

Webb then bellowed: ‘My compliments! What a splendid idea! My dear lady, you are amazing for taking on such a rascal! Waiter! This calls for a celebration.’

Anne was smiling; she was calm and relaxed. Just at that moment I saw Webb’s face light up and I did not turn round to look.

‘Elsa! My God, it’s Elsa Mackenbourg! She hasn’t seen me. Have you seen how lovely that girl is looking nowadays, Raymond?’

‘Isn’t she just!’ said my father complacently, as if she belonged to him.

Then he remembered and his expression changed.

Anne couldn’t fail to notice my father’s tone of voice. In one rapid movement she turned from looking at him to looking at me. As she opened her mouth to say no doubt the first thing that came into her head, I leant across and spoke to her:

‘Anne, your elegance is causing quite a stir. There’s a man over there who can’t take his eyes off you.’

I had dropped my voice to a confidential pitch but was speaking loud enough for my father to hear. He spun round and caught sight of the man in question.

‘I dislike that kind of thing,’ he said, taking Anne’s hand.

‘Aren’t they sweet?’ exclaimed Madame Webb mockingly. ‘Charles, you shouldn’t have bothered these two love-birds. You could just have invited young Cécile here.’

‘“Young Cécile here” wouldn’t have come,’ I said bluntly.

‘Why not? Have you boyfriends among the fishermen?’

She had once seen me sitting on a bench talking to a bus conductor and ever since had treated me as if I had lost caste – that’s what she called it: ‘losing caste’.

‘Yes, I have,’ I said, trying to sound cheery.

‘And do you fish often?’

The worst of it was that she thought she was being funny. I was getting more and more annoyed and I said: ‘I don’t know much about what old trouts do, but I myself do fish.’

There was silence. Then Anne spoke up, composed as always:

‘Raymond, would you ask the waiter to bring a straw? You really do need one with freshly squeezed orange juice.’

Charles Webb quickly moved on to the topic of refreshing drinks. My father had to suppress his laughter. I could see it by the way in which he became engrossed in his glass. Anne shot me an imploring look. On the spot it was decided that we would all have dinner together, which is what happens when people have narrowly avoided falling out.

I drank a lot during the meal. I needed to blot out the anxious expression Anne wore whenever she looked at my father or what could have been gratitude whenever her eyes rested on me. Whenever Webb’s wife made a dig at me, I looked back at her with a beaming smile. She found this tactic of mine disconcerting and she very quickly became aggressive. Anne signalled to me not to react. She had a horror of scenes and she sensed that Madame Webb was all set to create one. For my part, I was used to scenes, they were common occurrences in the circles in which we moved. So I wasn’t at all on edge as I listened to her.

After dinner we went to a nightclub in Saint-Raphaël. Shortly after we got there, Elsa and Cyril arrived. Elsa stopped in the entrance, spoke very loudly to the lady in charge of the cloakroom and, with Cyril in tow, carried on in. It struck me that she was behaving more like a tart than a girlfriend but she had the looks to carry it off.

‘Who is that whippersnapper?’ asked Charles Webb. ‘He looks very young.’

‘It’s love,’ whispered his wife. ‘Love suits him.’

‘What an idea!’ my father said angrily. ‘It’s an infatuation, that’s what it is.’

I glanced at Anne. She was studying Elsa in a calm, detached way, the way that she would look at the fashion models who presented her collections, or at very young women. She showed no trace of acrimony. For a moment I admired her intensely for her lack of pettiness or jealousy. In any case, I couldn’t understand what she might have to be jealous about as far as Elsa was concerned. She was a hundred times more beautiful and more subtle than Elsa. Being drunk, I told her so. She looked at me curiously.

‘Do you really think I’m more beautiful than Elsa?’

‘There’s absolutely no doubt about it!’

‘That’s always nice to hear. But you’re drinking too much, yet again. Give me your glass. You’re not too upset at seeing Cyril over there, are you? Anyway, he’s clearly not enjoying himself.’

‘He’s my lover,’ I said brightly.

‘You are thoroughly drunk! It’s just as well that it’s time to go home.’

When, with relief, we left the Webbs, I made a point of addressing Madame Webb politely. My father took the wheel and my head lolled over on to Anne’s shoulder.

I kept thinking how much I preferred her to the Webbs and to all the people we usually saw. She was better than them, more dignified and intelligent. My father didn’t say much. No doubt in his mind’s eye he was going over the arrival of Elsa.

‘Is she asleep?’ he asked Anne.

‘She’s sleeping like a baby. She behaved herself quite well, relatively speaking. Except for the reference to old trout, which was a bit direct.’

My father began to laugh. There was silence. Then I heard his voice again.

‘Anne, I love you, I love only you. Do you believe me?’

‘Don’t keep saying that, it frightens me.’

‘Give me your hand.’

I almost sat up to protest: ‘No, not while you’re driving along a cliff top!’ But I was rather drunk, and there was Anne’s perfume and the wind from the sea blowing in my hair and the little scratch that Cyril had made on my shoulder when we were making love, so many reasons to be happy and to say nothing. I was falling asleep. Meanwhile, Elsa and poor Cyril must have been setting off laboriously on the motorcycle his mother had given him for his last birthday. I don’t know why, but the thought of it moved me to tears. This car was so smooth, it had such good suspension, it was just made for sleep … Madame Webb was unlikely to be getting much sleep at that moment. Probably at her age I’ll also be paying young men to love me, because love is the sweetest thing, it’s what in life is most vivid and has the most point. So the price paid hardly matters. What mattered was not to become embittered and jealous, as she was of Elsa and Anne. I began to laugh softly to myself. Anne’s shoulder sank down a little lower for me. ‘Go to sleep,’ she said firmly. I went to sleep.

Eight

The next day I awoke feeling perfectly fine, barely tired, just with the back of my neck aching slightly as a result of my excesses. As it was every morning, my bed was bathed in sunlight. I pushed back my sheets, took off my pyjama top and turned my bare back to the sun. With my cheek resting on my folded arm, I could see close up the coarse texture of the linen sheet and beyond that, on the tiled floor, the vacillations of a fly. The sun was warm and gentle, it seemed to make my bones expand beneath my skin and to take special care to bestow its warmth upon me. I decided to spend the whole morning like that, not budging.

The previous evening was gradually becoming clearer in my memory. I remembered having told Anne that Cyril was my lover and I laughed to think that when you are drunk you say things that are true and no one believes you. I also remembered Madame Webb and my altercation with her. I was familiar with that type of woman: in those circles and at her age they were often odious because they had nothing to occupy themselves with, yet they still desired to live life to the full. Anne’s serenity had led me to view Madame Webb as being even more idiotic and annoying than usual. It was only to be expected. I failed to see who among my father’s female friends could stand comparison with Anne for long. In order to spend a pleasant evening with these people, you had either to be a little drunk and enjoy arguing with them or to be in an intimate relationship with one or other of the spouses. For my father, it was simpler: he and Charles Webb both loved the thrill of the chase. ‘Guess who I’m going to wine and dine and then bed tonight! The little Mars girl, the one who was in Saurel’s film. I was going into Dupuis’ place when …’ My father would laugh and slap him on the shoulder: ‘Lucky man! She’s almost as lovely looking as Élise.’ Schoolboy talk, but what I liked about it was both men’s enthusiasm and ardour. And during interminable parties or on the terraces of cafés, I even liked Lombard’s melancholy avowals: ‘She was the only one I ever loved, Raymond! You remember that spring before she left me? It’s crazy, a man’s life ruined for the sake of one woman!’ There was something inappropriate and demeaning about all of this, but there was a warmth, too, in two men exchanging confidences over a drink.

Anne’s friends probably never talked about themselves. Doubtless they did not indulge in such escapades. Or even if they did talk about such things, it would most likely be with a shamefaced laugh. I was ready to share with Anne the condescending attitude she would adopt towards our acquaintances; it was not unkind and it was contagious. Yet I could see myself, at thirty, being more like our friends than like her, and finding her silence, her aloofness and her reserve suffocating. Indeed, I could imagine, in fifteen years’ time, being somewhat blasé; I could picture myself leaning across to an attractive man, just as world-weary as I was, to say:

‘My first lover was called Cyril. I was not quite eighteen; the sun was hot over the sea …’

I took pleasure in visualizing the man’s face. He would have the same little wrinkles as my father. There was a knock at the door. I hastily got into my pyjama top and called: ‘Come in!’ It was Anne, carefully balancing a cup.

‘I thought you might be in need of some coffee … You’re not feeling too bad, I hope.’

‘I’m feeling fine,’ I said. ‘I was a little bit tipsy last night, you know.’

‘You’re the same every time we take you anywhere …’ She began to laugh. ‘But I must say I found you entertaining. It was a long evening.’

I was no longer noticing the sun, nor even paying attention to the taste of the coffee. Whenever I talked to Anne, I was totally absorbed, I was no longer observing myself. And yet she was the one who was always calling me into question and forcing me to judge myself. It was because of her that I experienced intense moments of difficulty.

‘Cécile, do you enjoy being with those sorts of people, the Webbs and the Dupuis?’

‘I find the way they behave mostly quite tedious, but they can be very funny.’

She too was watching the comings and goings of the fly on the floor. I thought there must be something wrong with the fly. Anne had long, heavy eyelids so it was easy for her to look condescending.

‘Don’t you ever realize how monotonous their conversation is and – how can I put it? – how lumbering it is? All those stories of contracts, girls, parties, do they never bore you?’

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I spent ten years in a convent so it still fascinates me that these people have no morals.’

I did not dare add that it also appealed to me.

‘Even after two years,’ she said. ‘Yet it’s got nothing to do with being rational or moral, it’s a question of one’s sensitivity and having a sixth sense.’

I supposed I didn’t have one. I distinctly felt that I was lacking something in that department.

‘Anne,’ I asked abruptly, ‘do you think I’m intelligent?’

She began to laugh, astonished at the directness of my question.

‘But of course I do! Why do you ask?’

‘Even if I were an idiot, you would give me the same answer,’ I sighed. ‘You often give me the impression of being one step ahead of me.’

‘It’s just a question of age,’ she said. ‘It would be highly regrettable if I were not a little more self-assured than you. You would be able to influence me!’

She laughed out loud. I was vexed.

‘That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.’

‘It would be a catastrophe,’ she said.

She suddenly dropped her bantering tone and looked me straight in the eye. Feeling awkward, I shifted slightly. Even today I cannot get used to this mania people have for staring at you when they are talking to you or for coming up close to you to make sure you are listening. Of course it’s a miscalculation on their part, because when it happens my only thought is of retreat and escape. I say: ‘Yes, yes,’ while doing everything I can to get away and flee to the other end of the room; I become furious at their insistence, their lack of discretion, their claims to my exclusive attention. Anne, fortunately, did not feel obliged to corner me in this way. She confined herself to looking me steadily in the eye so that it became hard for me to sustain that detached, light-hearted note that I so much favoured.

‘Do you know how men of Webb’s type finish up?’

I thought to myself: ‘And of my father’s type.’

‘In the gutter,’ I said brightly.

‘The time comes when they are no longer attractive or “on form”, as the saying goes. They can’t drink any more and they are still thinking about women. The only thing is, they now have to pay for them and accept a host of little compromises to escape their loneliness. They are sad dupes. That’s when they opt to become sentimental and demanding … I’ve seen a lot of them turn into wrecks in that way.’

‘Poor Webb!’ I said.

I was at a loss. In truth, that was how my father risked ending up. At least, it would have been the end in store for him if Anne had not taken charge.

‘You hadn’t thought of that,’ said Anne with a little smile of commiseration. ‘You don’t think much about the future, do you? That’s youth’s privilege.’

‘Oh, please,’ I said, ‘don’t cast my age up at me like that. I use that card as little as possible. I don’t think being young gives me a right to every privilege or excuse. I don’t attach any importance to it.’

‘What do you attach importance to? To being left alone? To being independent?’

I was afraid of conversations like this, especially when they were with Anne.

‘I don’t attach importance to anything,’ I said. ‘I don’t do a lot of thinking, you know.’

‘I find you rather irritating, you and your father. “You don’t ever think about anything … you’re not good at much … you don’t know …” Does that make you pleased with yourselves?’

‘I’m not pleased with myself. I don’t like myself. I don’t set out to like myself. There are times when you force me to make my life complicated. I almost resent you for it.’

She began to hum to herself, pensively. I recognized the tune but I couldn’t remember what it was.

‘What is that song, Anne? It’s annoying me.’

‘I don’t know.’ She smiled again, seeming a little discouraged. ‘Stay in bed and rest yourself. I’m going to pursue my research into the family’s intellect elsewhere.’

‘Of course,’ I thought, ‘it’s easy for my father.’ From where I was I could hear him saying: ‘I don’t think about anything much, because I love you, Anne.’ For all her intelligence, that reason would be likely to appear valid to her. I had a good long stretch and dived back into my pillow. I did reflect a lot on things, in spite of what I had said to Anne. Really, she was dramatizing the situation. In twenty-five years’ time my father would be a lovable sexagenarian with white hair and a fondness for whisky and highly coloured reminiscences. We would go out together. I would be the one to recount my escapades to him and he would be the one giving advice. It struck me that I was excluding Anne from this future of ours. I was unable to find a place for her in it, I just couldn’t picture it. Our chaotic flat could sometimes be desolate, but at other times it was full of flowers and abuzz with activity and unfamiliar accents; it was frequently cluttered up with luggage. I just could not imagine it pervaded by the order, silence and harmony which Anne brought with her wherever she went, as if she were bringing the most precious of assets. I was terrified that I would die of boredom. I probably feared her influence less since loving Cyril in a real and physical sense. That had liberated me from many of my terrors. But, more than anything, I feared boredom and repose. To be inwardly reposeful, my father and I needed to be outwardly in ferment. And that was something that Anne would never be able to acknowledge.

Nine

I am talking a lot about Anne and myself and very little about my father. Not that he did not play the most important part in this story, nor that I do not deem it interesting. I have never loved anyone as much as him and, of all the feelings I experienced at that period, those I had for him were the most stable, the deepest and the ones I set most store by. I know him too well and feel too close to him to want to talk about him. However, it is he more than anyone whom I should discuss, in order to be able to present his conduct in an acceptable light. He wasn’t a vain man, nor was he an egoist. But he was a frivolous man, incorrigibly so. I cannot even say that he was irresponsible or incapable of deep feelings. There was nothing frivolous about his love for me, nor could it be regarded as merely a fatherly habit. He more than anyone could suffer through me. For my part, had I not once been close to despair solely because, in averting his gaze from me, he had seemed to be casting me off? He never put his love affairs before me. Some evenings, he must have passed up on what Webb called ‘great opportunities’ just so that he could take me home. But beyond that I cannot deny that he had given himself over to doing whatever he wanted, to caprice and convenience. He was not one for reflection. He tried to give everything a physiological explanation, which he said was the rational one: ‘Do you find yourself hateful? Sleep more and drink less!’ It was the same with the overwhelming desire he sometimes felt for a particular woman; it never occurred to him either to repress it or to elevate it into becoming a more complex sentiment. He was a materialist, but he was sensitive and understanding and quite simply very kind.

He was put out by his desire for Elsa, but not in the way you might think. He didn’t say to himself: ‘I’m going to deceive Anne and that must mean that I love her less.’ What he thought was: ‘It’s a nuisance, my wanting Elsa. I’d better get it over with quickly, otherwise I’m going to have complications with Anne.’ What’s more, he loved Anne, he admired her; she made a change from that succession of shallow, rather silly women with whom he had kept company over the previous few years. She satisfied at one and the same time his vanity, his sensuality and his sensibility, for she understood him and she offered him her intelligence and experience against which to match his own. I am less sure now that he realized how deeply she cared for him. He saw her as the ideal mistress for him and the ideal mother for me. But did he think of her as ‘the ideal wife’, with all the obligations which that entails? I do not believe so. I am sure that, from Cyril and Anne’s standpoint, he was, like me, abnormal where emotions were concerned. That did not prevent him from leading a highly charged life, because he did not consider such a life to be out of the ordinary and he brought all his vitality to bear on it.

I was not thinking of him when I formulated my plan to banish Anne from our lives. I knew that he would get over it, as he got over everything. A break-up would be less painful to him than having to live a well-ordered life. He was only truly disturbed and undermined, as I was myself, by things being repetitive and foreseeable. We were of the same tribe, he and I; sometimes I told myself we belonged to a pure, noble tribe of nomads, and at other times I told myself it was to a poor, washed-up tribe of pleasure-seekers.

Just then he was really suffering, or at least he was becoming intensely irritated. Elsa had come to symbolize for him a life that was past, she had come to symbolize youth and in particular his own youth. I sensed that he was longing to say to Anne: ‘Sweetheart, excuse my absence for one day. I have got to go and prove to myself with that girl that I’m not an old buffer. To be at peace with myself I have got to be reminded how tired I am of her physically.’ But he couldn’t say that to her, not because Anne was jealous or fundamentally prudish or uncompromising in that regard, but because she must have agreed to live with him on the understanding that the days of casual dissipation were over, that he was no longer a schoolboy but a man to whom she was entrusting her life and that consequently he had to behave himself properly and not like some pathetic individual who was a slave to his impulses. You couldn’t blame Anne for reckoning like that, it was perfectly normal and sound as an approach, but it did not prevent my father from desiring Elsa. And he was gradually coming to desire her more than anything else, and to do so with that doubly strong desire that you have for forbidden fruit.

At that point I could probably have made it all come right. I only had to tell Elsa to consent to his wishes and on some pretext or other I would have got Anne to go to Nice with me for the afternoon, or anywhere else for that matter. On our return we would have found my father relaxed and imbued with a fresh devotion to legitimized love, or love that was due at least to become so in the autumn. That was another thing about Anne: she would never put up with the idea of having been merely a mistress like the others, a temporary fixture. How difficult she made life for us, with her sense of dignity and her self-esteem!

But I did not tell Elsa to consent, nor did I tell Anne to come with me to Nice. I wanted that desire in my father’s heart to get the better of him and cause him to commit a blunder. I could not endure the contempt which Anne heaped on our past life, that casual disdain she displayed towards everything that, for my father and me, had represented happiness. I was not setting out to humiliate her, but to make her accept our view of life. She had to know that my father had been unfaithful to her and she had to see that infidelity for what it actually was, a purely physical whim, not an attack on her personal worth or dignity. If she wanted at all costs to be in the right, she had to allow us to be in the wrong.

I even pretended to know nothing of the torment my father was going through. It was essential that he should not confide in me, nor should I be forced by him to become his partner in crime by speaking to Elsa on his behalf or getting Anne out of the way.

I had to pretend to believe that his love for Anne, and Anne herself, were sacrosanct. And I must say that I had no difficulty in doing so. The idea that he might deceive Anne and then face up to her filled me with terror and a sense of awe.

In the meantime the days passed happily for us. I found repeated opportunities to get my father worked up over Elsa. I had stopped feeling remorseful at the sight of Anne’s face. I sometimes thought that she would accept the deed and that we would subsequently have a life with her that suited our tastes as much as hers. Furthermore I was seeing a lot of Cyril and we were carrying on our love affair in secret. There was the scent of the pines, the sound of the sea, the feel of his body … He was beginning to torture himself with remorse: the role that I was making him play was as disagreeable to him as it could possibly be and he continued with it only because I persuaded him that it was necessary for our love. This all added up to a lot of duplicity and keeping quiet, but it involved very little effort and surprisingly few lies (and, as I have said, the only things that forced me into passing judgement on myself were actual deeds).

I am passing rapidly over this period, for I’m afraid that, if I examine it too closely, I could lapse back into memories that might overwhelm me. As it is, I only have to reflect on Anne’s happy laughter and on her kindness to me for something to land me a nasty, low, painful punch. I’m winded. I get so close to having what people call a bad conscience that I have to resort to certain activities such as lighting a cigarette or putting on a record or phoning a friend. Then eventually I think of something else. But I don’t like having to take refuge in my faulty memory and my superficiality instead of combatting these traits. I don’t like to recognize them for what they are, not even to the extent of being very glad that I possess them.

Ten

It’s funny how fate likes to choose faces to represent it which are unworthy or second-rate. That summer it had selected Elsa’s face. Call it, if you will, a very lovely face, but it was really merely alluring. She also had an extraordinary laugh, one that was hearty and infectious, the kind of laugh that only rather stupid people have.

It hadn’t taken long for me to notice the effect that laugh of hers had on my father. I told Elsa to make maximum use of it whenever we were due to ‘come across’ her with Cyril. I would say: ‘Whenever you hear me approach with my father, don’t say anything, just laugh.’ And then, whenever my father heard that exaggerated laughter, I would see his face cloud over with fury. My role in directing these events never ceased to enthral me. I never missed the mark, for whenever we saw Cyril and Elsa together, openly engaged in a relationship that, although imaginary, was perfectly imaginable, my father and I would both go pale, the blood draining from my face as it did from his, sucked away by a desire for possession which was worse than pain. Cyril, Cyril bending over Elsa … that was the image that ravaged my heart and yet it was an image that I helped them to bring to perfection without realizing its potency. Words are easy, companionable things, but whenever I saw the outline of Cyril’s face and his smooth, suntanned neck bent over Elsa’s upturned face, I would have given anything for that not to be. I kept forgetting that it was I myself who had willed it.

Aside from these incidents, and suffusing our everyday life, there was Anne’s confidence, her gentleness and – it pains me to use the word – her happiness. She was in fact closer to happiness than I had ever seen her, and although she had given herself over to the egoists that we were, she was far removed from our tempestuous desires and my low little schemes. This was precisely what I had counted on, that her aloofness and pride would instinctively prevent her from employing any kind of tactic to bind herself more closely to my father, would prevent her, indeed, from using any type of seductiveness other than that of being beautiful, intelligent and tender. I began to feel more and more sorry for her. Pity is a most agreeable emotion. It carries you along like the music of a military band. No one could reproach me for feeling it.

It happened one morning that the maid, in great excitement, handed me a note from Elsa which read as follows: ‘Come quickly! It’s all working out!’ I had the impression that a catastrophe was in the offing: I hate it when things come to a head. Anyway, I met a triumphant-looking Elsa on the beach.

‘I’ve just seen your father. I mean, an hour ago.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He told me he was extremely sorry about what had happened and that he’d behaved very boorishly. Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’

I thought it best to agree.

‘Then he paid me various compliments, the way only he can … you know, in that rather detached tone of his, and very quietly, as if it were causing him pain … that tone of voice …’

I dragged her back to reality from her idyllic visions:

‘What was the upshot?’

‘Well, nothing really … No, there was something, he invited me to take tea with him in the village, to show that I had no hard feelings and that I was broadminded, you know what I mean, progressive.’

I was greatly amused at the thought of the views my father might have on the progressiveness of red-headed young women.

‘Why are you laughing? Am I to go?’

I almost replied that it was nothing to do with me. Then I realized that she credited me with the success of her stratagems. Rightly or wrongly, that irritated me. I felt cornered.

‘I don’t know, Elsa. It’s up to you. Don’t keep asking me what to do. Anyone would think I’m the one pushing you …’

‘But you are,’ she said. ‘After all, it’s thanks to you that …’

The admiring way in which she spoke suddenly frightened me.

‘Go if you want to. Just, for heaven’s sake, don’t talk to me about it any more!’

‘But we have to get rid of that woman for him … don’t we, Cécile?’

I fled. My father could do as he wished and Anne could sort herself out as best she could. In any case, I had a date with Cyril. It seemed to me that love was the only antidote to the fear that was sapping me.

Cyril took me in his arms without a word and led me off. When I was with him, everything became simple and charged with intensity and pleasure. Later, lying stretched out against that golden, sweat-bathed torso of his, and feeling exhausted and adrift, as if I had been shipwrecked, I told him that I hated myself. I smiled when I told him, for, although I meant it, the thought caused me no pain, just a kind of pleasant resignation. He did not take me seriously.

‘It doesn’t matter. I love you enough to make you share my opinion of you. I love you, I love you so much.’

The lilt of that sentence stayed with me right through lunch: ‘I love you, I love you so much.’ That’s why, although I’ve tried, I no longer remember much of that meal. Anne was wearing a mauve dress whose colour matched the circles under her eyes, and her eyes themselves. My father laughed and appeared to be relaxed: the situation was working out for him. Over dessert he announced that he had shopping to do in the village that afternoon. I smiled to myself. I was tired and I was feeling fatalistic. All I wanted to do was to have a swim.

At four o’clock I set off down to the beach. I ran into my father on the terrace as he was leaving to go to the village. I said nothing. I did not even warn him to be careful.

The water was warm and caressing. There was no sign of Anne; she must have been busy with her collection, drawing in her room while my father was playing the ladies’ man with Elsa. Two hours elapsed and, as it was no longer warm enough to sunbathe, I went back up to the terrace, sat down in a chair and opened a magazine.

It was just then that Anne appeared, coming from the direction of the wood. She was running, and with some difficulty, awkwardly, with her elbows held against her sides. I had the sudden, shocking impression that it was an old lady running and that she was going to fall. I was aghast. She disappeared behind the house, heading for the garage. Then all at once I realized what had happened and I too began to run, to catch up with her.

She was already in her car and turning the ignition. I rushed up and threw myself against the door.

‘Anne,’ I cried, ‘Anne, don’t go. It’s all a mistake, it’s my fault, I can explain …’

She was neither listening to nor looking at me, but leaning forward to release the handbrake.

‘We need you, Anne!’

At that, she straightened up. Her composure had gone and she was crying. Then all at once I saw that I had been attacking a living creature, a creature with feelings and not an abstraction. She must once have been a little girl, on the secretive side, then a teenager, then a woman. She was forty years old, she was on her own, she loved a man and she had hoped to be happy with him for ten, maybe twenty years. And as for me … that face, that face of hers, was my handiwork. I was rooted to the spot, my whole body trembling as I leant against the car door.

‘You don’t need anyone,’ she murmured. ‘Neither of you does.’

The engine was running. I was in despair; she couldn’t leave like that!

‘Forgive me, I beg you …’

‘Forgive you for what?’

The tears continued to stream down her cheeks. She did not seem to notice them and her face was rigid.

‘My poor little girl!’

She laid her hand on my cheek for an instant and then she was gone. I watched her car disappear round the side of the house. I was lost, adrift … It had all happened so quickly. And that face of hers, that face …

I heard footsteps behind me: it was my father. He had taken the time to remove traces of Elsa’s lipstick and to brush the pine needles from his suit. I turned round and threw myself at him:

‘You bastard!’

I began to sob.

‘What’s going on? Has Anne …? Cécile, tell me, Cécile …’

Eleven

We did not meet again until dinner, both of us nervous about this togetherness that was so suddenly ours again. I was not in the least hungry and neither was he. We both knew that it was essential for Anne to come back to us. For my part, I could not bear for long the memory of the distraught face that she had turned towards me before she left, nor the thought of her grief and my responsibility. I had forgotten all about my patient stratagems and the plans that I had so carefully laid. I felt that I had completely lost my compass, there was nothing to guide me, and I could see from my father’s face that he felt the same way.

‘Do you think she has abandoned us for long?’ he asked.

‘She’s no doubt heading for Paris,’ I replied.

‘Paris …’ my father murmured pensively.

‘Perhaps we shall never see her again.’

He looked at me, quite at a loss, and took my hand across the table.

‘You must hold this against me terribly. I don’t know what got into me … On the way back through the wood with Elsa, she … The fact is, I kissed her and Anne must have arrived at that very moment and …’

I wasn’t listening. The idea of those two characters, my father and Elsa, embracing in the shadow of the pines seemed to me farcical and devoid of reality, I couldn’t visualize it. The only vivid thing from that day, and cruelly vivid at that, was Anne’s face as I had last seen it, with grief written on it, the face of a person who has been betrayed. I took a cigarette from my father’s packet and lit it. That was another thing that Anne would not tolerate, smoking during meals. I smiled at my father:

‘I understand fully: it’s not your fault. It was a moment of madness, as they say. But Anne will just have to forgive us, what I mean is, she’ll have to forgive you.’

‘What’s to be done?’ he asked.

He looked dreadful. I was sorry for him and for myself as well. Why was Anne abandoning us like this, why was she making us suffer for what amounted to nothing more than an indiscretion? Was she under no obligation to us?

‘We’ll write to her,’ I said, ‘and ask her forgiveness.’

‘What a brilliant idea!’ my father cried, at last finding a way out of the state of remorseful inactivity in which we had been wallowing for the past three hours.

Without waiting to finish our meal we pushed back the tablecloth and what was on it, my father went to fetch a big lamp, pen and ink and his writing paper and we settled down opposite each other. The gracious scene thus created seemed so likely to bring about Anne’s return that we were almost cheerful. A bat came and traced silken curves outside the window. My father bent his head and began to write.

I cannot recall without an unendurable awareness of mockery and cruelty the letters overflowing with kind sentiments that we penned to Anne that evening, the two of us sitting in the lamplight like two diligent, clumsy schoolchildren working away in silence at that impossible task of ‘getting Anne back’. But we produced two masterpieces of their kind, full of good excuses, affection and repentance. By the time I had finished, I was more or less persuaded that Anne would be unable to resist them and that a reconciliation was imminent. I could already envisage the scene of forgiveness, full of delicacy and humour … It would take place in our drawing room in Paris, Anne would come in and …

The phone rang. It was ten o’clock. We exchanged glances, at first astonished and then full of hope: it must be Anne, phoning to say that she forgave us and that she was coming back. My father leapt to the phone and shouted down it a joyful ‘Hello’.

Then, in a voice almost too low to be heard, he just said, ‘Yes, yes. Where is that? Yes.’

It was my turn to stand up; I was becoming fearful. I watched my father as he passed his hand over his face in an automatic gesture. At length he gently put the receiver back and turned to face me.

‘She has had an accident,’ he said. ‘It happened on the Route de l’Esterel.13 It took them some time to discover her address. They phoned Paris and were given our number here.’

He was speaking in a monotonous, mechanical way and I did not dare interrupt.

‘The accident happened at the most dangerous spot. There have been a lot of accidents at that particular spot, it seems. The car fell fifty metres. It would have been a miracle if she had escaped.’

I remember the rest of that night as if it had been a bad dream: the road coming up to meet our headlights, my father’s face set rigidly, the door of the clinic … My father did not want me to see her. I sat on a bench in the waiting-room staring at a framed print of Venice. My mind was a blank. A nurse told me that it was the sixth accident at that spot since the beginning of the summer. My father still did not come back.

Then it struck me that, in the manner of her death, Anne had once again marked herself out as different from us. If we had committed suicide, my father or I – always assuming that we would have had the courage to do so – it would have been with a bullet in the head and we would have left behind an explanatory note designed to be permanently unsettling to those responsible and to trouble their sleep. But Anne had bestowed on us a magnificent gift by making it entirely possible for us to believe in an accident, given the dangerous spot and the instability of her car. It was a gift that before long we would be weak enough to accept. And, in any case, if I now refer to it as suicide, I’m taking rather a romantic view of it. Would anybody be likely to commit suicide on account of creatures like my father and myself who have need of no one, either living or dead? Be that as it may, my father and I have only ever spoken of it as an accident.

We returned to the house the next day at around three o’clock in the afternoon. Elsa and Cyril were waiting for us there, sitting on the steps. To us they were just two drab, forgotten characters, neither of whom had really known Anne or loved her. There they were with their petty little love stories and the two things that gave them any appeal, their good looks and their discomfiture. Cyril came up to me and laid his hand on my arm. I looked at him: I had never loved him. I had found him kind and attractive; I had loved the pleasure he gave me; but I did not need him.

I was going away, leaving behind me that house, that boy and that summer. My father was with me. It was he now who took my arm as we went into the house.

Inside were Anne’s jacket, her flowers, her room, her scent. My father closed the shutters, took a bottle from the fridge and fetched two glasses. It was the only remedy we could aspire to. Our letters of apology were still spread over the table. I pushed them aside and they fluttered on to the parquet. My father, coming towards me with a full glass, hesitated, then avoided stepping on them. I found all that symbolic and in poor taste. I took my glass in both hands and drained it in one gulp. The room was in semi-darkness. I could see my father silhouetted against the window. The sea was beating on the shore.

Twelve

The funeral took place in Paris, in fine sunshine, with a crowd of curious onlookers and much black. My father and I shook hands with Anne’s elderly relatives. I looked at these ladies inquisitively: they would most likely have come to our house to take tea with us once a year. People looked at my father with sympathy: Webb must have spread the news about his planned marriage. I caught sight of Cyril looking for me on the way out. I avoided him. The resentment I harboured against him was completely unjustified but I couldn’t help it. People around us deplored the dreadful, senseless thing that had happened and, as I had still some doubts as to whether the death had been an accident, I was glad about that.

On the way back in the car my father took my hand and held it tight in his. I thought: ‘I am all that you have left and you are all that I have left, we are alone in our unhappiness,’ and for the first time I wept. It was not unpleasant to shed tears. It was quite unlike that emptiness, that terrible emptiness I had felt in the clinic while looking at the print of Venice. My father offered me his handkerchief, wordlessly, his face ravaged by grief.

For a month the two of us lived as widower and orphan-girl, taking all our meals together and not going out. We sometimes spoke a little of Anne: ‘Remember that day when …’ We spoke about her cautiously and without looking at each other, for fear of causing ourselves hurt or lest something be triggered in one or other of us that might result in something irreparable being said. Our wariness and our consideration for each other had their reward. We were soon able to talk about Anne in a normal way, speaking of her as of someone dear to us with whom we would have been happy but whom God had called to Himself. I am writing ‘God’ instead of ‘chance’, but we did not believe in God. We were fortunate enough in the circumstances to be able to believe in chance.

Then one day at a friend’s house I met a cousin of the friend’s whom I liked and who liked me. I went out with him a lot in the course of just one week, as one does with a person, frequently and foolhardily, when a love affair is just beginning, and my father, who was not well suited to being on his own, did likewise with a rather ambitious young woman. Life took up again along its old lines, as it was bound to. Whenever my father and I are together, we laugh and talk about our conquests. He must suspect that my relationship with Philippe is not platonic and I know perfectly well that his new girlfriend is costing him a lot of money. But we are happy. Winter is nearly over; we shall not be renting the same villa again, but a different one, near Juan-les-Pins.

Only, when I am in bed, at dawn, when all that can be heard in Paris is the sound of cars, my memory sometimes betrays me: summer, with everything I remember of it, comes flooding back. Anne, Anne! I repeat that name very softly to myself, over and over in the dark. Then something stirs within me that, with eyes closed, I greet by its name, sadness: Bonjour tristesse.

A CERTAIN SMILE

To Florence Malraux 1

Love is what happens between two people who love each other.

Roger Vailland^2

PART ONE

One

We had been spending the afternoon in a café on Rue Saint-Jacques,3 an afternoon in springtime like any other. I was quietly rather bored: I was moving back and forth between the jukebox and the window while Bertrand discussed Spire’s lecture. I remember that, at one moment, leaning against the jukebox, I had watched the record rise slowly and then place itself at an angle against the needle, almost tenderly, as if it were a cheek. And I don’t know why but I was suffused with a fierce sense of happiness and with the overwhelming, almost palpable intuition that I was going to die one day and that there would no longer be this hand of mine on the chrome ledge, nor sun in my eyes.

I had turned towards Bertrand. He was watching me and when he saw me smile he stood up. He would never accept that I could be happy without him. Any happiness of mine had to be limited to the important moments in our life together. I was already dimly aware of his attitude but on that particular day I couldn’t bear it and I turned away again. The piano had introduced the theme of ‘Lone and Sweet’; the clarinet had taken it up and I knew its every note.

I had met Bertrand during the previous year’s exams. We had spent an anguished week side by side before I went off to my parents’ house for the summer. On the last evening he had kissed me. Then he had written to me, initially in a detached way. Subsequently the tone had changed. I had followed these gradations fairly feverishly, so that when he had written: ‘I find what I am about to say ridiculous, but I think I love you,’ I had been able to reply to him in the same vein, quite truthfully: ‘What you have said is ridiculous, but I love you too.’ This response had come to me quite naturally, or perhaps I should say I had replied in parrot fashion. My parents’ property, on the River Yonne,4 offered few distractions. I would go down to the riverbank and for a while would watch the shoals of undulating yellow weed on the surface, then I would send smooth, worn, black pebbles skimming across the water, like swallows swooping. All that summer I repeated ‘Bertrand’ to myself, thinking of him in the future tense. But in one way, striking up a passionate affair by letter seemed to me to be enough in itself.

Now Bertrand was standing behind me. He was holding out my glass and when I turned round I was right up against him. He was always rather annoyed at my not participating in their discussions. I liked reading well enough, but talking about literature bored me and he couldn’t get used to that.

‘You always put on the same tune,’ he complained. ‘Mind you, it’s not that I don’t like it.’ He had adopted a neutral tone for those last few words and I recalled that we had been together when we had first heard that record. I was always finding that he had little surges of sentimentality for things that had been markers in our relationship but that I hadn’t remembered. ‘He means nothing to me,’ I thought suddenly. ‘He bores me, I really don’t care about any of this, I’m nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing,’ and the same absurd sense of exaltation took hold of me.

‘I have to go and see my uncle, the one who travels a lot,’ said Bertrand. ‘Are you coming?’

He went ahead and I followed him. I did not know this uncle ‘who travelled a lot’ and I had no wish to know him. But something in me meant that I was destined to follow a young man’s close-shaven neck, destined to allow myself always to be led away without any resistance on my part, just with these little thoughts, as ice-cold and slippery as fish, going through my head. And affection came into it too. I walked down the boulevard with Bertrand. Our steps were in harmony, as our bodies were at night. He held my hand. We were slender and pleasing to the eye, in a picture-book way.

All along the boulevard and standing on the platform of the bus taking us to the uncle who travelled a lot, I felt really fond of Bertrand. Whenever the jolting of the bus threw me against him he would laugh and put a protective arm around me. I was leaning up against his jacket on the curve of his shoulder, a man’s shoulder so conveniently placed for my head. I was breathing in his smell, I recognized it easily and it affected me. Bertrand was my first lover. I had got to know the smell of my own body through his. It is always through the bodies of other people that you discover your own body, the length of it and the smell of it, distrustfully at first, and then with recognition.

Bertrand talked about this uncle who travelled a lot, whom he did not seem to like very much. He told me that the travels were something of a farce – Bertrand spent his time looking out for the farcical things other people did, so much so that he tended to live in fear of himself being part of some farce without realizing it. That struck me as farcical in itself, which made him furious.

The uncle who travelled a lot had arranged to meet Bertrand on the terrace of a café. When I caught sight of him I told Bertrand that he looked really quite nice. We were approaching him when I said that and he was standing up to greet us.

‘Luc,’ said Bertrand, ‘I’ve brought a friend, Dominique. This is my uncle Luc, who travels a lot.’

I was pleasantly surprised. I said to myself: ‘He’s a genuine proposition, this uncle who travels a lot.’ He had grey eyes and he looked tired, almost sad. He was handsome in a way.

‘How did the last trip go?’ asked Bertrand.

‘It was no fun. I had an extremely dull inheritance case in Boston to sort out. There were dusty little lawyer fellows coming out of the woodwork. All very boring. What about you?’

‘We’ve got our exam in two months’ time,’ said Bertrand.

He had stressed the word ‘our’. Studying together at the Sorbonne made you feel like a married couple. You talked about the exam as if it were a baby.

His uncle turned to me.

‘Are you sitting exams too?’

‘Yes,’ I said vaguely. (I was always rather ashamed of my activities, even though they were minimal.)

‘I’m out of cigarettes,’ said Bertrand.

He stood up and I watched him go off. He had a rapid, supple way of walking. It sometimes occurred to me that that assemblage of muscles and reflexes and olive skin belonged to me, and it seemed to me to be an amazing gift.

‘What do you do apart from exams?’ asked the uncle.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Well, nothing much.’

I raised my hand dismissively. He caught it in mid-air; I looked at him, taken aback. Immediately, and for a split second, I thought: ‘I like him. He’s rather old and I like him.’ But he laid my hand back on the table, smiling:

‘Your fingers are all inky. That’s a good sign. You’re going to pass your exam and you’re going to be a brilliant lawyer, even though you don’t seem to be very talkative.’

I began to laugh along with him. I did so want to make a friend of him.

But Bertrand was back already and Luc was talking to him. I didn’t listen to what they were saying. Luc had a slow way of speaking and large hands. I said to myself: ‘He’s the archetypal seducer of little girls like me.’ I was on my guard already. Even so, I felt a little stab of displeasure when he invited us to lunch a couple of days from then, but with his wife.

Two

Before going to Luc’s for lunch I spent two rather boring days. What was there for me to do, really? I could work a bit for an exam that wouldn’t lead to much, I could sit around in the sun or I could be made love to by Bertrand, without much reciprocity on my part. Having said that, I did like Bertrand. As I saw it, trust, tenderness and respect were not things to be sniffed at, and I didn’t really think a lot about passion. It seemed to me perfectly normal to live your life without experiencing any genuine emotion. Living, essentially, meant seeing to it that you were as content as you could be. And even that wasn’t always so easy.

I was staying in a sort of family-run residence, inhabited exclusively by female students. The people in charge were broad-minded and I was quite easily able to come back in at one or two o’clock in the morning. My room was large, with a low ceiling, and completely bare, for my initial plans for decorating had very soon fallen by the wayside. I didn’t ask much of my surroundings, as long as they didn’t get in my way. The house had a provincial atmosphere which I really liked. My window looked out on a courtyard, enclosed by a low wall, and over it brooded the permanently circumscribed, polluted skies of Paris, skies you could sometimes glimpse receding into the distance above a street or a balcony in a gently touching way.

I would get up, go to classes, meet up with Bertrand and we would have lunch together. Then there was the library at the Sorbonne, there was work, there were cinemas, the terraces of cafés and friends. In the evening we would go dancing or instead we would go back to Bertrand’s place, where we would stretch out on his bed, make love and afterwards talk for a long time in the darkness. I was fine, and yet, inside of me, like some warm, living creature, there was always that hankering for languor, solitude and sometimes exaltation. I told myself that it was probably something to do with my digestion.

That Friday, before going to Luc’s for lunch, I called in to see Catherine and stayed for half an hour. Catherine was lively, bossy and permanently in love. I hadn’t chosen her friendship, it was something I was at the receiving end of. But she looked upon me as being fragile and defenceless, and I liked that. Indeed she often struck me as being quite marvellous. My indifference to things seemed to her to have something poetic about it, as it had for a long time seemed to Bertrand, before that sudden, insistent desire to possess me had taken hold of him.

On that particular day she was in love with a cousin and she recounted this romance to me at length. I told her that I was going to have lunch with some relatives of Bertrand’s and, as I spoke, I realized that I had rather forgotten about Luc and I was sorry that I had. Why did I not have one of those naïve and never-ending tales of love to recount to Catherine? It didn’t even surprise her that I hadn’t. We were already so rigidly set in our respective roles. She would talk and I would listen; she would advise and I would stop listening.

My visit to her depressed me. I went to Luc’s without much enthusiasm and even with some trepidation: I was going to have to chat, be friendly and project an image of myself to them. I would have preferred to have lunch on my own, twirl a jar of mustard round between my fingers, and be vague, vague, completely vague …

When I got to Luc’s, Bertrand was already there. He introduced me to his uncle’s wife. Her face had something radiant about it, and something very kind and lovely. She was tall, quite well-built and blonde. She was beautiful, in fact, but not in an intimidating way. It struck me that she was the type of woman that many men would like to have and to hold on to, one who would make them happy, a gentle kind of woman. Was I gentle? I would have to ask Bertrand. I certainly took his hand, I wasn’t loud, I stroked his hair. But I detested loudness and my hands loved the feel of his hair, which was warm and thick, like the fur of an animal.

Right from the start Françoise was very nice. She showed me round the flat, which was luxurious; she poured me a drink and she sat me down in an armchair, all in a relaxed, attentive way. The embarrassment I had felt regarding my rather worn-out, shapeless skirt and sweater faded. We were expecting Luc, who was working. I thought I ought perhaps to pretend to show some interest in Luc’s job, something it never occurred to me to do. I would have liked to ask people: ‘Are you in love?’ or ‘What are you reading?’ but I never wondered what their job was, although to them it was often of prime importance.

‘You seem anxious,’ remarked Françoise laughingly. ‘Would you like another drop of whisky?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Dominique already has a reputation for being a drunkard,’ said Bertrand. ‘Do you know why?’

He leapt to his feet and came over to me in a self-important manner.

‘She has a rather short upper lip, so that when she drinks with her eyes closed it gives her a fervid look that has nothing to do with Scotch.’

While speaking he had taken my upper lip between his thumb and forefinger. He was showing me to Françoise as if I were a puppy. I began to laugh and he let go of me just as Luc arrived.

When I saw him I said to myself once again, but this time experiencing a painful sensation when I did so, that he was very handsome. It really did cause me some hurt, as did everything that I could not have. I rarely felt the desire to have anything, but in that instance the thought came to me very quickly that I would have liked to take that face of his in my hands, grip it violently with my fingers and press that full, rather elongated mouth against mine. Yet Luc wasn’t handsome. People were often to say that to me subsequently. But there was something about his features that meant that his face, which I had seen only twice, was a thousand times less strange to me than Bertrand’s, a thousand times less strange and more desirable than Bertrand’s, which I nonetheless liked.

He came in, said hello to us and sat down. He could be amazingly still. I mean that there was something charged and restrained in the slow, casual way in which he gestured and moved that was disturbing. He looked at Françoise affectionately and I looked at him. I no longer remember what was said. Bertrand and Françoise did most of the talking. I am quite appalled, however, when I look back on those early stages. All I would have needed to do at that point to escape his attentions would have been to be a little cautious and a little distant. Now, on the contrary, I can’t wait to talk about the first time I was to be happy because of him. The very thought of describing those first moments, of trying briefly to overcome the inertness of mere words, fills me with a bitter, impatient joy.

So we had lunch with Luc and Françoise. Then, in the street, I immediately fell into step with Luc, who walked briskly, and I forgot to keep step with Bertrand. Luc took my elbow to guide me across the road and I remember finding that awkward. I didn’t know what to do with my forearm, nor with the hand that hung dejectedly at the end of it, as if, below where Luc’s hand was placed on it, my arm was dead. I couldn’t think what I did about this when I was with Bertrand. Later on, Luc and Françoise took us to an outfitter’s and bought me a coat in a reddish woollen material. I was so astonished that I didn’t know either how to refuse it or how to thank them. When Luc was on the scene things moved very quickly, they really speeded up. Afterwards, time seemed to lapse back with a bump and be once again measured out in minutes, hours and cigarettes.

Bertrand was furious with me for having accepted the coat. After we left them he made the most dreadful scene about it.

‘It’s absolutely incredible! Anyone could offer to give you anything and you wouldn’t refuse. You wouldn’t even be surprised!’

‘He’s not just anyone. He’s your uncle,’ I retorted, deliberately missing the point. ‘And in any case, I couldn’t have bought that coat for myself; it was horribly expensive.’

‘You could have gone without it, I imagine.’

Over the previous couple of hours I had got used to wearing the coat; it suited me perfectly and I was rather horrified by that last comment of his. There was a kind of logic to things that escaped Bertrand. I told him as much and we quarrelled. The upshot was he took me back to his place without our first going for dinner, as a kind of punishment. For him, I knew, this ‘punishment’ provided the most intense and worthwhile moment of his day. Lying next to me, he kissed me with a sort of trembling respectfulness that I found both touching and alarming. I had preferred the relaxed light-heartedness we had enjoyed at the beginning of our relationship, and the young, animal nature of our embraces. But when he lay on me and sought me out impatiently, I forgot everything that wasn’t him or our murmuring together. It was the old Bertrand, and the same anguish and pleasure as before. Even today, especially today, that kind of happiness, that way of becoming lost in physical sensation, seems to me to be an incredible gift; yet at the same time it seems quite derisory when compared to my capacity for thought and my ability to feel emotion – those things, for me, are the true essentials.

Three

There were other meals, with either just the four of us or friends of Luc’s. Then Françoise went away to spend ten days with friends of hers. I had already come to like her; she was extremely considerate towards others, she was very kind and she was confident in her kindness, though occasionally she was afraid of not understanding people, and that appealed to me more than anything. She was like the earth, reassuring like the earth, and sometimes childlike. She and Luc laughed a lot together.

We saw her off at the Gare de Lyon.5 I was less intimidated than I had been at the start, I was almost relaxed. In fact, I was thoroughly cheerful, for the complete disappearance of my boredom, which until then I hadn’t dared call by its name, was bringing about a pleasant change in me. I was becoming lively and could sometimes even be amusing. It seemed to me that this state of affairs could last for ever. I had grown accustomed to Luc’s face, and the sudden emotions it aroused in me from time to time seemed to me to be based on aesthetic considerations or on simple affection. At the door of the carriage Françoise was smiling.

‘Look after him for me,’ she said to us.

The train pulled away. On our way back Bertrand stopped to buy some literary-political journal or other which would give him an excuse to get indignant. All at once Luc turned to me and said very quickly:

‘Shall we have dinner together tomorrow?’

I was about to reply: ‘Fine. I’ll just ask Bertrand,’ but he cut me short and said: ‘I’ll phone you,’ and, turning towards Bertrand who had just then rejoined us, he asked:

‘Which journal do you buy?’

‘I couldn’t see the one I wanted,’ said Bertrand. ‘We’ve got a class now, Dominique. I think we’d better hurry.’

He had taken my arm and was holding on to me. He and Luc were eyeing each other with mutual suspicion. I stood there feeling disconcerted. With Françoise away, everything was becoming confused and disagreeable. I still have a painful memory of that first sign of Luc’s interest in me, for, as I’ve indicated, I had taken to wearing a fine pair of blinkers. I had a sudden desire to see Françoise again; she was like a protective rampart. I realized that the foursome we had formed had only ever rested on rigged foundations and that dismayed me, for, like all those who find it easy to tell lies, I was sensitive to atmosphere and sincere about playing any role that I assumed.

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ said Luc casually.

He had a fast, open-topped car which he handled well. We said nothing on the journey except, on parting company: ‘See you again very soon.’

‘All things considered, I’m relieved that she’s gone away,’ said Bertrand. ‘You can’t always be seeing the same people.’

This comment of his cut Luc out of our plans, but I didn’t point that out to him. I was becoming wary.

‘And then, after all,’ Bertrand went on, ‘they’re a bit on the old side, don’t you think?’

I did not reply and we went and took our seats for Brême’s lecture on the ethics of Epicurus.6 I listened to it for a while, sitting quite still … Luc wanted to have dinner alone with me. That was probably what was meant by happiness. I spread my fingers out on the bench and felt my mouth curve up in an irrepressible little smile. I turned my head away so that Bertrand wouldn’t see it. This lasted for a moment before I said to myself: ‘You are flattered, that’s only natural.’ I still had a young person’s healthy reactions: burn your boats, meet the situation head-on, just don’t let yourself be taken in.

The next day I decided that dinner with Luc was bound to be fun and would not lead to anything further. I pictured him showing up looking ardent and declaring his love for me on the spot. He arrived a little late, looking preoccupied, and all I wanted was for him to show some anguish on account of this impromptu tête-à-tête of ours. He did nothing of the kind. He talked quite calmly about this and that, with an ease that I ended up sharing. He was probably the first person ever to have made everything feel comfortable and entirely unproblematic for me. Then he suggested that we go somewhere to dance and have dinner and he took me to Sonny’s. He met some friends there and they joined us, and it struck me that I was a little fool, and very vain, for having for one instant thought that he would have wanted to be alone with me.

Looking at the women at our table, I also realized that I lacked elegance and sparkle. In short, towards midnight nothing much was left of the youthful femme fatale I had for a whole day imagined myself to be, just a shattered wreck trying to hide her dress and inwardly calling for Bertrand, in whose eyes at least she was beautiful.

Luc’s friends were talking about liver salts and the boon they were ‘the morning after the night before’. So there was a whole set of people out there who took liver salts, who woke up thinking of their bodies as marvellous playthings which they could wear out having fun and then dose with enthusiasm. Perhaps I should give up books and conversation and walks, and head for a place where the pleasures of money and frivolity and other absorbing distractions could be enjoyed. Perhaps I should acquire the means to do so and myself become a thing of beauty. Did Luc actually like these people?

Turning to me with a smile, he asked me to dance. He took me in his arms and settled me there gently, with my head against his chin. We danced. I was conscious of his body against mine.

‘You find these people boring, don’t you?’ he said. ‘The women all twitter a lot.’

‘I didn’t know what a real nightclub was like,’ I said. ‘I’m dazzled.’

He broke into laughter.

‘You’re funny, Dominique. I find you very amusing. Let’s go on somewhere else to talk, come on.’

We left Sonny’s. Luc took me to a bar in Rue Marbeuf and we got started on some serious drinking. Apart from the fact that I liked drinking whisky, I knew it was the only thing that got me talking a bit. Before long Luc struck me as a very pleasant, attractive man and not at all intimidating. I even felt an easy-going tenderness towards him.

We quite naturally got to talking about love. He said that it was a good thing, less important than people made out, but that you had to be loved and, yourself, love quite ardently in order to be happy. I nodded in agreement. He told me that he was very happy because he loved Françoise very much and she loved him very much too. I congratulated him, assuring him that it did not surprise me and that he and Françoise were very, very nice people. I was sinking into sentimentality.

‘Having said that,’ said Luc, ‘I would very much like to have an affair with you.’

I began to laugh foolishly. I didn’t know how to react.

‘And what about Françoise?’ I said.

‘I might tell Françoise. She likes you a lot, you know.’

‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘And anyway, I’m not sure, it’s not the kind of thing you tell people.’

I felt indignant. Moving constantly from one state of mind to another was beginning to wear me out. It seemed to me both hugely natural and hugely improper that Luc should be suggesting we go to bed together.

‘There’s something there, in a kind of way,’ said Luc seriously. ‘I mean something between us. God knows that, generally speaking, I don’t go in for little girls like you. But you and I are two of a kind. What I mean is that it would make some sense, it wouldn’t just be banal. Anyway, think about it.’

‘That’s what I’ll do,’ I said, ‘I’ll think about it.’

I must have looked pitiful. Luc bent over and kissed me on the cheek.

‘My poor darling,’ he said. ‘You’re in a bad way. If only you had a smattering of basic morality. But you haven’t, any more than I have. And you’re nice. And you really like Françoise. And you find it less boring to be with me than with Bertrand. Ah, isn’t that you in a nutshell?’

He burst out laughing. I was annoyed. Later on I was always to feel a bit resentful when Luc began what he called summing up. On that occasion I let him see that I was annoyed.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Nothing in that realm is really of any importance. I do like you, I do like you a lot. We’ll have great fun together. Just fun.’

‘I detest you,’ I said.

I had adopted a sepulchral voice and we both began to laugh. This sense of collusion, which it had taken just two or three minutes to establish, seemed somehow disreputable to me.

‘Now I’m going to take you back,’ said Luc. ‘It’s very late. Or, if you like, we can go to the Quai de Bercy^7 to watch the sun come up.’

We drove to the Quai de Bercy. Luc stopped the car. The sky was white above the Seine, which was sitting among its cranes like a sad child among its toys. The sky was white, with patches of grey. It rose to meet the day above the silent houses, the bridges and the scrap iron, slowly and unstoppably, with the same effort it made every morning. Beside me Luc was smoking; he said nothing and his silhouette was perfectly still. I held out my hand, he took it and we drove slowly back to the family-run residence. When we got to the door he let my hand go, I got out and we smiled at each other. Once indoors I collapsed into bed, thought then that I should have got undressed, should have washed my stockings and put my dress on a hanger, and promptly fell asleep.

Four

I awoke with the unpleasant sense of having an urgent problem to resolve. For what Luc was in fact proposing was just a game, an enticing game, but, even so, one that could destroy my undoubtedly quite genuine feelings for Bertrand; and it could destroy something else within me, something ill-defined but fiercely felt, which, whether I liked it or not, was opposed to transience. Or, at the very least, to the intentionally transient nature of what Luc was offering. And then, even if I was only able to conceive of any passion or liaison as being short-lived, I couldn’t accept in advance that it had to be that way. Like any individual for whom life is a series of charades, I could bear the charades only if they were written by me, and by me alone.

Moreover, I knew very well that this game – if you could call it a game, if there can be merely a game between two people who are really attracted to each other and who glimpse in each other a chance to relieve their loneliness, even temporarily – this game was a dangerous one. It was essential not to pretend foolishly to be stronger than I was. From the point at which I was ‘tamed’, as Françoise put it, from the point at which I was countenanced and wholly accepted by Luc, I would not be able to leave him without suffering. Bertrand was incapable of anything other than loving me. When I told myself that, I felt tender towards Bertrand but it did not stop me from thinking about Luc. For when all is said and done, at least when you are young, nothing in life’s long swindle seems more desperately desirable than a spirit of recklessness. Besides, I had never decided anything for myself. I had always been decided on by others. Why not once more let myself be on the receiving end? There would be Luc’s charm to add to the daily tedium and to the evenings. Everything would happen of its own accord; there was no point in trying to fathom things out.

Feeling blissfully complacent at having resigned myself to the inevitable, I took myself off to class where I met up with Bertrand and our friends and we then all went to have lunch in Rue Cujas. Yet although every day was like this, it seemed to me abnormal. My proper place was with Luc. This was how I was vaguely feeling when Jean-Jacques, a friend of Bertrand’s, launched into some sarcastic comments about me looking dreamy.

‘It can’t be true, Dominique: you’re in love! Bertrand, what have you done to this girl? Her mind is elsewhere. Have you turned her into a Princesse de Clèves?’8

‘I know nothing about it,’ said Bertrand.

I looked at him and saw that he had gone red. He avoided my stare. It was quite unbelievable: he had been my ally and had kept me company for the past year and suddenly he had become my adversary! I made to move towards him. I would have liked to say: ‘Bertrand, honestly, you really mustn’t suffer, it’s too sad, I don’t want you to.’ Idiotically I would even have added: ‘Anyway, remember those summer days we shared, and those winter days, and those times in your room, all of that can’t just be erased in three weeks, it doesn’t make sense.’ And I would have liked him to agree with me vehemently, to reassure me and to take up my theme. For he loved me. But he was not what you would call a real man. In some men, including Luc, you could sense a strength that neither Bertrand nor any of those other very young men possessed. Yet it had nothing to do with experience …

‘Stop annoying Dominique!’ said Catherine with her usual bossiness. ‘Come on, Dominique, men are such boors. Let’s go and have coffee together.’

Once outside, she informed me that there wasn’t much the matter, that essentially Bertrand was very attached to me and that I was not to worry about his little bouts of ill humour. I did not protest. After all, it was better that Bertrand should not be humiliated in the eyes of our friends. As for me, I was sick of their talk, their tales of which boys were going out with which girls, all that puerile stuff supposedly to do with love. I was sick of their little dramas. But still, there was Bertrand and Bertrand’s pain, and that was not negligible. Everything was happening so quickly. I could scarcely be said to have dropped Bertrand and already they were talking about it and analysing the situation, and in so doing they were driving me, through sheer irritation, to hasten on and ratchet up what might otherwise have been merely a passing distraction.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said to Catherine. ‘It’s not about Bertrand.’

‘Really?’ she said.

Turning to look at her, I saw on her face such curiosity, such a mania for giving advice and such a vampire-like expression that I had to laugh.

‘I’m thinking of going into a convent,’ I went on solemnly.

At this, Catherine, overcoming her astonishment, embarked on a long discussion of the pleasures of life, the little birds, the sun and so on. These were all things that I was going to leave behind, she said, and it was sheer madness! She also spoke of the pleasures of the flesh, dropping her voice to a whisper: ‘It has got to be said … That’s important too.’ In short, if I had been seriously thinking about taking vows, her description of life’s pleasures would have sent me headlong in that direction. Could it be that life merely amounted to ‘that’ for anyone? As far as I was concerned, if I was bored, at least there was an intensity to my boredom. Besides, she turned out to have at her disposal such a wealth of truisms, and to be so eager for that revolting type of intimacy that girls can share with one other, so eager for a detailed heart-to-heart, that I cheerfully left her standing on the pavement. ‘Let’s ditch Catherine while we’re about it,’ I thought merrily, ‘Catherine and her devotedness.’ I was almost humming this, so strongly did I feel.

I walked around for an hour, went into half a dozen shops, talked to everyone I met with total ease. I felt utterly free and utterly happy. Paris belonged to me. Paris belonged to those who had no scruples, who were free and easy. I had always been pained by my awareness of this, because I myself was not free and easy. This time it was my city, my beautiful city, gilded and sharp-edged, a city you couldn’t hoodwink. I was carried along by something that might have been joy. I walked quickly. I felt full of impatience and of my own strength. I felt young, ridiculously young. In those moments of wild happiness I had the impression of arriving at a truth much more self-evident than the poor, hackneyed little truths learnt in times when I had been unhappy.

I went into a cinema on the Champs-Élysées where they showed old films. A young man came and sat next to me. One glance told me that he was good-looking, though perhaps a bit too fair-haired. Before long he shifted his elbow against mine and ventured a cautious hand in the direction of my knee. I grasped his hand as it advanced and held it in mine. I wanted to giggle, like a schoolgirl. Where were those shocking acts of promiscuity that they said took place in dimly lit cinemas, the furtive embraces and the shame? I had in my hand the warm hand of an unknown young man who meant nothing to me and it made me want to laugh. He turned his hand over in mine and slowly advanced one knee. I watched him do so with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension and encouragement. Like him, I feared that my sense of dignity would assert itself and I felt myself turning into the kind of elderly lady who gets up from her seat in exasperation. My heart was beating quite fast: was it that I was agitated or was it the film? It was a good one, incidentally. They ought to give one cinema over to mediocre films, just for people who are short of companions. The young man turned an enquiring face towards me and, since the film was Swedish, therefore full of luminosity, I saw that he was in fact quite handsome. ‘Quite handsome, but not my type,’ I said to myself, just as he was cautiously bringing his face closer to mine. I thought for a moment of the people behind us and the impression they must be having. He was good at kissing but at the same time he was pressing harder with his knee, putting out his hand and trying stealthily to take some advantage, which was stupid of him, since up to that point I had not rebuffed him. I stood up and walked out. He must have been totally uncomprehending.

I found myself back on the Champs-Élysées with the taste of a strange mouth on my lips and I decided to go home and read a new novel.

It was a very fine work by Sartre, The Age of Reason.9 I threw myself into it with relish. I was young, I was attracted to one man and another man loved me. I had one of those silly little girlish conflicts to resolve. I was acquiring some importance. There was even a married man involved, and another woman; in fact a little game for four players was getting under way in Paris, in the springtime. I was turning it all into a nice, dry little equation, as cynical as you could wish for. What’s more, I was feeling remarkably at ease with myself. I accepted whatever sorrows, conflicts and pleasures might lie ahead; flippantly I accepted them all in advance.

As I read, evening fell. I put down my book, laid my head on my arm and watched the sky turn from mauve to grey. Suddenly I felt weak and without defences. My life was slipping past, I was achieving nothing, all I did was sneer. I imagined someone’s cheek resting on my cheek, someone whom I would not let go, whom I would press close to me with the heart-breaking violence of love. I was not cynical enough to envy Bertrand, but I was sad enough to envy anyone who knew what it was to experience happy love, rapturous meetings, passionate enslavement. I got up and went out.

Five

Over the two weeks that followed I went out with Luc several times, but always in the company of his friends. Generally speaking they were travellers with tales to tell, and quite agreeable individuals. Luc talked fast and amusingly and would look at me in a kindly way, while still appearing to be simultaneously preoccupied and pressed for time, which made me continue to wonder whether he was really interested in me. Afterwards he would drop me off at my front door, getting out of the car and kissing me lightly on the cheek before driving off. He no longer talked about the desire for me that he had previously spoken of and I felt both relieved and disappointed. Eventually he announced that Françoise was coming home in a couple of days’ time and I realized that those two weeks had gone by in a flash and that I had got myself worked up over nothing.

So one morning we went to fetch Françoise from the station, but without Bertrand, who had not been on speaking terms with me for ten days. I was sorry about that, but it gave me the opportunity to lead an idle, carefree life on my own, which I liked. I knew he was unhappy at no longer seeing me and that stopped me from being seriously unhappy myself.

Françoise arrived, all smiles, kissed us and exclaimed that we were not looking well but that, as good luck would have it, we had been invited to spend the weekend at Luc’s sister’s (she being the mother of Bertrand). I protested that I wasn’t invited and that in any case I had rather fallen out with Bertrand. Luc added that his sister exasperated him. But Françoise settled things. She said that Bertrand had asked his mother to invite me, adding with a laugh: ‘probably so that you can make up after this famous falling-out of yours’. And as for Luc, he sometimes really just had to enter into the family spirit.

She looked at me, still laughing, and I smiled back at her, overcome by goodwill. She had put on weight. She was rather on the large side, but she was so warm and trusting that I was delighted to think that nothing had happened between Luc and me and that we could all three of us be happy, as before. I would get back together with Bertrand, who basically did not irritate me all that much and who was so cultured and intelligent. We had been sensible, Luc and I. Even so, when I got into the car between Françoise and Luc I glanced at him for a second and realized that here was someone I was renouncing, and I felt a strange little jolt inside, which was very unpleasant.

We left Paris on a fine evening to drive to Bertrand’s mother’s place. I was aware that her husband had left her a very pretty house in the country and the idea of ‘going to spend the weekend’ somewhere allowed me to indulge in a feeling of superiority when I used this expression, which before then I had not had the opportunity to do. Bertrand had told me that his mother was a very pleasant person. In saying this he had spoken in that detached manner that young people affect when referring to their parents, in order to make the point that they themselves lead their own lives elsewhere. I had gone to the expense of buying some denim trousers,10 since all Catherine’s trousers were really too wide for me. This purchase put a strain on my budget but I knew that Luc and Françoise would provide for me, should it become necessary. I was astonished at the ease with which I took this for granted but, like all those who are keen to live on good terms with themselves, at least with regard to small matters, I had put it down more to the tactfulness of their generosity than to any indelicacy on my part. In any case, it’s better to credit others with having virtues than to admit to having faults yourself.

Luc came with Françoise to pick us up at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel.11 He again seemed tired and rather sad. Once on the motorway he began to drive very fast, almost dangerously. Bertrand succumbed to a fit of terrified giggling and I very soon joined in. Hearing us laugh, Françoise looked round. She was wearing that disconcerted expression that is typical of very nice people who would never dare object to anything, even if their lives depended on it.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘They’re young,’ said Luc. ‘At twenty you’re still young enough to giggle.’

I don’t know why, but that remark annoyed me. I didn’t like Luc to treat Bertrand and me as a couple, especially not as a couple of children.

‘It’s nervous laughter,’ I said. ‘It’s because you’re driving so fast and we don’t feel very brave.’

‘If you come with me,’ Luc said to me, ‘I’ll teach you to drive.’

It was the first time he had spoken to me in a familiar way in public. ‘That’s maybe what people mean by a bit of a gaffe,’ I thought. Françoise looked at Luc for a second. Then the idea of its being a gaffe struck me as ridiculous. I didn’t generally believe in accidental gaffes that resulted in revelations nor in glances that got intercepted nor in sudden intuitions. There was a sentence in novels that always surprised me: ‘And all at once she realized that he was lying.’

We were arriving at our destination. Luc turned sharply down a little lane and I was thrown against Bertrand. He held me against him firmly and tenderly and I was very embarrassed. I couldn’t bear Luc to see us like that. It seemed crass and, what was really stupid, it seemed to me to be lacking in consideration towards him.

‘You’re like a bird,’ said Françoise.

She had turned around and was looking at us. She had a really kind, sensitive way of looking at you. She hadn’t adopted that knowing, approving expression that a mature woman assumes when faced with a teenage couple. She simply seemed to be saying that I looked quite comfortable in Bertrand’s arms and that I was a touching sight. I was happy enough to look touching since it often saved me the bother of having to believe things or think about things or come up with replies.

‘I’m like a bird that’s old,’ I said. ‘I feel old.’

‘So do I,’ said Françoise, ‘but that’s more understandable.’

Luc turned his head in her direction and gave a little smile. I suddenly thought: ‘They’re attractive to each other. They still sleep together, for sure. Luc sleeps next to her, he lies down alongside her and he loves her. Does he similarly think that Bertrand has my body at his disposal? Does he picture it? Does he feel vaguely jealous about it, as I feel jealous about him?’

‘Here we are at the house,’ said Bertrand. ‘There’s another car here. I fear my mother may have some of her usual guests.’

‘In which case, we’ll go away again,’ retorted Luc. ‘I can’t stand my dear sister’s guests. I know a very pleasant inn not far from here.’

‘Come now,’ said Françoise, ‘that’s enough of being negative. This house is very pleasant and Dominique hasn’t been here before. Come with me, Dominique.’

She took me by the hand and led me off in the direction of a fairly attractive house surrounded by lawns. I followed her, saying to myself that I had in fact nearly played her the very nasty trick of deceiving her with her husband, and yet I liked her very much and would rather do anything than hurt her. Of course, she would never have known.

‘You’ve got here at last!’ came a shrill voice.

Bertrand’s mother was emerging from behind a hedge. I had never seen her before. She gave me the kind of interrogating once-over that only the mother of a young man is capable of when the latter is introducing some girl to her. The predominant impression I received was of someone blonde and rather loud. She immediately began to hover round us, twittering away. I quickly felt overwhelmed. Luc was eyeing her as if she were some sort of catastrophe. Bertrand seemed rather embarrassed, which led me to behave very pleasantly. Eventually, with relief, I found myself in my bedroom. The bed was very high, with coarse sheets, like those from my childhood. I opened my window on to rustling green trees, and an intense smell of wet earth and grass filled the room.

‘Do you like it?’ Bertrand asked.

He seemed both pleased and abashed. It occurred to me that this weekend with me at his mother’s must have been a rather important and complicated occasion for him. I gave him a smile.

‘You have a very pretty house. As far as your mother is concerned, I don’t know her, but she seems nice.’

‘So you don’t dislike it. In any case, I’m just next door.’

He gave a conspiratorial laugh which I joined in with. I rather liked strange houses, black-and-white-tiled bathrooms, big windows and imperious young men. He took me in his arms and kissed me gently on the mouth. I knew his breath and his way of kissing. I had not told him about the young man in the cinema. He would have taken it badly. I was taking it badly myself now. When I looked back on it I was left with a rather shameful memory which had its amusing as well as its disturbing side but which was fundamentally unpleasant. For one afternoon I had been free and full of whimsy; I wasn’t any more.

‘Come and have dinner,’ I said to Bertrand, who was bending forward to kiss me again, his eyes slightly dilated. I liked him to desire me. On the other hand, I didn’t like myself much. I had been adopting by turns the role of free-spirited young thing and of cold-hearted miss whose innocent exterior concealed darker intents – yet this now seemed a performance better suited to a public of aged gentlemen.

Dinner was unbelievably boring. There were indeed some friends of Bertrand’s mother’s there, a talkative, up-to-the-minute couple. When dessert was served, the husband, who was called Richard and was chairman of some board or other, could not resist launching into the usual type of remark:

‘And what about you, young lady? Are you one of those wretched existentialists?12 Honestly, my dear Marthe’ – he was at this point addressing himself to Bertrand’s mother – ‘these disillusioned young people are beyond me. At their age, what the deuce, we loved life. In my day we knew how to enjoy ourselves. We may have got up to some shenanigans but whatever we did, we did light-heartedly, I assure you.’

His wife and Bertrand’s mother laughed in a knowing way. Luc was yawning. Bertrand was working up a speech that wouldn’t get a hearing. With her usual good humour, Françoise was visibly trying to understand why these people were so boring. As for me, it was the umpteenth time that a rosy-complexioned, grey-haired gentleman had subjected me to his robust good sense of humour by mouthing the word ‘existentialism’ with a pleasure that was all the greater for his not knowing what it meant. I did not reply.

‘My dear Richard,’ said Luc, ‘I fear that shenanigans are really only for people of your age – I mean, our age. These young people don’t get up to shenanigans, they simply make love and that’s just as good. For shenanigans you need a secretary and an office.’

The self-styled fun-lover did not respond. The rest of the meal passed without incident and with more or less everyone talking, except Luc and myself. Luc was the only one to be as intensely bored as I was and I wondered if that wasn’t the thing that first made for complicity between us, being both in a way unable to tolerate boredom.

After dinner, as it was mild, we moved out on to the terrace. Bertrand went off to fetch some whisky. Luc advised me quietly not to drink too much.

‘Well, anyway, I’m behaving very well,’ I replied, somewhat annoyed.

‘I would be jealous,’ he went on. ‘I only want you to get drunk and say silly things when you’re with me.’

‘And what would I do the rest of the time?’

‘You would just look rather a sorry sight, as you did at dinner.’

‘And what about how you looked?’ I said. ‘Do you think you were looking very cheerful? You can’t belong to the right generation, contrary to what you said.’

He laughed.

‘Come and take a walk round the garden with me.’

‘In the dark? What about Bertrand and the others?’

I was panic-stricken.

‘They’ve bored us for long enough. Come on, let’s go.’

He took me by the arm and turned to the others. Bertrand had not come back yet with the whisky. I vaguely thought that when he returned he would go and look for us, find us under a tree and maybe kill Luc, just as happens in Pelléas et Mélisande.13

‘I’m taking this young lady for a romantic walk,’ he said, to no one in particular.

I didn’t turn round but I heard Françoise laugh. Luc was already leading me off down a pathway which looked white to start with, where it was gravelled, but which then carried on into the darkness. I was suddenly very frightened. I wanted to be with my parents on the banks of the Yonne.

‘I’m frightened,’ I said to Luc.

Instead of laughing, he took my hand. I wished that he could always be as he was just then, silent, rather solemn, protective and tender, that he would never leave me, that he would say he loved me, I wished that he would cherish me and take me in his arms. He stopped and took me in his arms. I was pressed up against his jacket with my eyes closed. And all those recent days and weeks had merely been a long flight from this instant in time, and from those hands lifting my face and that warm, sweet mouth which was just made for mine. He had kept his fingers around my face and he pressed them down firmly while we kissed. I put my arms around his neck. I was frightened of myself, of him and of everything that was not that moment.

Straight away I liked his mouth, I liked it a lot. He did not say a word, only kissed me, raising his head from time to time to draw breath. When he did that, I could see his face above mine, in the half-light, looking absent yet focused at the same time, like a mask. Then he would come back to me, very slowly. Soon I was no longer able to make out his face and I closed my eyes because a warmth was flooding my temples, my eyelids and my throat. Something was surfacing within me that I had not known before, that had not the haste and impatience of desire but was happy and slow-paced and indistinct.

Luc broke away from me and I stumbled slightly. He took me by the arm and, without a word, we walked round the garden. I told myself that I would have liked to do nothing but kiss him until dawn. Bertrand had very quickly exhausted the pleasure of kisses. As he saw it, desire soon had no further use for them. They were only a stage on the road to pleasure, not something inexhaustible and sufficient in themselves, as in the glimpse that Luc had given me.

‘You have a wonderful garden,’ said Luc, smiling, to his sister. ‘Unfortunately it’s getting rather late.’

‘It’s never too late,’ said Bertrand drily.

He was staring at me. I turned my eyes away. What I wanted was to be alone in the darkness of my room, in order to recall and comprehend those few moments in the grounds. I would put them aside while the conversation lasted, my mind would be a complete blank. Then I would go up to my room with that memory. I would lie flat on the bed with my eyes open, would turn it over and over in my head for a long time and would either destroy it or allow it to become an essential part of me. That night I locked my door, but Bertrand did not come to knock.

Six

The next morning got off to a slow start. Waking up had been very pleasant and very gentle, like waking up had been when I was a child. But what awaited me was not one of those long, bright, solitary days punctuated by reading, it was ‘other people’14 – other people in relation to whom I had a role to play, a role for which I was responsible. At first the thought of that responsibility and that activity gripped me by the throat and I plunged back into my pillow feeling physically sick. Then I remembered the previous evening and Luc’s kisses and I felt something gently rend itself within me.

The bathroom was wonderful. Once in the bath I began to croon away merrily to a jazz tune: ‘And now, I must decide, I must decide.’ There was a loud knock on the wall.

‘Could decent folk be allowed to sleep?’

It was a happy voice, Luc’s voice. If I had been born ten years earlier, before Françoise, we could have lived together and he would have laughingly stopped me from singing in the morning and we would have slept together and we could have been happy for a very long time, instead of finding ourselves in a blind alley. For it really was a blind alley and perhaps that was why we were not going down it, in spite of our splendid, blasé lack of concern. I had to flee from him, I had to get away. I got out of the bath, but only to come across a fluffy bathrobe that smelt of old country wardrobes and that I wriggled into, telling myself that the sensible approach was just to let things run their course and that it wasn’t always necessary to be dissecting events, you needed to be calm and courageous. I was purring with inauthenticity at the idea.

I tried on the denim trousers that I had bought and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw: my hair was untidy, I had sharp features and I looked too nice. I would have preferred regular features and braided hair, with the dark eyes of girls whose destiny it was to make men suffer and whose faces were severe yet at the same time carnal. If I threw my head back I did perhaps look voluptuous, but what woman wouldn’t have, in that pose? And then those trousers were ridiculous, they were too tight-fitting. I would never dare go downstairs in them. It was a form of despair that I was well acquainted with. I disliked my appearance so much that if ever I decided to go out anywhere in the evening I would be unbearable beforehand for the whole day.

But Françoise came in and made everything all right.

‘Dear little Dominique, you look really charming like that! You’re looking even younger and livelier than usual. You’re a living reproach to me.’

She had sat down on my bed and was looking at herself in the mirror.

‘Why am I a reproach?’

Without looking my way, she replied:

‘I eat too many cakes, purely because I like cakes. And then there are these wrinkles here.’

She had quite deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. I touched them with my forefinger.

‘I think that’s wonderful,’ I said tenderly. ‘Just think of all those nights you’ve lived through and all the countries and faces you’ve known, to get those two tiny little lines … It’s a plus for you. And they make you look alive. And, how can I put it, I think a face like yours is beautiful and expressive and affecting. I have a horror of smooth faces.’

She burst out laughing.

‘Just for the sake of cheering me up, you would make beauty salons go bankrupt. You’re sweet, Dominique, you’re very sweet.’

I felt ashamed.

‘I’m not as sweet as all that,’ I said.

‘Am I irritating you? Young people have a horror of being thought sweet. But you never say anything unpleasant or unjust. And you really like people. So I think you’re perfect.’

‘I’m not.’

It had been a very long time since I had talked about myself. Yet it was an occupation that I had indulged in a lot up to the age of seventeen. But I was wearying of it. The fact was that I could only take an interest in myself, and love myself, if Luc loved me and took an interest in me, which was stupid.

‘I’m exaggerating,’ I said aloud.

‘And you seem incredibly preoccupied,’ said Françoise.

‘Because I’m not in love,’ I said.

She looked at me. I felt myself sorely tempted to say to her: ‘Françoise, I would be very capable of loving Luc. I love you very much too. Take him, take him away.’

‘And is it really all over with Bertrand?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘I don’t see him any more. What I mean is, I don’t look at him any more.’

‘Shouldn’t you perhaps tell him?’

I did not reply. What could I tell Bertrand? ‘I don’t want to see you any more’? But I really did want to see him. I liked him a lot. Françoise smiled.

‘I understand. Nothing’s simple. Come and have breakfast. I’ve seen a jumper in Rue Caumartin that would be terrific with those trousers. We’ll go and look at it together …’

We went downstairs talking animatedly about clothes. It wasn’t a subject that greatly interested me but I liked just talking like that, talking for the sake of it, suggesting an adjective, choosing the wrong one just to tease her and laughing over it. Downstairs Luc and Bertrand were having breakfast. They were talking about going for a swim.

‘Maybe we could go to the swimming pool?’

It was Bertrand speaking. He must have thought that he would look more presentable in the early summer sunshine than Luc. But perhaps he didn’t have such unworthy thoughts.

‘That’s an excellent idea. And I’ll teach Dominique to drive at the same time.’

‘We don’t want any silliness,’ said Bertrand’s mother, coming into the room clad in a sumptuous dressing gown. ‘Did you sleep well? And what about you, my pet?’

Bertrand looked embarrassed. He had been adopting a dignified demeanour and it didn’t suit him. I liked him to be cheerful. You prefer people whom you are treating badly to be cheerful. It’s less disturbing.

Luc was getting up to go. It was obvious that he could not stand his sister’s presence, which amused me. I too had experienced visceral dislike where others were concerned but I had had to conceal it. There was something childlike about Luc.

‘I’ll go upstairs and get my swimsuit.’

We all began to rush around looking for our things. Finally we were all ready. Bertrand set off with his mother in their friends’ car and the three of us were left together.

‘You drive,’ said Luc.

I did have some vague idea of what to do and it didn’t go too badly. Luc was beside me and Françoise was in the back, talking away, unaware of the danger. Once again I was filled with an intense yearning for what might have been: long journeys with Luc at my side, the road showing white beneath the headlights, the night, me with my head on Luc’s shoulder and Luc so steady at the wheel and driving so fast. I thought of dawn over the countryside, dusk over the sea …

‘You know, I’ve never seen the sea …’

There was an outcry.

‘I’ll show it to you,’ said Luc softly.

And he turned towards me with a smile that was like a promise. Françoise hadn’t heard him and went on talking:

‘The next time we go, Luc, we must take her along. She’ll keep saying, “Such a lot of water! Such a lot of water!” like the man whose name I can’t remember.’15

‘The first thing I’ll do, probably, will be to have a swim,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk afterwards.’

‘You know, it really is very beautiful,’ said Françoise. ‘The beaches are yellow, with red rocks and with all that blue sea washing over them …’

‘I love your descriptions,’ said Luc, laughing, ‘yellow, blue, red. Like a schoolgirl’s. A young schoolgirl, of course,’ he added apologetically, turning to me. ‘There are older schoolgirls who are very, very clever. Turn left, Dominique, if you can.’

I could. We drew up in front of a lawn. In the middle of it was a large swimming pool full of clear blue water, the very sight of which made me freeze. Before long we were standing at the edge in our swimsuits. I had met Luc as he was coming out of his cubicle, looking displeased. When I asked him why, he gave an embarrassed little smile.

‘I don’t think I look good.’

He didn’t, in fact. He was tall and thin, slightly stooped and not very brown. But he seemed so unhappy, he was taking such precautions to keep his towel held in front of him and he had so much of the ‘awkward age’ about him that I felt sorry for him.

‘Come on now,’ I said lightly, ‘you’re not as ugly as all that.’

Looking almost shocked, he cast me a sidelong glance and then burst out laughing.

‘You’re beginning to show me a lack of respect.’

Then he broke into a run and threw himself into the water. He surfaced immediately, uttering howls of distress, and Françoise came and sat on the pool’s surround. She looked better the way she was than fully clothed, she looked like a statue from the Louvre. ‘It’s atrociously cold,’ Luc was saying, his head sticking out of the water. ‘You have to be mad to swim in May.’

‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out,’16 Bertrand’s mother pronounced sententiously.

Having dipped a toe in the water, she went off to get dressed again. I watched the merry, chattering crowd of pallid, excited people round the pool and was filled with gentle mirth, while at the same time being niggled by the thought: ‘What on earth am I doing here?’

‘Are you going to get in?’ asked Bertrand.

He was standing in front of me on one foot and I looked at him approvingly. I knew that he did weight lifting every morning. We had once spent a weekend together and, at first light, mistaking my dozing for a deep sleep, he had performed various exercises at the window which at the time had made me laugh noiselessly until the tears ran, but which seemed to have had the desired effect. He had a clean, healthy look about him.

‘We’re lucky to have olive skin,’ he said. ‘Look at the others.’

‘Let’s have a dip,’ I said. I was afraid he might launch into exasperated comments about his mother, whom he found infuriating.

I got into the water with the greatest reluctance, swam once round the pool as a face-saving exercise and got out shivering. Françoise rubbed me down with a towel. I wondered why she had never had any children, since she was so obviously made for motherhood, with her broad hips, a body in full bloom and her gentleness. It was such a pity.

Seven

Two days after that weekend I had an arrangement to meet Luc at six o’clock. My view was that from now on, if he tried again to start something that was going to be pointless, things between us would become toxic and beyond repair. In short, I was as ready as any seventeenth-century maiden to demand that he make amends for a kiss.

We had arranged to meet in a bar on the Quai Voltaire. When I arrived I was surprised to find Luc already there. He looked tired and not at all well. I sat down beside him and he straight away ordered two whiskies. Then he asked me for news of Bertrand.

‘He’s fine.’

‘Is he suffering much?’

He asked the question not in a mocking way, but quite calmly.

‘Why would he be suffering?’ I asked foolishly.

‘He’s not stupid.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re talking about Bertrand. It’s … um …’

‘It’s a secondary matter?’

This time he had asked the question with irony in his voice. I lost my patience and said: ‘It’s not a secondary matter but at the end of the day it’s not very serious. While we’re on the subject of serious matters, let’s talk about Françoise.’

He burst out laughing.

‘It’s a funny thing, but, as you’ll see, in a situation like this, the … let’s just say, the partner of the other person seems more of an obstacle than your own partner. Dreadful as it may sound, when you know someone you also know their way of suffering and it seems quite acceptable. Well, maybe not acceptable, but familiar, so you’re less scared of it.’

‘I don’t know much about Bertrand’s way of suffering …’

‘You haven’t had time. I’ve been married for ten years, so I’ve seen Françoise suffer. It is very unpleasant.’

We sat quite still for a moment. We were both probably imagining Françoise suffering. I visualized her with her face to the wall.

‘This is stupid,’ said Luc at length. ‘But, you understand, it’s not as simple as I had thought.’

Lifting his whisky, he threw back his head and gulped it down. I felt as if I were watching something at the cinema. I tried telling myself that this was not the time to be detached from things but I had the impression of living in a state of total unreality. Luc was there, he would decide, everything was fine.

He leant forward slightly with his empty glass in his hands, swirling the ice round in a regular movement. He talked without looking at me.

‘I’ve had affairs, of course I have. Mostly Françoise hasn’t known about them, except in a few unfortunate instances. But they were never really serious.’

He straightened up in a kind of rage.

‘And it’s not very serious with you either. Nothing is very serious. Nothing is of any value when set against Françoise.’

I don’t know why, but I was listening to what he said without experiencing any distress at all. It was as if I were sitting in a philosophy class that was of no relevance to me.

‘But this is different. To begin with I desired you, the way a man of my type can desire any young girl who is feline and stubborn and difficult. Besides, I’ve told you already, I wanted to tame you. I wanted to spend the night with you. I never thought …’

All of a sudden he turned towards me, took my hands in his and spoke to me gently. I studied his face close up, I could make out all the lines in it, I listened, enthralled, to what he was saying, I was finally capable of perfect concentration, liberated from myself and my little inner voice.

‘I never thought that I could hold you in esteem. I esteem you greatly, Dominique, and I like you a lot. I shall never love you “really and truly”, as children say, but we are alike, you and I. I no longer want just to sleep with you, I want to live with you, to go away on holiday with you. We would be very happy and very loving. I would teach you things about the sea and about money and about a certain kind of freedom. We would be less bored. So there you are.’

‘I would like that too,’ I said.

‘Afterwards I would go back to Françoise. What risk do you run? The risk of becoming attached to me and of suffering afterwards? So what? It’s better than being bored. You prefer to be happy and unhappy than for there to be just nothingness, don’t you?’

‘Obviously,’ I said.

‘What risk do you run?’ repeated Luc, as if to convince himself.

‘And then, when it comes to suffering,’ I went on, ‘one mustn’t exaggerate. I’m not as sensitive as all that.’

‘Good,’ said Luc. ‘We’ll see, we’ll think about it. Let’s talk about something else. Would you like another drink?’

We drank our health. What was becoming clearer to me was that we were perhaps going to go off in the car together, just as I had pictured but had not believed possible. I would manage perfectly well not to become attached to him, knowing that I had burnt my boats in advance. I was not that crazy.

We went for a walk along the quays. Luc laughed and talked. I laughed as well and said to myself that you always had to laugh when you were with him and I felt quite disposed to do so. ‘Laughter is a distinguishing feature of love’, as Alain said.17 But it wasn’t a question of love, merely of something we had agreed on. And then, in fact, I felt quite proud: Luc thought about me, he held me in esteem, he desired me. I was able to think of myself as being quite amusing and worthy of esteem and desirable. The petty little official that was my conscience and that, as soon as I thought about myself, cast back at me a pathetic picture of myself, was perhaps too hard on me and too pessimistic.

When I left Luc I went into a bar and had another whisky with the four hundred francs^18 that had been earmarked for my evening meal. After ten minutes I felt marvellous, I felt tender-hearted, kind and agreeable. What I needed was to meet someone who could benefit from this and to whom I could explain all the difficult, sweet, painful things I knew about life. I could have talked for hours. The barman was nice enough, but uninteresting. So I went to the café in Rue Saint-Jacques, where I met Bertrand. He was alone, surrounded by a few empty saucers. I sat down next to him and he seemed really glad to see me.

‘I was just thinking about you. There’s a new bebop band at the Kentucky. What do you say to going along? It’s ages since we’ve been dancing.’

‘I haven’t a bean,’ I said pitifully.

‘My mother gave me ten thousand francs the other day. Let’s have a few more drinks and then let’s go.’

‘But it’s only eight o’clock,’ I objected. ‘It doesn’t open till ten.’

‘We’ll have several drinks,’ said Bertrand cheerfully.

I was delighted. I really loved dancing the fast bebop movements with Bertrand. The jukebox was playing a jazz melody that made me move my legs to the rhythm. When Bertrand paid the bill, I realized that he must have had quite a lot to drink. He was quite merry. Anyway, he was my best friend, he was a brother to me, I loved him dearly.

By the time ten o’clock came we had taken in five or six bars. In the end we were completely drunk. We were ridiculously merry but not sentimental with it. When we got to the Kentucky the band had begun to play, there was almost nobody there and we had the dance floor more or less to ourselves. Contrary to what I had expected, we danced very well together; we were very relaxed. I loved that music more than anything. I loved the rush it gave me, and the pleasure my whole body had in keeping up with it. We only sat down when we wanted to have a drink.

‘Music,’ I said in a confidential tone to Bertrand, ‘jazz music, equates to freedom from care, speeded-up.’

He stopped in his tracks.

‘That’s exactly what it is! Very, very interesting. An excellent formulation. Well done, Dominique!’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘The whisky’s vile at the Kentucky. But the music’s good. Music equals freedom from care. But care about what?’

‘I don’t know. Listen, there’s the trumpet. It isn’t just carefree, it’s philosophically necessary. It had to go to the very end of that note, didn’t you sense that? It was necessary. It’s like love, you know, physical love. There’s a moment when you’ve got to … when it just can’t be other than what it is.’

‘Exactly. Very, very interesting. Shall we dance?’

We spent the night drinking and swapping high-flown pronouncements. By the end there was a dizzying whirl of faces and feet and Bertrand’s arm sending me spinning far away from him and the music hurling me back towards him and the incredible heat and the incredible suppleness of our bodies.

‘They’re closing up,’ said Bertrand. ‘It’s four a.m.’

‘It’s closed at my place too,’ I remarked.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

It was true that it didn’t matter. We were going to go back to his place, we were going to lie down on his bed and it would be perfectly normal for me to feel Bertrand’s weight on me that night, just as all through the winter, and for us to be happy together.

Eight

In the morning I lay up close to him while he slept, his hip against mine. It must have been early. I couldn’t get back to sleep and I said to myself that I was not really there at all, any more than he was, sunk in his dreams. It was as if my true self were somewhere very far away, far beyond the houses in the suburbs, far beyond trees or fields, further back than childhood, motionless at the end of a path. It was as if that girl, bending over that sleeping form, were only a pale reflection of the calm, inexorable self whom I was in any case already stepping aside from, in order to live. It was as if I had chosen to have a life rather than an immutable self and had left that statue at the end of a path, in the half-light, with all the lives that it might have had, but had refused, perched on its shoulders like so many birds.

I stretched, then got up and got dressed. Bertrand was waking up, asking me questions, yawning, running his hands over his cheeks and his chin, complaining about needing to shave. I arranged to see him that evening and went back to my room planning to work, but in vain. It was atrociously hot and getting on for noon. I was due to have lunch with Luc and Françoise. There was no point in starting work for the sake of an hour. I went out again to buy a packet of cigarettes, came back and smoked one, realizing suddenly, as I was lighting it, that I had performed every one of my actions that morning in a state of complete oblivion. For hours there had been nothing driving me but a vague instinct telling me to stick to my routine. There had been nothing, not for a moment. And where would I have found anything? I didn’t set store by the marvellous smile of a fellow human being on the bus, or by the throbbing life of the streets, and I did not love Bertrand. I needed someone or something. I said this to myself almost aloud as I lit my cigarette: ‘Someone or something’, and it sounded melodramatic, but also funny. So, just like Catherine, I had sentimental highs when I loved love and the words relating to love: ‘tender’, ‘cruel’, ‘sweet’, ‘trusting’, ‘excessive’; yet I loved no one. Luc, perhaps, when he was there. But since the previous day I hadn’t dared think about him. I did not like the taste of renunciation that filled my throat when I remembered him.

I was waiting for Luc and Françoise when a strange dizziness took hold of me and sent me rushing to the washbasin. When it was over I raised my head and looked at myself in the mirror. I had had plenty of time to do the calculations. ‘So,’ I said aloud, ‘it’s happened.’ The nightmare that I knew so well for having so often lived through it mistakenly was beginning again. But this time … perhaps it was the whisky of the previous evening and there was really nothing to get worked up about. I was already having a fierce inner debate, while looking at my reflection in the mirror with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. I had very probably been caught out. I would tell Françoise. Françoise was the only person who could help me in the circumstances.

But I didn’t tell Françoise. I didn’t dare. And then at lunch Luc insisted on pouring us drinks, so I forgot about it for a bit and tried to be rational. But how was I to know whether Bertrand, who was so jealous of Luc, had not found this way of keeping me? I reckoned I had all the symptoms …

The day following the lunch ushered in a week of hot weather, it was summer come early, the like of which I would not have thought possible. I walked about the streets, for my room was so hot it was unbearable. I questioned Catherine vaguely about possible solutions to my dilemma, without daring to confess anything to her. I no longer wanted to see Luc or Françoise; they were strong, free individuals. I was as sick as a dog and had bouts of nervous giggling. I had no plans and no strength. By the end of the week I was sure that I was expecting Bertrand’s child and I felt more composed. I was going to have to take some action …

But on the day before the exam I knew that I had been mistaken and that in fact it had been nothing but a bad dream, and I sat the written paper laughing with relief. Quite simply I had thought of nothing else for ten days and it was a miracle for me to rediscover other people. Everything was becoming possible again, things were looking up. Françoise happened to visit me in my room, was horrified at how swelteringly hot it was and suggested that I should go round to theirs to prepare for the oral exam. So I worked on the white rug in their flat, alone, with the shutters half closed. Françoise would come home at around five, would show me what she had bought, would try without much conviction to test me on the syllabus and it would end up with our joking together. Luc would arrive and would join in our laughter. We would go and have dinner on the terrace of a restaurant and they would drop me back at my place. On only one day of that week did Luc get home before Françoise, coming into the room where I was working and kneeling down beside me on the rug. He took me in his arms and kissed me without a word, over my notebooks. It seemed to me as if I were rediscovering his mouth, as if it were the only mouth I had ever known and as if I had thought of nothing else for the past fortnight. Then he told me that he would write to me during the holidays and that, if I wanted, we could meet up somewhere for a week. He stroked the back of my neck and sought my mouth. I wanted to stay leaning on his shoulder like that until night fell, perhaps complaining softly that we did not love each other. The academic year was over.

PART TWO

One

It was a long, grey house. A meadow ran down to the River Yonne, ensconced among its reeds and its creamy currents, the sluggish, green Yonne, overhung by poplar trees and with swallows flying overhead. There was one tree that I especially liked to lie down under. I would go there and stretch out with my feet against its trunk and my thoughts lost in its branches, which I could see high above, swaying in the wind. The earth smelt of warm grass and gave me a feeling of lingering pleasure, along with a sense of my own powerlessness. I knew that landscape in rain and shine. I had known it long before I knew the streets of Paris and the River Seine and before I knew men: it never changed.

With my exams miraculously over and done with, I was able just to read and would then make my way slowly back up to the house for meals. My mother had lost a son fifteen years earlier in somewhat tragic circumstances and ever since had suffered from a depression which had soon become part and parcel of the house itself. Within those walls sadness took on a flavour of pious devotion. My father walked about on tiptoe and carried shawls around for my mother.

Bertrand had been writing to me. He had sent a curious letter, unclear and full of allusions to the last night we had spent together, the evening we had gone to the Kentucky, a night during which, he said, he had been lacking in respect towards me. It hadn’t seemed to me that he had been more lacking in respect than usual and since, as far as that area of our lives was concerned, we had a very straightforward and satisfactory relationship, I had tried at length to work out what he was alluding to, but in vain. It had finally dawned on me that he was trying to introduce into our relationship an element that would ensure a deep sense of collusion between us, a strong eroticism. He was looking for something to bind us together, he was clutching at straws, and for once what he chose to clutch at was something rather base. At first I resented him for complicating what had been the happiest and indeed the purest thing between us, but I did not know that in some cases people would rather look for any explanation, even the worst, than accept the obvious and the banal. And for him, the obvious and the banal was that I did not love him any more. Besides, I knew that it was me he was missing, and no longer us, since there hadn’t been an ‘us’ for a month, and this awareness pained me even more.

As for Luc, there was no word from him during that month, just a very nice card from Françoise to which he had added his signature. I kept repeating to myself with a certain inane pride that I did not love him, the proof being that I was not suffering from his absence. I did not realize that, in order for this to be at all convincing, I should have felt chastened by the fact of my not loving him and not, as I did feel, triumphant. In any case, all these niceties irritated me. I normally had myself so well in hand.

And then I loved that house, although I should have been so bored in it. I was bored, of course, but it was a pleasant kind of boredom, not the boredom that I was ashamed of experiencing when I was with people in Paris. I was very kind and considerate to everyone. I took pleasure in being so. Wandering from one piece of furniture to another, from one field to another, from one day to the next and there being nothing else to do, what a relief that was! Acquiring a kind of gentle tan on my face and body as a result of staying put, waiting, and yet not waiting, for the holidays to be over. Reading. The holidays were one enormous, dull, yellow blur.

At last the letter from Luc arrived. In it he said that he would be in Avignon on 22 September. He would await me there, or, if not me, then a letter from me. I decided on the spot to be there myself and the month just past looked like having been blissfully simple. But it was so like Luc, the calm tone, the ridiculous, unexpected choice of Avignon, the apparent lack of interest. I set about weaving a web of lies and wrote to Catherine asking her to send me a fake invitation to something. When she did so, she sent me another letter along with it, saying how surprised she was, since Bertrand was on the Côte d’Azur with all the gang, so who could I be going to meet up with? She was distressed by my lack of trust in her. She saw nothing to justify it. I sent her a note of thanks, merely pointing out that, if she wanted to make Bertrand suffer, all she had to do was to tell him about my letter … which she did anyway, out of friendship for him, of course.

On 21 September, carrying only light luggage, I set off for Avignon, which fortunately is on the way to the Côte d’Azur. My parents took me to the station. I left them with tears in my eyes, not knowing why. For the first time it seemed to me that I was leaving behind my childhood and the security of the family. I already hated Avignon.

As a consequence of Luc’s silence and the distant tone of his letter, I had conjured up quite a hard, detached image of him, and I arrived in Avignon feeling quite guarded, a mental outlook that did not sit well with a supposedly amorous rendezvous. I was not going away with Luc because he loved me nor because I loved him. I was going away with him because we spoke the same language and because we found each other attractive. When I thought about it, these reasons seemed rather slight and the trip itself a terrifying venture.

But once again Luc surprised me. He was standing on the station platform looking anxious. Then, when he saw me, his look changed to one of delight. When I got off the train he gave me a hug and kissed me lightly.

‘You’re looking great. I’m glad you’ve come.’

‘You too,’ I said, referring to his appearance. Indeed, he was looking tanned and slim and much more handsome than he had looked in Paris.

‘There’s no reason for us to stay in Avignon, you know. We’re going to go and take a look at the sea, because, after all, that’s what we’re here for. After that we’ll decide what we’re doing.’

His car was parked in front of the station. He threw my case into the back and we set off. I felt completely dazed and slightly disappointed, which was not how it should have been. I didn’t remember him being either so seductive or so cheerful.

Our route was lovely. It was lined with plane trees. Luc smoked and we bowled along in the sun with the hood down. I kept saying to myself: ‘There, I’ve made it, this is it.’ Yet it didn’t matter to me, it didn’t matter at all. I might just as well have been sitting under my poplar tree with a book. In the end the fact that I was so detached from what was taking place made me cheer up. I turned towards him and asked him for a cigarette. He smiled:

‘Are you feeling better?’

I began to laugh.

‘Yes, I’m feeling better. I’m just wondering what I’m doing here with you, that’s all.’

‘You’re not doing anything. You’re going on a drive, you’re smoking, you’re wondering whether or not you’re going to be bored. Don’t you want me to kiss you?’

He stopped the car, put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me. It was a very good way of acknowledging each other’s presence. I laughed a bit as we kissed and we set off again. He held my hand. He understood me. For two months I had been living with near-strangers who were frozen in a state of mourning in which I could not participate, and it seemed to me that, very slowly, life was beginning again.

The sea was astonishing; for a moment I was sorry that Françoise was not there so that I could tell her that it really was blue, with red rocks and yellow sand, and that it was very well done. I had been rather afraid that Luc might point it out to me with an air of triumph while watching for my reactions, which would have forced me to reply with much rhetoric and to make faces expressing my admiration, but he merely indicated it as we arrived in Saint-Raphaël.

‘There’s the sea.’

And we drove on slowly into the evening, with the sea alongside us growing pale until it faded into grey. In Cannes Luc stopped the car on la Croisette^19 in front of a huge hotel whose lobby horrified me. I knew that, to feel any enjoyment, I would have to forget about the decor and the bellboys; the latter I would have to turn into familiar figures who didn’t look my way or pose a threat. Luc was having a powwow with a haughty-looking man behind a desk. I would rather have been anywhere else but there. Sensing this, he put his hand on my shoulder as we crossed the lobby and ushered me along. Our room was immense, almost all white, with two French windows looking out over the sea. There was a hubbub of porters and luggage and of windows and wardrobes being thrown open. There I was in the midst of it all, my arms dangling by my sides, indignant at my own inability to react.

‘So here we are,’ said Luc.

He cast a satisfied glance round the room and went to lean over the balcony.

‘Come and look.’

I rested my elbows on the railing beside him but at a respectful distance. I had no wish at all to look out nor to be on familiar terms with this man whom I didn’t really know. He glanced at me.

‘Come now, you’ve gone all shy again. Go and have a bath and come back and have a drink with me. I can see that there’s nothing will cheer you up but luxury and alcohol.’

He was right. Once I had changed I stood leaning on the balcony next to him, with a glass in my hand, and complimented him a thousand times on how nice the bathroom was, and the sea. He told me that I looked most radiant. I replied that he did too and we gazed at the palm trees and the crowds below in a satisfied way. Then he went off to change, leaving me with a second whisky, and I walked about barefoot on the thick carpet humming to myself.

Dinner went off well. We talked about Françoise and Bertrand with a lot of good sense and affection. I hoped I wouldn’t meet Bertrand but Luc said that we were bound to bump into someone or other who would be only too happy to spill the beans, to both him and Françoise, and that it would be time enough to worry about that in the autumn. I was touched by the fact that he was running that risk on my account. I yawned as I told him, because I was asleep on my feet. I also told him that I liked his way of approaching things.

‘It’s a very good way. You make up your mind to do something, you do it, you accept the consequences and you’re not afraid.’

‘What do you expect me to be afraid of?’ he said in a strangely sad way. ‘Bertrand is not going to kill me. Françoise is not going to leave me. You are not going to love me.’

‘Perhaps it’s me that Bertrand will kill,’ I said crossly.

‘He’s much too nice for that. In fact, everyone’s nice.’

‘It’s nasty people who cause the most trouble, you told me so yourself.’

‘You’re right. Anyway, it’s late, come to bed.’

He said that quite naturally. There had been nothing passionate about our conversation but that phrase ‘come to bed’ did strike me as rather offhand. To tell the truth I was afraid, very much afraid, of the night ahead.

In the bathroom I put on my pyjamas with trembling hands. They were quite schoolgirlish pyjamas but I had nothing else. When I came back, Luc was already in bed. He was smoking, with his face turned towards the window. I slid in beside him. He held out a steady hand and took mine. I was shivering.

‘Take off those pyjamas, you little fool, you’re going to crease them. How can you be cold on a night like this? Are you unwell?’

He took me in his arms, carefully removed my pyjamas and threw them in a ball on the floor. I pointed out to him that they would get creased after all. He began to laugh softly. All his movements had become incredibly gentle. He was quietly kissing my shoulders and my mouth, while continuing to speak.

‘You smell of warm grass. Do you like this room? If not, we can go somewhere else. It’s quite pleasant, Cannes …’

I was answering ‘Yes, yes’ in a strangled voice. I so much wanted it to be the next morning. It was only when he drew back from me a little and put his hand on my hip that I became carried away. He was stroking me and I was kissing his neck, his torso, everything that I could touch of that dark shadow, silhouetted against the sky through the French window. Finally he slid his legs between mine, I slid my hands over his back, we were sighing together. Then suddenly I no longer saw either him or the sky above Cannes. I was dying, I was going to die yet I was not dying, but I was swooning. Nothing else was of any importance, how could I not always have known that? When we separated, Luc opened his eyes and smiled at me. I fell asleep immediately, with my head on his arm.

Two

I had always been told that it was very difficult to live with someone. During the short time I spent with Luc I did think it was, although I didn’t really experience it as such. I thought it was difficult insofar as I was never able to be truly relaxed with him. I was afraid that he might be bored. I couldn’t help observing that, generally speaking, I was more afraid of being bored by others than of seeing them get bored by me, so to have things turned the other way round worried me. Yet how could I find it difficult to live with someone like Luc, who said very little, who asked me no questions (and especially not ‘What are you thinking about?’), who invariably seemed pleased that I was there and who made none of the demands associated with either insensitivity or passion? We lived in step, we had the same habits and the same rhythm. We found each other attractive, everything was going well. And I had no reason to regret his not having made the enormous effort required in order to love someone, in order really to know that person and to dispel their loneliness. We were friends and lovers. We swam together in a Mediterranean that was just too blue for words; we had lunch without saying much, dazed as we were by the sun, and we would go back to the hotel. Sometimes, in his arms, in that great aura of tenderness that follows love-making, I wanted to say to him: ‘Luc, love me, let’s try, allow us to try.’ But I did not say it. I confined myself to kissing his forehead, his eyes, his mouth, all the contours of that new face, that sensitive face that the lips discover after it has been discovered by the eyes. I had never loved a face so much. I even loved his cheeks, although cheeks had always appeared to me to be without much substance, the things that made a face look like a fish. Now when I pressed my face against Luc’s cheeks, which were cool and somewhat rough from the beard that was growing in, I understood why Proust speaks at such length of Albertine’s cheeks.20 Luc also helped me discover my own body, he talked to me about it with interest, but without any indecency, as if it were a precious thing. And yet it wasn’t sensuality that set the tone of our relationship, but something else, a sort of cruel complicity that came about because we were both weary of putting on an act, we were weary of words, we were simply weary.

After dinner we would always make our way to the same rather sinister bar behind Rue d’Antibes. There was a small band, and when we first went there, Luc had asked them to play the tune ‘Lone and Sweet’, which I had already mentioned to him. He had turned to me in triumph.

‘That’s the one you want, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It’s good of you to have thought of it.’

‘Does it remind you of Bertrand?’

I replied that it did a bit, it had been in jukeboxes for quite a while. He looked put out.

‘That’s a nuisance. But we’ll find another one.’

‘Why?’

‘When you have an affair you have to choose a tune to go with it, that’s how it is, and a perfume, and landmarks, for the future.’

I must have taken on a rather peculiar look, because he began to laugh.

‘At your age you don’t think about the future. But I’m preparing for an enjoyable old age, with records to play.’

‘Have you a lot?’

‘No.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said, feeling irked. ‘When I’m your age I imagine I’ll have a whole collection of them.’

He took my hand cautiously.

‘Are you offended?’

‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘But it’s rather strange to be saying to yourself that a whole week of your life, an exciting week that you’ve spent with someone, will be reduced in a year or two to nothing more than a record. Especially if the someone knows that already and proclaims it.’

To my annoyance I could feel tears in my eyes. It was the way he had said: ‘Are you offended?’ When people spoke to me in a certain tone it always made me want to wail.

‘Apart from that, I’m not offended,’ I went on shakily.

‘Come on,’ said Luc, ‘let’s dance.’

He took me in his arms and we began to dance to Bertrand’s tune, which in any case sounded nothing like the very good recording of it in the jukebox. As we danced, Luc all of a sudden clasped me in his arms fiercely with what no doubt could be called a despairing tenderness, and I clung on to him. Then he stopped holding me so tightly and we talked about other things. We found a tune that we could not but choose, since at the time it was being played everywhere.

Apart from that slight clash, I behaved well, I was very cheerful and I reckoned that our little escapade was a great success. And then, I admired him, I could not help admiring his intelligence and stability and his man’s way of according to things their exact importance, their weight, without being either cynical or complacent. Only, I wanted to say to him, sometimes with annoyance: ‘But, after all, why do you not love me? That would be so much more restful for me. Why not let there be passionate love between us, like a kind of glass partition which can sometimes distort things, yet which is so very convenient?’ But no, we were two of a kind, allies and accomplices. I could not reduce myself to being merely the object of his love, any more than he could force himself to love me: it was not within his power, he had neither the strength nor the wish to do so.

The week we had anticipated was coming to an end. However, Luc did not say anything about our leaving. We had become very tanned and had acquired a rather dishevelled look as a result of nights spent in the bar talking, drinking and waiting for dawn, a white dawn breaking over an unfeeling sea, all boats at rest, and with the crazy, elegant crowd of seagulls dozing under the eaves of the hotel. We would go back then, would greet the same drowsy bellboy and Luc would take me in his arms and we would make love, giddy with fatigue. We would wake up at noon and go for a swim.

On that particular morning, which was to have been our last, I really believed that he loved me. Walking about the room, he had taken on a hesitant look which intrigued me.

‘What have you said to your family? That you would go home when?’

‘I told them in about a week.’

‘If it suited you, perhaps we could stay on for another week?’

‘Yes …’

It was dawning on me that I had never really thought I would have to leave. My whole life would go by in that hotel, which had become so hospitable and accommodating, like a big ship. With Luc, all my nights would be sleepless nights. We would move gently towards winter, towards death, still talking as if everything were provisional.

‘But I thought Françoise was expecting you?’

‘I can sort that out,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave Cannes. I don’t want to leave Cannes and I don’t want to leave you.’

‘Neither do I,’ I replied in the same calm, restrained voice.

The same voice as his. For a moment I thought he perhaps loved me but didn’t want to tell me so. It made my heart do a somersault in my chest. Then I remembered that these were only words, that in fact he liked me a lot and that that was enough. We were simply granting ourselves one more happy week. Afterwards I would have to leave him. Leave him? But why would I leave him? For whom? To do what? To go back to that restless boredom, that fragmented solitude of mine? At least, when he looked at me, it was he whom I saw; when he spoke to me it was he whom I tried to understand. It was he who interested me, he whom I wanted to be happy. He, Luc, my lover.

‘That’s a good idea,’ I went on. ‘To tell the truth, I hadn’t given any thought to leaving.’

‘You don’t give thought to anything,’ he said, laughing.

‘Not when I’m with you.’

‘Why? Do you feel young and irresponsible?’

He was wearing a mocking little smile. Had I shown the slightest tendency towards it, he would have quickly eliminated from our relationship any hint of its being a case of ‘the little girl and her marvellous protector’. Fortunately I was feeling perfectly adult. I was feeling adult, and blasé with it.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I feel completely responsible. But responsible for what? For my life? My life is something very pliable, as soft as putty. I am not unhappy. I am content enough, though not really happy. I am nothing, except that I’m fine with you.’

‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘And I’m really fine with you too.’

‘So let’s do some satisfied purring.’

He broke into laughter.

‘You’re like an angry pussycat as soon as anyone attacks your little portion of the absurd,21 your little dose of daily despair. I don’t care about making you “purr”, as you say! Nor do I care about your being blissfully happy with me. I would find that boring.’

‘Why?’

‘I would feel alone. That’s the one thing about Françoise that frightens me: when she is beside me, saying nothing, and is happy like that. On the other hand, it’s very satisfying, sexually and socially, to make a woman happy, even if you ask yourself why.’

‘So basically it’s fine,’ I said, straight out. ‘There is Françoise whom you make happy and there is me whom you’re going to make just slightly unhappy in the autumn.’

I had no sooner uttered those words than I regretted them. He turned to me.

‘You, unhappy?’

‘Not unhappy,’ I replied, smiling, ‘just a little disoriented. I’ll have to find someone to take care of me and no one else will be as good at it as you are.’

‘Be sure not to tell me about it,’ he said angrily.

Then he changed his mind.

‘Actually, yes, do tell me about it. Tell me everything. If a certain person is unpleasant to you, I’ll thrash him. If not, I’ll speak well of him to you. In short I’ll be a real father to you.’

He took my hand, turned it over and kissed the palm gently and at length. I laid my free hand on the back of his neck. He seemed very young, very vulnerable and very kind, this man who had offered to take me on an escapade that had no future and where no sentimentality was involved. He was honest.

‘We’re honest people,’ I said sententiously.

‘We are,’ he replied, laughing. ‘Don’t smoke your cigarette like that, it does nothing to make you look like an honest woman.’

I drew myself up in my polka-dot dressing gown.

‘Well, am I an honest woman? If so, what am I doing in this sick, luxury hotel, in this courtesan’s get-up, with someone else’s husband? Am I not entirely typical of those delinquent young ladies from Saint-Germain-des-Prés^22 who break up marriages without a second thought?’

‘Yes, you are,’ he said remorsefully. ‘And I’m the husband, up to now a model husband, who has been led astray by his senses, I’m the sucker, the unfortunate sucker. Come here …’

‘No, no. I’m refusing you, I’m sending you packing in the most despicable way. Having lit the fires of lechery in your veins, I am refusing to quench them. So there!’

He collapsed on to the bed with his head in his hands. I sat down beside him, solemnly. And when he raised his head again I fixed him with a harsh stare.

‘I am a dangerous woman.’

‘And what am I?’

‘You are a wretched human reject who was once a man … Luc! One more week!’

I threw myself down next to him, I entwined my hair in his. He was burning yet cool against my cheek. He smelt of the sea and salt.

I was on my own, and quite happy to be so, in a deckchair in front of the hotel, facing the sea. On my own except for a few elderly English ladies. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and Luc had had to go to Nice to do various complicated things. I rather liked Nice, at least the shabby side of Nice, between the station and the Promenade des Anglais.23 But I had declined to go with him because I had suddenly wanted to be on my own.

So there I was on my own, yawning, exhausted through lack of sleep, and feeling wonderful. I couldn’t light my cigarette without my hand trembling a bit as it held the match. The September sun, not giving out much warmth, caressed my cheek. For once I felt very good about myself. ‘We only feel good when we’re tired,’ Luc used to say, and it was true that I was one of those people who only feel good when they have killed off that part of themselves that is truly alive, that is demanding and full of care, that part of them that asks the question: ‘What have you made of your life and what do you want to make of it?’ to which I could only reply: ‘Nothing.’

A very handsome young man went by; I looked him up and down a bit with what seemed to me marvellous indifference. Good looks, generally speaking, and to some extent at least, made me feel rather embarrassed. They seemed somehow indecent and beyond my reach. The young man was pleasant to look at but didn’t seem real. Luc cancelled out other men. By contrast, I did not cancel out other women for him. He took pleasure in looking at them, even without passing comment.

Suddenly I saw the sea only through a mist. I felt myself suffocating. I put my hand to my forehead and found it bathed in sweat. The roots of my hair were soaked through. A drop of sweat was slowly running down my back. Death was probably nothing more than this, a blue mist and a gentle sense of falling. If I could have died there and then, I would not have put up a struggle.

I seized on those words as they brushed up against my conscious mind and before they could tiptoe away and elude me: ‘I would not put up a struggle.’ And yet there were things that I loved greatly: Paris, certain smells, books, love and my present life with Luc. My intuition told me that there was probably no one I would be better off with than Luc, that he had been meant for me from all eternity and that, without a doubt, fate was involved when people met. My destiny was for Luc to leave me and for me to start all over again with someone else, which I would do, of course. But I would never again feel the same way with anyone else as I did with him: so not alone, so tranquil and with a sense of holding back so little. Only, he was going to go back to his wife, he was going to leave me to my room in Paris, to interminable afternoons, to fits of despair and to liaisons that wouldn’t work out. I began to snivel quietly out of self-pity.

After three minutes of this I blew my nose. Two deckchairs away from me an elderly Englishwoman was staring at me, not with compassion, but with a curiosity that made me blush. I looked at her attentively. For a moment I was overcome with incredible respect for her. She was a human being, another human being. She was looking at me and I was staring back at her, in the sun, as if both of us were dazzled by a kind of revelation: two human beings not speaking the same language and looking at each other in mutual astonishment. Then she got up and limped off, leaning on her stick.

Happiness is a flat expanse without landmarks. Hence I have no precise memory of that period in Cannes, apart from those few unhappy moments and Luc’s laughter and, in the room at night, the faint, beseeching fragrance of summer mimosa. Perhaps, for people like me, happiness is no more than a kind of absence, an absence of worry, a reassuring absence. It was an absence I was now familiar with, and I was familiar too with sometimes meeting Luc’s gaze and having the impression that all was in fact well: he was facing up to the world on my behalf. He would look at me and smile. I knew why he smiled and I wanted to smile too.

I remember a moment of elation one morning. Luc was lying on the sand. I had been diving from a kind of raft, then I climbed up to the topmost of the diving boards. I saw Luc and the people on the beach, and the sea that awaited me obligingly. I was going to fall and bury myself in it. I was going to fall from a great height and I would be alone during my fall, mortally alone. Luc was watching me. He made a gesture of pretending to be afraid and I let myself go. The sea fluttered up towards me; when I hit the surface I hurt myself. I got back to the shore and came and collapsed against Luc, showering him with water. Then I laid my head on his dry back and kissed his shoulder.

‘Are you mad, or just very sporty?’ said Luc.

‘I’m mad.’

‘That’s what I thought, and I was proud of you. When I said to myself that you were diving from so high up to come back to me, I was very happy.’

‘Are you happy? I am happy. At least I must be, because I am not asking myself whether I am or not. It’s a well-known maxim, isn’t it?’

I was speaking without looking at him directly because he was lying on his stomach and I could only see the back of his neck. It was firm and tanned.

‘I’m going to return you to Françoise in good shape,’ I said jokingly.

‘You cynic!’

‘You are much less cynical than we are. Women are very cynical. You are just a little boy compared to Françoise and me.’

‘You’re pretentious!’

‘You are much more pretentious than us. Women who are pretentious immediately look ridiculous. But it gives men a false appearance of manliness which they cultivate in order to …’

‘Have you nearly finished with your maxims? Talk to me about the weather. It’s the only subject permitted on holiday.’

‘It’s a lovely day,’ I said. ‘It’s a really lovely day …’

And, turning over on my back, I went to sleep.

When I woke up, the sky was overcast, the beach was deserted and I felt exhausted, with a dry mouth. Luc was sitting next to me on the sand, dressed again. He was smoking and looking out to sea. I watched him for a moment without letting him know I was awake; for the first time I was watching him with a purely objective curiosity: ‘What can this man be thinking about?’ What can any human being think about on an empty beach, faced with an empty sea, beside someone who is asleep? I imagined him to be so crushed by these three absences, and so alone, that I stretched my hand out towards him and touched his arm. He wasn’t even startled. He was never startled, he was rarely astonished by anything and even more rarely did he utter expressions of surprise.

‘Are you awake?’ he said idly. And he stretched regretfully. ‘It’s four o’clock.’

‘Four o’clock!’ I sat up. ‘Have I been asleep for four hours?’

‘Don’t panic,’ said Luc. ‘We have nothing to do.’

Those words sounded ominous to me. It was true that there was nothing for us to do together, we had no work nor any friends in common.

‘Do you regret that?’ I asked.

He turned to me, smiling.

‘I love it. Put on your sweater, darling, you are going to be cold. We’ll go and have tea at the hotel.’

La Croisette was sinister and sunless and its old palm trees were swaying slightly in a listless wind. The hotel slumbered. We had tea sent up. I had a hot bath and came back to lie alongside Luc, who was reading on the bed, from time to time flicking the ash from his cigarette. We had closed the shutters because the sky was so gloomy, so there wasn’t much light in the room and it was warm. I was lying on my back, with my hands clasped on my stomach, like a corpse or a fat man. I closed my eyes. Only the sound of Luc turning the pages interrupted the far-off breaking of the waves.

I said to myself: ‘There. I’m near Luc, I’m beside him, I have only got to stretch my hand out to touch him. I know his body, his voice and the way he sleeps. He’s reading, I’m getting a little bored, it’s not unpleasant. We’ll presently go for dinner, then we’ll go to bed together and in three days’ time we’ll part. Things will probably never again be as they are just now. But this moment is here, it’s ours; I don’t know whether it’s love or just an understanding we have; that’s not important. We are each of us alone. He doesn’t know that I’m thinking about him; he’s reading. But we are together, and next to me I have whatever warmth he may feel for me and his indifference too. In six months, when we have gone our separate ways, it won’t be the memory of this moment that will come back to me, but other foolish, involuntary memories. And yet it’s probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.’ I reached out and picked up The Fenouillard Family,24 which Luc often reproached me for not having read, and I began to laugh, so that Luc wanted to join in, and we pored over the same page, cheek to cheek and, before long, mouth to mouth, with the book eventually falling to the floor, while pleasure cascaded over us and night descended over the rest of the world.

Eventually the day of our departure arrived. Out of a hypocrisy largely based on fear – fear on his part that I would become emotional and fear on my part that, conscious of how he felt, I would indeed end up becoming emotional – we had not alluded to it the previous day, during what was our last evening. But in the night I had woken up several times, seized by a kind of panic, and I had sought Luc out with my forehead and my hand, to make sure that our sweet togetherness in shared sleep was still there. And every time, as if he had been on the look-out for those fears and had been sleeping very lightly, he had taken me in his arms, held the back of my neck firmly in his hand and murmured: ‘There, there,’ in a strange voice, as if he were comforting an animal. It was a confused night full of whisperings, heavy with the scent of the mimosa that we would be leaving behind, and with half-sleep and balminess. Then morning had come, and breakfast, and Luc had done his packing. I did mine at the same time, while talking to him about the route and the restaurants along it and so on. I was rather irritated by my artificially calm and courageous tone, for I didn’t feel courageous and I didn’t see why I should. I felt nothing, except perhaps vaguely helpless. For once we were putting on an act for each other, but I thought it safer to stick to it, for things could well end up with my having to suffer before parting from him. It was best to be restrained in manner and in one’s actions and appearance.

‘Well, that’s us ready,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll ring for the luggage to be collected.’

I became fully alert again.

‘Let’s lean over the balcony one last time,’ I said melodramatically.

He looked at me anxiously, then, seeing my expression, began to laugh.

‘You are a hard little thing, a real cynic. I like you.’

He had taken me in his arms in the middle of the room and was shaking me gently.

‘You know, it’s a rare thing to be able to say to someone: “I like you” after a fortnight of cohabiting with them.’

‘It wasn’t cohabitation,’ I laughingly protested, ‘it was a honeymoon.’

‘All the more reason!’ he said, detaching himself from me. That was the moment when I really had the impression that he was leaving me and I felt the desire to catch him by the lapel of his jacket. It was very fleeting and very unpleasant.

The return journey went well. I drove a bit. Luc said that it would be night-time when we got to Paris, that he would phone me the next day and that we would have dinner soon with Françoise, who would be back from the country, where she had been spending that fortnight with her mother. It all seemed rather worrying to me, but Luc advised me simply not to mention our trip: he would sort things out with her. I could easily enough see myself spending the autumn in their midst, meeting Luc occasionally to kiss him on the mouth and to sleep with him. I had never envisaged his leaving Françoise, firstly because he had told me that he wouldn’t and then because it didn’t seem possible that he would do that to Françoise. If he had offered to do so, I would probably not at that time have felt able to accept his offer.

He told me he had a lot of work to catch up with but that it didn’t interest him greatly. As for me, it was a new year of study, which meant having to go deeper into things that had already bored me enough the previous year. In a word, we were going back to Paris in a dejected frame of mind, but I was happy enough with that, because it was the same sense of dejection for each of us, it was the same problem and consequently we each had the same need to cling to the other, to that person who was other, yet the same.

We got to Paris very late at night. At the Porte d’Italie^25 I glanced at Luc, who seemed rather weary, and it struck me that we had come through our little escapade rather well, that we were really adult and sensible and civilized; and then suddenly, with something like rage, I felt that I had been incredibly humiliated.

PART THREE

One

I had never had to rediscover Paris. When I had first discovered it, it had been once and for all. But I was astonished now by its charm and the particular kind of pleasure I found in walking in its streets, still with a summer holiday feel about them. For three days, that took my mind off the emptiness and the impression of meaninglessness that Luc’s absence had left me with. At night I looked to see if he was there and reached out for him with my hand, and each time his absence seemed senseless and unnatural to me. Our fortnight together was already taking on a certain shape in my memory and was striking a note that was simultaneously harsh and resonant. Strangely enough, I had not been left with a sense of failure but, quite the contrary, one of achievement. However, it was a type of achievement that I could well see would make any similar endeavour difficult, if not extremely painful.

Bertrand would be returning soon. What would I say to him? Bertrand was going to try to get me back. Why should I take up with him again and, above all, how could I tolerate someone else’s body or someone else’s breath when they were not Luc’s?

Luc did not phone me, not the next day nor the day after that. I put this down to complications with Françoise and that made me feel both important and ashamed. I walked a lot, reflecting in a detached way and with only a very vague interest on the year ahead. Perhaps I would find something that it would make more sense for me to study than law, since Luc was supposed to be introducing me to one of his friends who was a newspaper editor. Even though my inertia, up to then, had prompted me to seek emotional forms of compensation for what had happened, it was now making me think of compensation in career terms.

After two days of waiting, I could no longer resist the desire to see Luc. Not daring to phone him, I sent him a little note that was both casual and friendly, asking him to ring me, which he did the next day. He had gone to the country to fetch Françoise and had not been able to phone me sooner. I thought his voice sounded strained. It occurred to me that he was missing me and, for an instant, while he was actually telling me so on the phone, I had a vision of the café where we would meet and where he would take me in his arms and tell me that he could not live without me and that those two days had been an absurdity. All that I would have to do would be to reply: ‘Neither can I,’ which was not too much of a lie, and then let him decide further. But although he did in fact arrange to meet me in a café, it was just to assure me that Françoise was fine, that she wasn’t asking any questions and that he was swamped with work. He said: ‘You are beautiful,’ and kissed the palm of my hand.

I found him changed – he had started wearing his dark suits again – changed but still desirable. I looked at that sharp, tired face of his. It seemed strange that he no longer belonged to me. I was already beginning to think that I had not really been able to gain any ‘benefit’ – and the word was repugnant to me – from my stay with him. I talked to him cheerfully and he replied in the same way, but there was nothing natural in the manner of either of us. Perhaps it was because we were surprised that it was so easy to live with someone for a fortnight, surprised that it had gone so well and surprised that no greater harm had been done. Only, when he stood up, I felt a burst of indignation and I felt like saying: ‘Where are you going? You’re not going to leave me on my own, are you?’ He departed, and I was left on my own. I had nothing much to do. I thought: ‘This is all quite comical,’ and shrugged my shoulders. I walked around for an hour and went into one or two cafés, hoping to meet the others, but no one was back yet. I had always the possibility of going to spend a fortnight on the Yonne. But, as I was due to have dinner with Luc and Françoise in two days’ time, I decided to wait until after that before setting off.

I spent those two days at the cinema or lying on my bed, sleeping and reading. My room seemed alien to me. Finally, on the evening of the dinner, I dressed with care and went to their flat. I had a moment of fear as I rang the bell, but Françoise came to open the door to me and I was immediately reassured by her smile. I realized, as Luc had said, that she could never look ridiculous or play a role that was incompatible with her exceptional kindness and dignity. She had never been duped and most likely never would be.

It was a strange meal. We were all three of us together and it worked very well, as previously. Quite simply, though, we had drunk a lot before sitting down at the table. Françoise appeared to know nothing, though perhaps she did look at me more attentively than usual. From time to time Luc looked into my eyes when speaking to me and I made it a point of honour to reply light-heartedly and in a natural way. The conversation got round to Bertrand, who was due back the following week.

‘I won’t be here,’ I said.

‘Where will you be?’ asked Luc.

‘I’m probably going to spend a few days with my parents.’

‘When will you be back?’

It was Françoise who asked that question.

‘In a fortnight.’

‘Dominique, I’m going to call you tu,’26 she exclaimed suddenly. ‘I find it tiresome to call you vous.’

‘Let’s all use tu,’ said Luc with a little laugh, as he headed for the record player. My eyes followed him and, turning back to Françoise, I saw that she was watching me. I returned her gaze, feeling rather anxious, and especially anxious not to appear to shy away from her. She laid her hand on mine for a moment, with a sad little smile that upset me.

Calling me vous but then correcting herself, she said: ‘You’ll send me a postcard, won’t you, Dominique? You haven’t told me how your mother was.’

‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘She …’

I stopped short because Luc had put on the tune they’d been playing on the Côte d’Azur and everything had suddenly come flooding back to me. He had not turned round. For a moment I found my thoughts in a whirl, what with the couple, the music, Françoise’s seeming to turn a blind eye, Luc’s similarly feigned sentimentality – in a word, the whole combination. I felt a powerful urge to run from the place.

‘I really like that tune,’ said Luc placidly.

He sat down and I realized that he had been thinking of nothing in particular, not even of our acerbic conversation about records as memories. The tune must simply have come back to him once or twice and he had bought the record to get it out of his system.

‘I like it very much too,’ I said.

He looked up in my direction, remembered and smiled at me. He smiled with such obvious tenderness that I lowered my eyes. But Françoise was lighting a cigarette. I was at a loss. You couldn’t even have said that there was a pretence going on, for it seemed to me that the situation would have needed only to be mentioned for each of us calmly and objectively to have given our opinion of it, as if we were not personally implicated.

‘Are we going to see this play or not?’ said Luc.

He turned to me to explain.

‘We’ve had an invitation to a new play. We could all three of us go …’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

I almost added, with an incipient giggle: ‘Considering everything else!’

Françoise took me into her bedroom to try on one of her coats, which was more stylish than mine. She got me to put on one or two, made me turn round, stood the collars up. At one moment, while doing so, she held my face between the two lapels of the collar and I thought, stifling the same laughter: ‘I’m at her mercy. Perhaps she is going to suffocate me or bite me.’ But she merely smiled.

‘You’re drowning a bit in this.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, not thinking of the coat.

‘I really must see you when you come back.’

‘That’s it,’ I thought. ‘Is she going to ask me to stop seeing Luc? Will I be able to?’ And the answer came to me straight away: ‘No. I couldn’t do it.’

‘Because I’ve decided to take you in hand and dress you suitably and introduce you to things that are more fun than those students and libraries.’

‘Oh, goodness,’ I thought, ‘this is not the moment, it’s not the moment to be saying that to me.’

‘Should I not?’ she went on, in response to my silence. ‘I rather felt I had a daughter in you.’ (She laughed as she said that, but in a kindly way.) ‘If that daughter is going to be rebellious and purely interested in intellectual things …’

‘You are too kind,’ I said, stressing the word ‘too’. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Just let yourself be done to,’ she said, laughing again.

‘I’ve really landed myself in it,’ I thought. ‘But if Françoise is fond of me and if she really wants to see me, I shall get to see Luc more often. Perhaps I’ll tell her. Perhaps it’s really all the same to her, after ten years of marriage.’

‘Why are you so fond of me?’ I asked.

‘You have the same nature as Luc. You have both rather unhappy natures and your fate is to be consoled by creatures from Venus like me. There’s no escape for you …’

Mentally I threw my up my hands in horror. Then we went to the theatre. Luc laughed and talked. Françoise explained to me who the various people were, who they were with and so on. Afterwards they dropped me back at my residence and Luc kissed the palm of my hand in a quite natural way. I went in feeling rather dazed, fell asleep and the next morning caught the train to the Yonne.

Two

But the Yonne was grey and the tedium was unbearable. It wasn’t so much tedium as the tediousness of missing someone. I left after a week. As I was leaving, my mother suddenly came to and asked me if I was happy. I assured her that I was, that I really liked studying law, that I was working hard and that I had some good friends. Reassured, she sank back into her melancholy. Not for one moment did I have any desire to confide in her, which is certainly what would have happened the year before. In any case, what would I have told her? I was definitely growing up.

At the residence I found a note from Bertrand asking me to phone him as soon as I got back. There was no doubt at all that he was looking for an explanation from me – for I didn’t believe much in Catherine’s discretion – but I did owe him that. So I phoned him and we arranged to meet. In the meantime I went to register at the university restaurant.27

At six o’clock I met Bertrand in the café in Rue Saint-Jacques and it was as if nothing had happened and everything was starting up again from where we had left off. But as soon as he stood up and kissed me gravely on the cheek, I was brought back to reality. Like a coward, I tried to adopt a light, irresponsible manner.

‘You’ve got better-looking,’ I said, with genuine sincerity and, deep down, with a cynical little thought: ‘A pity.’

‘So have you,’ he said curtly. ‘I wanted you to know: Catherine has told me everything.’

‘What’s everything?’

‘About your trip to the Côte d’Azur. I made one or two enquiries that led me to the conclusion that it was with Luc. That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. (I was impressed. Instead of looking furious, he just seemed calm and rather sad.)

‘Well, here’s how it is: I’m not the kind of guy who would be happy to share. I still love you; I love you enough to discount what has happened, but not enough to wallow in jealousy and to suffer because of you, as I did in the spring. You’ll just have to choose.’

He had said it all in one breath.

‘Choose what?’ I was annoyed. Just as Luc had foreseen, I hadn’t thought of Bertrand as being part of the problem.

‘Either you stop seeing Luc and we carry on as before, or you see him and we just stay good friends. That’s all.’

‘Of course, of course.’

I could think of absolutely nothing to say. He seemed more mature and serious; I almost admired him. But he no longer meant anything to me, he meant nothing at all. I laid my hand on his hand.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘but I can’t do it.’

He remained silent for a moment, looking out of the window.

‘It’s a bit hard to take,’ he said.

‘I don’t like making you suffer,’ I went on, and I felt utterly miserable.

‘That’s not the most difficult part,’ he said, as if he were talking to himself. ‘You’ll see. Once the decision has been made, it’s fine. The difficulty is when one clings on.’

He turned to me abruptly.

‘Do you love him?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, irritated. ‘There’s no question of it. We get on very well together, that’s all.’

‘If you ever have any problem, I’m here,’ he said. ‘And I do think you will have. You’ll see: there’s nothing to Luc, he’s just a very intelligent person with a sad streak. That’s all.’

I thought with a surge of joy of Luc’s tenderness and his laughter.

‘Believe me. In any case,’ he added with a kind of fervour, ‘I’ll always be there for you, you know that, Dominique. I’ve been very happy with you.’

We were both on the verge of tears, he because it was over and because, all the same, he must have hoped it would not be so, and I because it seemed as if I were losing my natural protector in order to throw myself into some bewildering adventure. I stood up and kissed him lightly.

‘Goodbye, Bertrand. Forgive me.’

‘Just go,’ he said gently.

I left feeling completely demoralized. The new academic year was not off to a good start …

Catherine was waiting for me in my room, sitting on the bed looking tragic. She got up when I came in and held out her hand. I shook it without enthusiasm, and sat down.

‘Dominique, I wanted to apologize. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything to Bertrand. What do you think?’

I had to admire her for asking the question.

‘It doesn’t really matter. It would perhaps have been better if I had told him myself, but it doesn’t really matter.’

‘Good,’ she said, obviously relieved.

She sat down on the bed again, looking pleased and excited.

‘So now, tell me all about it.’

I was speechless, then I burst out laughing.

‘Honestly! You’re priceless, Catherine. First you dispose of the Bertrand issue – right, that’s that done! – and once that problem is out of the way, then on to some juicy details!’

‘Don’t tease me,’ she said, acting the little girl. ‘Tell me everything.’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I answered drily. ‘I spent a fortnight on the Côte d’Azur with someone I liked. For various reasons, the story ends there.’

‘Is he married?’ she asked shrewdly.

‘No, he’s a deaf-mute. Now I have to unpack my case.’

‘I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me everything,’ she said.

‘The worst of it is, that’s probably true,’ I thought as I opened my wardrobe. ‘One day when I’m feeling down in the dumps …’

‘Now, about me,’ she continued, as if she were going to announce some great revelation, ‘I’m in love.’

‘Which one is it this time?’ I said. ‘Oh, the latest one, of course.’

‘If you’re not interested …’

But she went on anyway. I began putting my things away, feeling cross. ‘Why have I such idiotic girlfriends?’ I wondered. ‘Luc wouldn’t stand for her. But what has Luc got to do with it? It’s my life, after all.’

‘… So, to cut a long story short,’ she was concluding, ‘I love him.’

‘What do you mean by “love”?’ I asked curiously.

‘I don’t know. Love means thinking about someone, going out with him, preferring him to other people. Isn’t that it?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

I had finished unpacking. I sat down on the bed, disheartened. Catherine came over all sympathetic.

‘Dominique, dear, you’re crazy. You’re not thinking straight. Come out with us this evening. I’ll be with Jean-Louis, of course, and one of his friends, a very intelligent guy who’s interested in literature. It’ll take your mind off things.’

As it happened, I didn’t want to phone Luc until the next day. And then, I was tired. Life seemed to me to be like a dismal vortex with a single stable element glimpsed occasionally at its centre, Luc. He was the only one who could understand or help me. I needed him.

Yes, I needed him. I couldn’t require anything of him but, even so, he was in a sense responsible for me. Above all I mustn’t let him know it. After all, conventions are conventions, even if they make things difficult for people.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and see your Jean-Bernard and his intelligent friend. I don’t care about intelligence, Catherine. No, that’s not true, but I only like intelligent people who have a sad streak. Those who can cope with things get on my nerves.’

‘It’s Jean-Louis,’ she protested, ‘not Jean-Bernard. And cope with what?’

‘With that,’ I said theatrically, pointing up through the window to a low sky, all grey and pink, and sweetly, damnably sad.

‘There’s something not right about you,’ said Catherine in a worried voice, and she took my arm as we went down the stairs, watching the steps for me. When all was said and done, I liked her a lot.

The said Jean-Louis was handsome; his good looks had a sort of loucheness about them that was not disagreeable. However, the friend, Alain, was much more shrewd and amusing and had in particular the kind of acerbic intelligence and the insincerity and ability always to be changing his stance that Bertrand did not possess. We weren’t long in leaving Catherine and her suitor, who in any case were displaying their passion with an ardour that was out of place, at the very least in a café, and Alain took me back to my residence, talking about Stendhal^28 and literature, which interested me for the first time in two years. He was neither ugly nor good-looking, just nothing special. I was happy enough to agree to lunch with him a couple of days from then, while praying that it would not turn out to be Luc’s free day. Everything was already converging on Luc, everything depended on him and was taking its course whether I liked it or not.

Three

In short, I loved Luc and I quickly came to that conclusion on the first night I spent with him again. It was in a hotel facing the Seine; he was lying on his back after we had made love and was talking to me with his eyes closed. He said: ‘Kiss me,’ and I raised myself up on one elbow to kiss him. But as I bent over him I was filled with a kind of malaise and an unyielding conviction that this face and this man were the only things that counted for me, and that the unbearable pleasure and sense of expectation that kept me hovering over that mouth were indeed the pleasure and the expectation of love. And that I loved him. And I stretched out against his shoulder, without kissing him and with a little moan of fear.

‘You’re sleepy,’ he said, putting his hand on my back and laughing a bit. ‘You’re like a little animal; after love you either go to sleep or you’re thirsty.’

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that I really like you.’

‘And I you,’ he said, and he tapped my shoulder. ‘As soon as we don’t see each other for three days you start calling me vous. Why?’

‘Because I respect you,’ I said. ‘I respect you and I love you.’

We both laughed.

‘No, but seriously,’ I went on enthusiastically, as if that brilliant thought had just come into my head, ‘what would you do if I loved you for real?’

‘But you do love me for real,’ he said, with his eyes closed again.

‘I mean, if I couldn’t do without you, if I wanted you to myself all the time …’

‘I would be very worried,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t even be flattered.’

‘And what would you say to me?’

‘I would say: “Dominique, eh … Dominique, forgive me.”’

I gave a sigh of relief. So at least he wouldn’t have had the dreadful reaction of a cautious, conscientious man, and said: ‘I told you so.’

‘I forgive you in advance,’ I said.

‘Pass me a cigarette,’ he said lazily. ‘They’re on your side.’

We smoked in silence. I was saying to myself: ‘So there we are, I love him. This love of mine probably amounts to nothing more than the thought: “I love him.” That’s all it is, but outside of “that”, there is no salvation.’29

In fact there had only been ‘that’ the whole week: the telephone call from Luc asking: ‘Will you be free on the night of the fifteenth?’, those words that had come back to me every three or four hours, just as he had uttered them, coolly, but each time causing a diffuse weight of emotion within me to teeter between happiness and a sense of suffocation. And now I was beside him and time was passing, very slowly and in a featureless blur.

‘I’m going to have to go,’ he said. ‘It’s a quarter to five! It’s late.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘Is Françoise at home?’

‘I told her I was going out with some Belgians to Montmartre. But the cabarets will be closing now.’

‘What will she say? Five in the morning is late, even for Belgians.’

He was speaking with closed eyes.

‘I’ll get home and I’ll say, “Oh, those Belgians!” and I’ll stretch. She’ll turn over and say: “There are some liver salts in the bathroom,” and she’ll go back to sleep. That’s all.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And tomorrow you’ll have to give a brief, weary account of the cabarets, and Belgian morals, and …’

‘Oh, just a list … I don’t like lying and, well, even more, I don’t have time to lie.’

‘What do you have time for?’ I said.

‘Nothing. I have neither time nor strength nor inclination. If I had been capable of anything whatsoever, I would have loved you.’

‘What would that have changed?’

‘Nothing, it would have changed nothing for us. At least, I don’t think so. I would simply have been unhappy because of you, whereas now I’m quite content.’

I wondered if this was an admonishment for what I had said earlier, but he placed his hand on my head as if performing a solemn act:

‘I can say anything to you. I really like that. I couldn’t say to Françoise that I don’t really love her or that there is no marvellous, honest basis to our relationship. The basis of everything is my fatigue and boredom. That’s a solid basis, mind you, a superb one. You can build fine, lasting unions on such things: loneliness, boredom. Those things at least don’t change.’

I raised my head from his shoulder:

‘That’s …’

Filled with an energetic surge of protest, I was going to add ‘rubbish’, but I kept quiet.

‘It’s what? So now and then your youthfulness asserts itself, does it?’

He began to laugh, affectionately.

‘My poor pussycat, you are so young and defenceless. Yet, fortunately, so disarming. That reassures me.’

He took me back to the residence. I was to have lunch next day with Françoise and him and a friend of theirs. I kissed him goodbye through the car window. His features were drawn and he looked old, which I found rather distressing, and for a moment it made me love him more.

Four

I woke up the next day full of energy. Lack of sleep always agreed with me. I got up, went over to the window, breathed in the air of Paris and lit a cigarette without really wanting one. Then I went back to bed, though not without first having looked at myself in the mirror and noting that I had dark rings under my eyes and an interesting expression. Anyway, I was looking decent enough. I decided to ask the landlady if she would turn the heating on in the rooms the following day, for, really, it was getting beyond a joke.

‘It’s freezing cold here,’ I said out loud, and my voice sounded hoarse and funny.

‘My dear Dominique,’ I added, ‘you are passionately in love. What you must do is treat it, by going for walks, by doing some serious reading, or you could use young men to treat it, or perhaps some light work. That would do it.’

I couldn’t help feeling quite warm towards myself. I did, after all, have a sense of humour, and a damn good one at that! I felt fine. Wasn’t I just made for passion? What’s more, I was going to lunch with my heart’s desire. So I set off for Françoise and Luc’s with this somewhat fragile sense of detachment fortifying me on my pilgrimage, a sense of detachment which I owed to my physical euphoria, whose causes I knew only too well. I jumped on the bus just as it was moving off and the bus conductor, on the pretext of helping me, took the opportunity to put his arm round my waist. I showed him my ticket and we smiled conspiratorially at each other, he a ladies’ man and myself a woman who was used to ladies’ men. I stayed on the platform, leaning against the rail, as the bus jolted along, crunching over the cobblestones. With lack of sleep creating a tautness between my jaw and my solar plexus, I was feeling really great.

At Françoise’s, their friend, the one I didn’t know, had already arrived, quite a fat, red-faced, cold man. Luc wasn’t there because, as Françoise explained, he had spent the night with Belgian clients and hadn’t got up till ten. Those Belgians were a real bore with their wanting to go to Montmartre. I noticed the fat man looking at me and I felt myself blush.

Luc came in, looking tired.

‘Why, hello, Pierre,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

‘Weren’t you expecting me?’

There was something aggressive about him. Perhaps it was simply due to the fact that Luc had been surprised, not by my presence, but by his.

‘Yes, I was, old chap, I was,’ said Luc with a weary little smile. ‘Is there nothing to drink round here? What’s that delectable-looking yellow stuff in your glass, Dominique?’

‘It’s a pale whisky,’ I replied. ‘Don’t you even recognize it any more?’

‘No, I don’t,’ he said, and he sat down on an armchair as you would sit down in a railway station, on the edge of the seat. Then he glanced round at us again, the way you would glance at people in a station – in an absent-minded, indifferent way. He had a childish, obstinate look about him. Françoise began to laugh.

‘My poor Luc, you look almost as rough as Dominique does. And incidentally, my dear child, I’m going to call a halt to all this. I’m going to tell Bertrand that he …’

She told us what she would say to Bertrand. I had not looked at Luc. There had never been any conspiracy between us as far as Françoise was concerned, thank goodness. It was even quite funny. We spoke of her to each other as if we had been talking about a very dear child who was going to cause us a few headaches.

‘That kind of fun and games does nobody any favours,’ said the aforementioned Pierre. All of a sudden I realized that, probably because of Cannes, he knew about us. That explained his look of contempt at the beginning, and his coldness and those semi-allusions. I suddenly remembered that we had run into him there and that Luc had told me that he, Pierre, was a little in love with Françoise. He must have been shocked and was perhaps inclined to gossip, along the same lines as Catherine: not wanting to conceal anything from friends, wanting to be helpful, not wanting to take advantage, and so on. And if Françoise were to find out, and then if she were to look on me with contempt or anger or any of those feelings that were so foreign to her and, it seemed to me, so ill-deserved by me, what would I do?

‘Let’s go for lunch,’ said Françoise. ‘I’m ravenous.’

We set off on foot for a nearby restaurant. Françoise took my arm and the two men followed.

‘It’s very mild,’ she said. ‘I adore autumn.’

And I don’t know why, but those words triggered in me the memory of the hotel room in Cannes and Luc at the window saying: ‘What you need is a bath and a good glass of Scotch and then everything will be all right.’ That had been on the first day and I hadn’t been very happy. There was a fortnight to come, a whole fortnight with Luc, day and night. And that was what I most desired just now and it would probably never happen again. If only I had known … But if I had known, it would have made no difference. There was a sentence from Proust about it: ‘It is very rare for happiness to alight exactly on the desire that had summoned it.’30 Last night that rare thing had occurred: when I had come close to Luc’s face, even though it was something I had desired all week, the coincidence of desire and fulfilment had made me feel almost sick. Perhaps it was due simply to the sudden disappearance of the void that my life generally consisted of, a void which was to do with the feeling that my life and I were not in sync. Whereas, on the contrary, at that moment I had had the impression that I was at last in sync with my life and that it was a culmination for me.

‘Françoise,’ Pierre called out from behind us.

We turned round and swapped partners. I found myself in front, beside Luc, walking in step with him along the avenue with its russet tints, and we must have had the same thought, for he shot me a questioning, almost brutal glance.

‘Well, there we are,’ I said.

He shrugged his shoulders sadly; it was an imperceptible movement that somehow gave his expression a lift.

He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it as he walked and handed it to me. Whenever anything bothered him, he had this trick up his sleeve. Yet he was a man completely devoid of any nervous mannerisms.

‘That guy knows about us,’ he said.

He said it thoughtfully, with no apparent apprehension.

‘Is that serious?’

‘It won’t take him long to seize the opportunity of consoling Françoise. I should say, though, that consolation in this case won’t necessarily lead to very much.’

For a moment I admired his male self-confidence.

‘He’s a harmless moron,’ he said. ‘He’s a friend of Françoise’s from university. Do you get the picture?’

I got the picture.

He added: ‘It troubles me insofar as it will cause Françoise to be hurt. The fact that it’s you …’

‘Obviously,’ I said.

‘It would trouble me on your account too if Françoise were to hold it very much against you. She can do you a lot of good, can Françoise. She’s very reliable as a friend.’

‘I haven’t any reliable friends,’ I said sadly. ‘I don’t have anything that’s reliable.’

‘Are you unhappy?’ he asked, taking my hand.

I was touched for a moment by this gesture and by the apparent risk it made him run, then I was filled with sadness. Here he was, holding my hand, and we were walking along together with Françoise looking on; but as far as she was concerned it was Luc, the tired man, who was holding my hand. She no doubt thought that he wouldn’t have done that had he had a bad conscience about me. No, he wasn’t running much of a risk. And he was indifferent to risk. I squeezed his hand: it was him, of course, just him. I never ceased to be amazed that the sheer fact of his existence was enough to fill my waking moments.

‘I’m not unhappy,’ I replied. ‘I’m not anything.’

I was lying. I would have liked to tell him that I was lying and that the truth was that I needed him, yet when I was with him, all that seemed unreal. There was nothing, there had been nothing but a pleasant fortnight, and fancies and regrets. Why was I so heartbroken? ‘Sad mystery of love,’ I thought derisively. In fact I was annoyed with myself, for I knew that I was strong enough, free enough, gifted enough to be happy in love.

Lunch lasted a long time. Looking at Luc upset me. He was handsome and intelligent and weary. I didn’t want to part from him. I made vague plans for the winter. When he left me he told me that he would phone. Françoise added that she would phone too, about taking me to see someone or other.

Neither of them rang me. Ten days went by. The very name Luc was becoming burdensome to me. Finally he phoned to say that Françoise knew everything and that he would get in touch with me as soon as he could, but right now he was up to his eyes in work. His voice was gentle. I stood stock-still in my room, not really understanding. I was due to have dinner with Alain, but he could do nothing for me. I felt destroyed.

I saw Luc twice in the following two weeks, once in the bar on the Quai Voltaire and once in a hotel room where we found nothing to say to each other, either before or after. Everything tasted of ash. It’s always curious to see the extent to which romantic stereotypes are corroborated in real life. It dawned on me that I was definitely not cut out to be the cheerful little accomplice of a married man. I loved him. I should have thought of that, or at least thought about what love might be like, this obsession, this painful lack of satisfaction. I tried to laugh. He didn’t respond. He spoke to me gently and tenderly, as if he were going to die … Françoise had been very hurt.

He asked me what I was doing with myself. I replied that I was working, I was reading. In fact, whenever I read or went to the cinema, it was only with the thought that I would be able to talk to him about the particular book, or about the film whose director he had told me he knew. I was desperately seeking for bonds between us, bonds other than that rather sordid hurt we had inflicted on Françoise. There weren’t any other bonds, yet it never occurred to us to feel remorse. Nor could I say to him: ‘Remember how it was.’ That would have been cheating and it would have scared him off. I couldn’t tell him that I saw, or thought I saw, his car everywhere in the street, or that I repeatedly started to dial his telephone number without completing it, or that I feverishly questioned my landlady whenever I came in, or that everything led back to him and that I utterly resented myself for it. I was entitled to nothing. But all the same, for me at that moment, ‘nothing’ amounted to his face, his hands, his tender voice, all that unbearable past … I was losing weight.

Alain was kind, and one day I told him everything. We used to walk for miles and he would discuss my passion as if he were discussing something from literature, which allowed me to take a step back and talk about it myself.

‘But you know perfectly well that all this will come to an end,’ he would say. ‘You know that in six months or a year you’ll be making a joke of it.’

‘I don’t want to,’ I would say. ‘It’s not only myself I’m arguing for, it’s everything we’ve been together. It’s Cannes and our laughter and the harmony there was between us.’

‘But that doesn’t stop you from knowing that one day it’ll no longer matter.’

‘I know that very well, but I don’t feel it. And I don’t care. It’s what’s here and now that matters, that’s all there is.’

We walked and walked. He would come back with me in the evening as far as the residence and would shake my hand gravely and when I went in I would ask the landlady if Mr Luc H. had phoned. She would say ‘No’ and smile. I would lie down on my bed and think about Cannes.

I would say to myself: ‘Luc doesn’t love me,’ and it gave me a dull little pain in the region of my heart. I would repeat it again and the pain would return, sometimes just as intensely. Then it seemed to me that I had moved on a bit: the very fact that this little pain was at my disposal, ready to respond to my call, armed to the teeth, whenever I summoned it, meant that it was mine to do with as I pleased. I would say: ‘Luc doesn’t love me,’ and this amazing thing would happen. But even if I had the pain more or less at my beck and call, I couldn’t prevent it from resurfacing unexpectedly during a class or at lunch, taking me by surprise and causing me distress. There were other things I couldn’t prevent either: the daily, perfectly understandable sense of boredom, a larva-like existence in the rain, my fatigue in the mornings, uninspiring classes, conversations. I was suffering. I told myself that I was suffering, I said so with curiosity, with irony, any way at all, rather than face up to the woeful evidence of an unhappy love affair.

What was bound to happen did happen. I saw Luc again one evening. We went for a drive in his car to the Bois.31 He told me he had to go to America for a month. I said that was interesting. Then the truth hit me: a month! I reached for a cigarette.

‘When I get back, you’ll have forgotten me,’ he said.

‘Why would I?’ I asked.

‘My poor darling, it would be better for you that way, so much better …’ And he stopped the car.

I looked at him. He looked strained and very sad. That showed he knew. He knew everything. He was no longer just a man I had to humour, he was also a friend. All at once I clung to him. I laid my cheek on his cheek. I watched the shadows of the trees and heard my voice saying the most incredible things:

‘Luc, I can’t go on like this. You mustn’t leave me. I can’t live without you. You’ve got to stay. I’m alone, I’m so alone. It’s unbearable.’

I listened in surprise to my own voice. It was a young, frank, beseeching voice. I was telling myself the very things that Luc might have said: ‘Come on now, you’ll get over it, calm down.’ But I went on talking and Luc went on being silent.

Eventually, as if to staunch that flow of words, he took my head in his hands and kissed me gently on the mouth.

‘My poor darling,’ he kept saying, ‘my poor sweetheart.’

He sounded distraught. I thought: ‘This is it,’ and, simultaneously: ‘I’m greatly to be pitied.’ I began to weep on his jacket. Time was passing, he would soon be taking me back to the residence, exhausted. I would go along with it and afterwards he wouldn’t be there any more. I felt a surge of revolt.

‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’

I clung on to him. I wished I could be him, that I could simply disappear.

‘I’ll phone you. I’ll see you again before I leave,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, Dominique, forgive me. I’ve been very happy with you. You’ll get over it, you know. We get over everything. I would give anything to …’

He gestured helplessly.

‘To love me?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

His cheek was soft, and warm with my tears. I would not be seeing him for a month and he didn’t love me. It was a strange thing, despair. Strange, in that you come through it. He drove me back to the residence. I had stopped crying, I was drained. He rang me the next day and the day after that. On the day of his departure I had flu. He came up for a moment to see me. Alain was there, just calling in, and Luc kissed me on the cheek. He said he would write.

Five

Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night with a dry mouth, and even before I had fully emerged from my slumber, something would whisper to me to go back to sleep again, to plunge back into the warmth and unconsciousness that provided my only respite. But I was already saying to myself: ‘It’s just that I’m thirsty; all I have to do is get up, walk over to the washbasin, have a drink of water and go back to sleep.’ But when I was on my feet and caught sight of myself in the mirror by the dim light coming in from the streetlamp, and when the tepid water trickled down my throat, then despair took hold of me and I went back to bed shivering, with a real impression of physical pain. Once I was lying on my stomach with my head in my arms, I would crush my body against the bed as if my love for Luc had been a warm, mortal animal that I could have crushed just like that, in revolt, between my skin and the sheet. And then battle would commence. My memory and my imagination were two fierce enemies. I remembered Luc’s face and Cannes, what had been and what might have been. And my body, so much in need of sleep, was in an endless state of revolt, as was my intelligence, which was sickened by it all. I would sit up and reckon it all out: ‘I am me, Dominique. I love Luc, who doesn’t love me. My love is unreciprocated, so sadness is inevitable. Break it off!’ What’s more, I imagined ways of breaking it off for good, very nobly sending Luc an elegantly expressed letter explaining that it was over between us. But any such letter only interested me insofar as its elegance and nobility might bring Luc back to me. And no sooner did I see myself parted from him by this cruel means than I was already picturing our reconciliation.

All that I had to do was to shake myself out of it, as good folk say. But for whose sake ought I to shake myself out of it? I was not interested in anyone else, nor even in myself. I was only interested in myself in relation to Luc.

There was Catherine, Alain, the streets, the boy who kissed me at a party and whom I didn’t want to see again. There was rain, the Sorbonne and cafés. There were maps of America. How I hated America! There was boredom. Would all this never end? Luc had been gone for more than a month. He had sent me one sad, tender little note that I knew by heart.

What I found comforting was that my intelligence, which until then had been opposed to my passion, making fun of it and ridiculing me and giving rise within me to painful dialogues, was gradually becoming an ally. I no longer said to myself: ‘Let’s put an end to this nonsense,’ but: ‘How can the damage be limited?’ The nights were invariably dreary, bogged down in sadness, but the days sometimes passed quickly, taken up by reading. I thought about ‘Luc and me’ as if we were a case-study, although that didn’t prevent those unbearable moments when I would stop dead on the pavement with that nameless thing overcoming me and filling me with disgust and anger. I would go into a café, put twenty francs into the jukebox and treat myself to five minutes of dolefulness, thanks to our tune from Cannes. Alain ended up loathing it. But I knew every note, it brought back the scent of the mimosa, I certainly got my money’s worth. I did not like myself.

‘There, there, old thing,’ Alain would say patiently, ‘there, there.’

I didn’t much like people calling me ‘old thing’, but in this instance it was comforting.

‘You’re kind,’ I would say to Alain.

‘Not at all,’ he would say. ‘I’ll be writing my thesis on the subject of passion so it’s purely self-interest.’

But the music convinced me. It convinced me that I needed Luc. I knew very well that my need was both connected to, and separate from, my love. I could still distinguish in him, on the one hand, the human being, the person I had been complicit with, and, on the other hand, the object of my passion, the enemy. And that was definitely the worst part, being unable to take less account of him, in the way you can generally take less account of people who respond to you with half-heartedness. There were also times when I said to myself: ‘Poor Luc, what a strain and nuisance I would be to him!’ And I despised myself for not having been able to keep things light, all the more so because that would perhaps have bound him to me out of wounded pride. But I knew very well that the idea of wounded pride would have been alien to him. He wasn’t an adversary, he was Luc. There was no getting round it for me.

One day when I was coming down from my room at two o’clock to go to class, the landlady held out the telephone to me. My heart no longer beat furiously when I took it, because Luc was away. I immediately recognized the low, hesitant voice of Françoise.

‘Dominique?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

On the staircase all was still.

‘Dominique, I should have phoned you sooner. Do you want to come and see me all the same?’

‘Of course,’ I said. I was keeping my voice so much under control that I must have sounded quite urbane.

‘Would you like to come this evening at six?’

‘That’s fine.’

And she hung up.

I was both upset and pleased to have heard her voice. It brought back memories of that weekend, the car, lunches in restaurants, all the previous settings.

Six

I didn’t go to my class. Instead I walked about the streets wondering what she could have to say to me. Mine was the classic reaction: I felt I had suffered too much for anyone to hold anything against me. When six o’clock came, it was raining a little. The streets were damp and glistening beneath the streetlights, like the backs of seals. Going into the lobby of the apartment block, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I had shed a lot of weight, hoping vaguely that I would fall seriously ill and that Luc would come and sob at my deathbed. My hair was wet and I had a hunted look. I would inspire in Françoise her perennial kindness. I remained looking at myself for a moment. Perhaps I would have been able able to manipulate the situation, get really close to Françoise, prevaricate with Luc and evade the issue. But for what? How could the issue be evaded when my feelings were as they were, for once absolute, unconditional and wholehearted. I had been truly astonished and impressed by the strength of my love, but I had forgotten that it represented nothing, except, as far as I was concerned, an occasion to suffer.

Françoise opened the door to me with a half-smile and looking rather scared. I went in and took off my raincoat.

‘Are you well?’ I asked.

‘I’m very well,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’ Then, more formally: ‘I mean, do please sit down.’

I had forgotten that she had started to call me tu. I sat down. She was looking at me, visibly surprised at my pitiful appearance, which made me feel sorry for myself.

‘Would you like something to drink?’

‘Yes, please.’

She automatically poured me a whisky. I had forgotten how it tasted. There was that aspect too: I had been thrown back on my dismal room and student catering. Even so, the red coat they had given me had come in very useful. I felt tense and desperate, so wound up in fact that it almost gave me confidence.

‘So, there we are!’ I said.

I raised my eyes to look at her. She was sitting on the couch opposite, staring at me without speaking. There was still the possibility that we would talk of other things and that, on leaving, I would say in an embarrassed way: ‘I hope you don’t hold it too much against me.’ It was up to me. All I had to do was quickly to start talking before that silence became a confession on either side. But I said nothing. I had at last arrived at a critical moment, that was what I was now experiencing.

‘I would have liked to phone you sooner,’ she said at length, ‘because Luc had told me to. And also because I was sorry to think of you being alone in Paris. But …’

‘I should have phoned you too,’ I said.

‘Why?’

I was going to say ‘to apologize’ but the word didn’t seem strong enough. I started to tell the truth.

‘Because I wanted to. Because, yes, I was lonely. And then because I was sorry to think that you thought …’

I gestured vaguely.

‘You don’t look well,’ she said gently.

‘That’s right,’ I said irritatedly. ‘If I had been able to, I would have come to see you and you would have given me steak to eat, I would have lain down on your rug and you would have comforted me. Unfortunately you were the only person who would have known how to do that and the only person who couldn’t do it.’

I was shaking. My glass was shaking in my hand. Françoise’s gaze was becoming unbearable.

‘It … it wasn’t pleasant,’ I said, by way of excuse.

She took my glass from me, put it on the table and sat down again.

‘I was jealous,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I was jealous of you physically.’

I looked at her. It was the last thing I had expected.

‘It was stupid,’ she said. ‘I knew perfectly well that there was nothing serious between you and Luc.’

When she saw my reaction she immediately made a gesture of apology, which seemed to me commendable.

‘What I mean to say is that infidelity on the physical level isn’t really anything serious; but I’ve always thought that. And especially now, now that …’

She really seemed to be suffering. I was afraid of what she was going to say.

‘Now that I am not so young,’ she concluded, ‘and’ – she turned her head away – ‘not so desirable.’

‘Don’t say that,’ I said.

I protested. It hadn’t occurred to me that the story could have another dimension, unknown to me, a pitiable aspect, not even pitiable, just sad for its being ordinary. I had thought that the story belonged to me; but I knew nothing of their life together.

‘It wasn’t that,’ I said, and I got up.

I went up to her and stood there. She turned towards me and gave a slight smile.

‘My poor Dominique, what a mess!’

I sat down beside her and put my head in my hands. My ears were buzzing. I felt empty. I wanted to cry.

‘I really like you,’ she said. ‘I like you a lot. I don’t like to think that you’ve been unhappy. When I first saw you I thought that we could make you look happy in place of that rather defeated look you had. That hasn’t been a great success.’

‘Unhappy, yes, I have been rather unhappy,’ I said. ‘But then, Luc warned me.’

I would have liked to collapse against her, against her large, generous body, and tell her that I wished she could have been my mother and that I was indeed unhappy; I would have liked to weep a little. But I couldn’t even play that role.

‘He’ll be back in ten days,’ she said.

What was that jolt I felt again in my stubborn heart? This had to be: Françoise had to have Luc again, and what passed for her happiness. I had to sacrifice myself. That last thought made me smile. It was a final effort on my part to conceal from myself how unimportant I was. Since I had no hope, I had nothing to sacrifice. I had only to put an end, or let time put an end, to an illness. That bitter resignation carried with it a certain optimism.

‘Later on, when it’s over for me,’ I said, ‘I shall see you again, Françoise, and Luc too. All I have to do now is wait.’

At the door she kissed me gently. She said: ‘See you again soon.’

But once I had returned to my room I fell on my bed. What had I said to her? What half-baked nonsense? Luc was coming back, he would take me in his arms and kiss me. Even if he didn’t love me, he, Luc, would be there. The nightmare would be over.

Ten days later Luc came back. I knew that because on the day of his return I passed where he lived on the bus and saw his car. I went back to the residence and waited for his phone call. It did not come, not that day nor the next day when I stayed in bed to wait for it, pretending to have flu.

He was there but he wasn’t ringing me. After a month and a half of being away! Despair expressed itself in my shivering, in my wry, stifled laughter and my obsessive apathy. I had never suffered so much. I told myself that this was the last spasm, but that it was hard.

On the third day I got up and went to my class. Alain began taking walks with me again. I listened attentively to what he said, I laughed. A certain phrase obsessed me without my knowing why: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’32 It was always on my lips.

One morning when a full fortnight had gone by, I woke to hear music in the courtyard, emanating generously from a neighbour’s radio. It was a fine andante by Mozart evoking, as it always did, daybreak, death and a certain smile. I lay still in bed, listening to it for some time. I felt rather happy.33

The landlady called me. There was someone on the phone for me. Without rushing I slipped on a dressing gown and went downstairs. I thought it must be Luc and that it was no longer so very important. Something was ebbing away from me.

‘Are you well?’

I was listening to his voice. It was his voice. Where was I finding this sweetness and calm, as if something living and essential was now flowing from me? He was asking me if I would go for a drink with him the following day. I was replying: ‘Yes, I will, yes.’

I went back up to my room feeling very alert. The music had finished and I was sorry that I had missed the end of it. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I saw myself smile. I did nothing to prevent it, I couldn’t anyway. I knew I was alone again. I wanted to say that word over to myself. Alone. Alone. So what? I was a woman who had loved a man. It was a simple enough story. There was no reason to make a big deal of it.

Translator’s Note

Bonjour tristesse, a first novel by Françoise Quoirez, only eighteen years old and using the pen name Françoise Sagan, was published in Paris in March 1954 and immediately caught the attention of the French reading public, before going on to win the Prix des Critiques in May of that year. As early as 25 March the long-established London publishers John Murray were approached by a literary agent suggesting that they bring out an English edition. John Murray, who rarely published translations, were initially dubious but by the end of April had embraced the idea, no doubt influenced by the enthusiastic reception of the novel and its young author in France. By that time the American publishers E. P. Dutton and Company had also decided to publish it in English and John Murray, having now identified ‘an extremely suitable translator’, suggested to Dutton that they cooperate over the venture. The translator in question was the London-based Irene Ash, who had read and summarized the novel for John Murray, and by early December her finished translation had been accepted by the publisher. It has ever since reigned as the recognized translation in English of a novel celebrated for having spoken to a generation that was coming of age in the post-war period.

The English edition was widely and, on the whole, favourably reviewed (though John Davenport, writing in the Observer of 15 May 1955, opined that it was a ‘curiously vulgar little work […] put together with meretricious skill’ and predicted that ‘it will cause a flutter in the dovecots’). Where reviewers mentioned Ash’s skill as a translator, it was generally with warm approbation, in spite or because of an awareness that the translation represented an abbreviated version of the original: Peter Quennell in the Daily Mail of 20 May 1955 commented that, while the translation was ‘unusually good […] I observe on many pages the traces of a mysterious blue pencil. A number of sentences have been removed as too frank or too suggestive for the innocent English public.’ In the view of John Raymond, writing the following day in the New Statesman and Nation, Ash ‘has not been afraid to pare and clip the text to suit the English reader’, though the one example he gives refers to an innocuous enough phrase at the end of a paragraph in Part One, Chapter Two (translating as ‘with arms that felt heavy and a dry mouth’) the omission of which he sees as a stylistic improvement.

When, in the Spectator of 17 August 1956, Quennell reviews the English version of Sagan’s second novel, Un certain sourire, he states: ‘[H]er London publishers […] found it expedient to remove one or two passages from the translated version of Bonjour Tristesse.’ If John Murray’s did implement changes on the limited scale he indicates (and their archives reveal only their extreme satisfaction with Ash’s work), the comment in Quennell’s earlier review that the traces of a mysterious blue pencil were visible on ‘many’ pages suggests that the blue pencil was largely wielded by Ash herself on the French original, from which well over one hundred lines were cut. Some of the omissions involve quite short phrases, but others are substantial. The latter fall into two categories: firstly, sections of the text which might be deemed overtly sexual, and secondly, portions of detailed analysis.

Sagan may by no stretch of the imagination be called a sexually explicit writer, but in the Britain of the 1950s outlooks were prim. Indeed, as is well known, in 1960 Penguin were prosecuted (unsuccessfully) under the Obscene Publications Act over their intention to publish in Britain, unexpurgated, the novel by D. H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s novel is much more sexually focused than Bonjour Tristesse, but each was subject, albeit to a different degree, to the lingering strait-laced paternalism of the time and place which has for ever been encapsulated in the question of the prosecution counsel to the jury at the Chatterley trial: ‘Is it a book that you would […] wish your wife or your servants to read?’ Thus, six years earlier, it had been thought proper to omit from the English translation Sagan’s quite lyrical yet distinctly unanatomical references to love-making, notably in Chapters Four and Six of Part Two, as well as to excise or tone down other sexual allusions: for example Cécile, the seventeen-year-old heroine, is daringly frank (too frank for Ash, no doubt) in her condemnation of the life-choices of Cyril’s complacent widowed mother (Part One, Chapter Four). She also crosses swords lewdly with the dreadful Madame Webb, and although in that instance her play on the word maquereau, meaning both ‘mackerel’ and ‘pimp’, cannot be rendered directly into English, Ash’s translation does not seek to reflect its double-entendre in any way; Cécile merely tells the reader: ‘[I] did not know what to answer without being too offensive.’

The longest single omission is in Part Two, Chapter Six where, after a predictably cut-down version of Cécile and Cyril’s love-making in a little boat, nineteen lines are left out, an entire discussion in which Cécile deconstructs the expression ‘to make love’. While Ash may have deemed the topic unsuitable, it is also possible that she had little patience (or felt her readers would have) with the analysis as such. In fact she quite readily pares down analytic sections and in doing so short-changes us on one of Cécile’s principal traits, her intelligent, sometimes tormented reflectiveness, evident from the opening paragraph and liable to be pushed to extremes of convoluted self-interrogation. Thus she omits, for example, several lines at the end of Part One, Chapter Two in which Cécile discusses her attachment to some words of Oscar Wilde’s, and she condenses Cécile’s long discussion, strategically placed at the beginning of Part Two, of her newly discovered inner duality.

Aside from her treatment of the more erotic sections and her seeming impatience with Gallic navel-gazing, Ash frequently cuts out what she deems to be redundant phraseology, taking upon herself the role of editor of Sagan’s prose rather than the faithful translator of it. All the same, when the question arose of finding a translator for Un certain sourire, John Murray unhesitatingly selected her again, though Dutton in the United States preferred this time to make separate arrangements. Dutton’s decision was perhaps not surprising, in view of the fact that, although the American publisher had part-paid for and published Ash’s translation of Bonjour tristesse as agreed, it had been issued to the American market with most of the important omissions made good and with numerous alterations to the English. So although John Murray offered Ash’s translation of Un certain sourire to Dutton, who pronounced it ‘excellent’, they chose as their translator Anne Green. Green’s pacey translation is somewhat less coy than Ash’s. Arguably, however, in spite of its topic (the affair between the young student Dominique and her boyfriend’s much older, married uncle Luc), Un certain sourire contains less in its detail that was liable to create a flutter in the dovecots, and what risked doing so was mostly dealt with in Ash’s usual no-nonsense way: thus she has Luc in bed with Dominique place his hand on her side and not, as in the French, her hip, and she sees fit to apply a little further censoring of what immediately follows.

It may be thought fortunate that what appears to have been an early working title for Sagan’s second novel, Solitude aux hanches étroites (‘loneliness with narrow hips’), was dropped in favour of Un certain sourire, this being a phrase used by Dominique near the end of the novel. As a title for the English translation, Ash initially suggested A Way of Smiling, and there were other proposals. In March 1956 Sagan herself reportedly preferred the title in English to be A Certain Smile, so it was perhaps journalistic spin that led Nancy Spain to announce to readers of the Daily Mail of 31 March: ‘A bottle of bubbly if you can name Miss Sagan’s naughty book,’ and to go on: ‘Her English publishers have not yet decided upon a title. Can you think of one better than A Certain Smile?’ It seems nobody could.

One appreciative English reviewer of Sagan’s second novel refers to its being ‘diamond-bright in style in Irene Ash’s translation’. It might equally be said of both her translations that Ash’s language has a cut-glass quality about it, reflecting an upper-middle-class milieu familiar to earlier cohorts of English readers, a world of secluded beaches, bathing things, afternoon tea and country houses, and a style of expression to match, existing in conjunction with the torrid heat of the Mediterranean, the mustiness prevailing elsewhere in the French provinces and the atmospheric student cafés of the Quartier Latin. Some of Ash’s vocabulary, now dated, risks being a distraction to today’s reader: characters cavil at things and chaff one another; Cyril fears he may be a cad; Elsa’s eye-black runs; Dominique lodges in a ‘pension’ and blows her money on a pair of slacks; the seductive Luc wears a waistcoat (in the French it is in fact a jacket); and everyone at some point or other is referred to as being gay. Yet despite all this, the three translations – Ash’s two and Green’s one – are to be admired for having served over many years as polished, readable and intelligent versions. The new translations offered here present both novels in entirely unabridged form for English-speaking readers and it is hoped they will encourage and help at least some to sample the original French for themselves; they have been undertaken with a view also to giving a fresh new dress, after almost sixty years, to the young Sagan’s remarkably stylish and perceptive treatment of themes that are still highly contemporary.

I wish to thank Mrs Virginia Murray, archivist at John Murray, Albemarle Street, London, for having generously put at my disposal documentation relating to the English editions of Bonjour tristesse and Un certain sourire.

Heather Lloyd

Glasgow, 2013

Notes

BONJOUR TRISTESSE

1. Paul Éluard, La Vie immédiate: Françoise Sagan found the title for her novel in the second line of the poem she quotes here (‘À peine défigurée’), from the collection La Vie immédiate (1932) by the surrealist poet Paul Éluard (1895–1952). (This is my translation.)

2. Fréjus: A town on the French Riviera to the west of Cannes and close to Saint-Raphaël.

3. Oscar Wilde’s: ‘Sin … life’: Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), an Anglo-Irish writer, wit, aesthete and Francophile who courted scandal with his writings and lifestyle. Cécile quotes here (in French) from Chapter Two of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

4. Bergson: Henri Bergson (1859–1941), a leading French philosopher of the earlier part of the twentieth century. His wide-ranging work addresses issues relating to consciousness, free-will, intellect, instinct and what he saw as the intuitive, creative impulse within humans. Philosophy has long been part of the school syllabus in France, and Bergson’s thought has traditionally featured in it.

5. Your ideas may be fashionable: The ‘fashionable’ ideas for which Anne castigates Cécile are not hard to identify. The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) had been set out in his philosophical works of the 1940s and by the 1950s was widely known of and influential in France, having found expression also in his novels, plays and other writings. According to Sartre, human beings are free to create their own destiny and should shoulder the heavy responsibility for doing so, rather than take refuge in some pattern of existence supposedly preordained for them. In 1949 a close associate of Sartre’s, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), published Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex). This work, of pioneering importance for modern feminism, highlighted the conventions hampering the liberty of women to flourish as autonomous individuals.

6. bebop: A style of jazz popularized in the New York of the 1940s, more musically developed than swing jazz.

7. the islands: Off the coast to the west of Saint-Raphaël and Saint-Tropez lie the Îles d’Hyères. To the east, facing Cannes and closer in, lie the two smaller Îles de Lérins. Either group of islands could provide an attractive, secluded destination for anyone staying on the Côte d’Azur who had a small boat.

8. However disparate … humanity: Cécile is reading the second chapter of Bergson’s treatise Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). He argues that a distinguishing mark of our humanity is our potential ability (referred to here as ‘the creative principle in the human species’) to transcend conventional loyalties dictated by tribe and clan and to reach out to those who are not like us. While the quotation conveys the dryness of the revision that Cécile is having to buckle down to on holiday, its substance may appear relevant to the situation in which she and Anne find themselves with regard to each other.

9. The baccalaureate was bound … useful: Passing the baccalauréat, an examination taken as the culmination to secondary level studies, would have secured for Cécile a university place.

10. Kant: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a German philosopher whose writing greatly influenced the development of European thought. In his best-known work, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant analyses the competing claims of reason and perception, a topic which Cécile, in her divided state of mind, may consider to be of particular relevance to herself. To the hedonist Raymond, on the other hand, his daughter’s interest in Kantian thought could be a worrying sign that she risks turning into a blue-stocking.

11. Pascal: Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a French writer, thinker and mathematician. The work for which he is most remembered, the Pensées, published after his death, is a series of reflections in which he seeks to reconcile reason and Christian mysticism. Biographers of Sagan record that she wrote a composition on Pascal for her baccalauréat.

12. You’re not Snow White: In the well-known folk tale to which Raymond alludes, Snow White has a wicked stepmother who tries to get rid of her.

13. Route de l’Esterel: This is not the coast road (la corniche) but what in the 1950s was a narrow, winding road going north from Fréjus through deserted, hilly country.

A CERTAIN SMILE

1. Florence Malraux: Florence Malraux (b. 1933) was a close, lifelong friend of Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) whom she met at school when she was sixteen. She was the daughter of André Malraux (1901–76), an eminent writer who, in 1959, was appointed as Minister of Culture by Charles de Gaulle, shortly after the latter became President of the newly instituted French Fifth Republic. Florence, a keen supporter of Sagan in her early development as a novelist, went on to work in cinema.

2. Roger Vailland: Vailland (1907–65) was a novelist and, for a period, a member of the French Communist Party. He also worked in journalism and the cinema. Although not altering their meaning, Sagan slightly misquotes Vailland’s original words (‘L’amour est ce qui se passe entre deux êtres qui s’aiment’) as they appear in Drôle de jeu, his first novel (Deuxième Journée, V). Published in 1945, it was one of the earliest novels set in a French Resistance milieu to appear at the end of the Second World War. Although the action of Drôle de jeu is very different to that of A Certain Smile, in each work a dispassionate gaze is turned on the theme of love, and Paris with its well-known streets and districts provides a backdrop in both.

3. Rue Saint-Jacques: The reference to Rue Saint-Jacques, an important thoroughfare in the Quartier Latin, in the vicinity of the ancient University of Paris (la Sorbonne), situates the opening of the story firmly in the student quarter of the city on the left bank of the River Seine.

4. the River Yonne: The river gives its name to the French département of Yonne, an area in Burgundy about an hour south-east of Paris.

5. the Gare de Lyon: One of the main railway stations in Paris, a departure point for southbound trains.

6. Epicurus: A Greek philosopher (340–270 BCE) who taught the importance of the pursuit of pleasure.

7. the Quai de Bercy: One of an important series of embankments along the River Seine, this one is on the right (i.e. northern) bank and to the east of the city. The French singer Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972) recorded a sentimental song of the same name in 1947, celebrating its fame as a centre of the French wine trade; a whodunit film entitled Minuit quai de Bercy appeared in 1953.

8. a Princesse de Clèves: La Princesse de Clèves, one of the earliest French novels, as the genre has come to be understood, written by Madame de Lafayette (1634–93), analyses the passionate longing experienced by the eponymous heroine for the worldly duc de Nemours, for whom she does not however abandon her sense of duty towards her worthy husband.

9. a very fine work … The Age of Reason: The Age of Reason (L’Âge de raison) is the first novel in the trilogy The Roads to Liberty (Les Chemins de la liberté), published in 1945, by Jean-Paul Sartre. The difficulty of achieving personal freedom and meaning is highlighted in the problematic lives and relationships of a varied group of characters depicted as living in the Paris of the 1930s.

10. denim trousers: Although Dominique does not refer to her new trousers as jeans, the reference in French to their being made of toile, canvas material, does suggest that she has bought the very latest in youth fashion, jeans being popularized in the fifties through American cinema. In the next chapter she adds that her new trousers were tight-fitting.

11. Boulevard Saint-Michel: One of the principal streets in the Quartier Latin.

12. those wretched existentialists: See page 211, note 5.

13. Pelléas et Mélisande: A play by the Belgian symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), first performed in 1893 and later adapted by the French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918) as an opera. Dominique’s allusion to the story is apt, if melodramatic: the lovers Pelléas and Mélisande, holding a tryst deep in the grounds of a castle, are interrupted by Mélisande’s husband, who kills Pelléas, his half-brother, with his sword. The setting and the fact that the male rivals are related and that a marriage is being betrayed provide resonances with Dominique’s immediate situation.

14. ‘other people’: In the French, Dominique’s reference to ‘les autres’ in inverted commas may be seen as an allusion to a well-known quotation from Sartre’s play Huis clos (1944): ‘L’enfer, c’est les Autres’ (‘Hell is other people’).

15. ‘Such a lot of water!’ … remember: Marshal Mac-Mahon, first President of the French Third Republic (1873–9), a man not noted for his oratory, is said to have commented: ‘Que d’eau! Que d’eau!’ when visiting a town in south-west France that had been severely affected by flooding.

16. ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’: The French proverb quoted by Bertrand’s mother takes a less pessimistic view of the weather in the month of May than does its English equivalent: ‘En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil. En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît’ (‘In April don’t take off a stitch. In May do as you wish’). But she betrays her own words of wisdom by going off to get dressed again almost immediately.

17. ‘Laughter is …’ as Alain said: Alain is the pen name of Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868–1951), a French philosopher and essayist. The words attributed to him (‘Le rire est le propre de l’amour’) appear to be a misquotation of what he says in reflecting on laughter in his work Système des beaux-arts (1920) (Book 5, Chapter 8): ‘Le rire est le propre de l’homme’ (‘Laughter is a distinguishing feature of man’), which echoes the maxim in Gargantua by François Rabelais (1494–1553): ‘Rire est le propre de l’homme.’ Rather than misquoting Alain, Dominique/Sagan may be simply extrapolating, since he goes on to argue that, in everyday conversation, trust and friendship are required for wholehearted laughter to occur.

18. four hundred francs: The currency referred to was shortly to be replaced, in 1960, by the system of ‘new francs’ in which one new franc would replace 100 francs under the previous system, having the effect of making everyday sums sound less inflated.

19. la Croisette: The main promenade in Cannes (la promenade de la Croisette).

20. Proust speaks … Albertine’s cheeks: Françoise Sagan claimed the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) as her literary master, saying in a discussion of the authors whom she had read as a teenager: ‘Proust, moreover, taught me everything’ (‘J’appris tout d’ailleurs, par Proust’) (Avec mon meilleur souvenir, Paris, Gallimard, 1984, p.214). Albertine is a key female character in Proust’s vast work À la Recherche du temps perdu, making her first appearance in the second part, À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919). The admiring narrator makes frequent reference to her cheeks, providing at one point a seven-line description of them (À la Recherche du temps perdu, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954, volume 1, 888).

21. your little portion of the absurd: The concept of the absurd, the idea of there being a mismatch between the human desire for meaning in life and the absence of ultimate meaning, was given expression notably by the French writer Albert Camus (1913–60) as well as being an element in Sartre’s existentialism. The absurd is enough of an intellectual commonplace of the period for Luc to be able to joke about it.

22. Saint-Germain-des-Prés: A neighbourhood in Paris around an ancient church of the same name on the left bank of the Seine, in the 1940s and 1950s it was a favoured haunt of the intelligentsia and a byword for avant-garde thinking, notably existentialism.

23. the Promenade des Anglais: The main promenade in Nice, so called because it was created by English residents in the nineteenth century to provide a route for walks alongside the Mediterranean.

24. The Fenouillard Family: A French comic-strip, La Famille Fenouillard first appeared in 1889, in a children’s periodical, and later the stories were published in book form. Their enduring popularity led to the release of a film of the same name in 1961.

25. Porte d’Italie: Paris is served from its periphery by a large number of access routes, identified at the point at which they enter the city as portes (‘gates’), the Porte d’Italie being a major gateway on the south of the periphery.

26. I’m going to call you tu: In modern English only one personal pronoun is used for addressing another person: you. However, there are two possibilities in French, tu, which is primarily used for addressing a person with whom one is on friendly and familiar terms, and vous, which is more formal.

27. I went to register … restaurant: In France, networks of canteen-style restaurants catering for university students have traditionally been state-subsidized, with low-cost meals available to those holding the appropriate registration.

28. Stendhal: The pen name of Henri Beyle, French novelist and essayist (1783–1842). Best known for two of his novels Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), Stendhal also published a study on love (De l’Amour (1822)), which could explain Alain’s interest in his work, in view of his own planned thesis on the subject of passion.

29. ‘outside of “that”, there is no salvation’: Dominique is making a secular play on the dictum ‘Hors de l’Église, point de salut’ (‘Outside the Church there is no salvation’).

30. ‘It is very rare … summoned it’: Like the reference to Albertine’s cheeks (see note 20 above), this quotation is from À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (À la Recherche du temps perdu, volume 1, p.489). Dominique’s rendering of it (‘Il est très rare qu’un bonheur vienne se poser précisément sur le désir qui l’avait appelé’) is not identical to the original (‘[…] il est rare qu’un bonheur vienne justement se poser sur le désir qui l’avait réclamé’), although the meaning remains in essence unchanged.

31. the Bois: Paris boasts two areas of extensive public woodland on its periphery, the Bois de Vincennes on the south-eastern edge of the city not far from the Quai de Bercy, and, to the west, the larger Bois de Boulogne, set on the edge of the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. The reference to the Bois will be to one of these.

32. ‘Something is rotten … Denmark’: Dominique quotes in French this jaundiced comment from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4. In the Denmark of Prince Hamlet, his uncle has married with almost adulterous haste Hamlet’s mother, widow of the late king, so in the play we may fancy we see mirrored a distorted configuration of the foursome in which Dominique has been caught.

33. I woke to hear music … happy: La Nausée (Nausea), a novel published by Sartre in 1938, explores the principal character Roquentin’s sense of the perceived gratuitousness and absurdity of existence, while, in its final pages, seeming to suggest some kind of palliative to the human condition to be found in writing and music. As Roquentin is moved by a bad recording of a jazz melody played on a café record player (prefiguring the jukebox music Dominique listens to at the beginning of this novel) so, here, a portion of a work by Mozart heard coming from a neighbour’s radio gives Dominique fresh courage to face life.

Content

Sagan Françoise Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

BONJOUR TRISTESSE AND A CERTAIN SMILE

Introduction

BONJOUR TRISTESSE

A CERTAIN SMILE