His religious fervor filled him to overflowing. He lived henceforth
with the vision of God under his eyelid
in company with the saints whom he evoked in his plays. I missed him terribly. I suffered, too, on seeing him in his superabundant literary production, content himself more and more easily, and the excellence of his intentions too often satisfy his slightest exigency. I am told that he realized it and suffered from it himself in the latter days of his life, having slowly descended, because of too much obligingness and renunciation, from the summit attained in Sainte Cécile and Le Pauvre sous l’Escalier.
I can not speak of what became of him but only of what he was at the time of perfect agreement between us: all joy, youth, enthusiasm, giving and surrender. He cast over the outer world an ecstatic glance in a sort of panicky devotion, all his senses awake, wedding each harmony, amusing himself like a child or a faun, infatuated with sympathy. “Some of everything. A great deal of it. Twice,” was his device. He laughed at it with intoxication. I relished his judgment, too, very correct, very sure, which, in art, allowed him to fall in love only with the best and reject vehemently everything that did not satisfy his reason along with his sensibility. His critical articles were remarkable. He wrote them without trouble though with an extreme application. A continuous exchange between us put each of our appreciations to proof, and the approbation of one nourished the confidence of the other.
That was how he threw himself into life, full of ardor and answering anyone who asked him what he intended to write: “Twelve novels; fifty plays; loads of poems, among them three epics; cart-loads of chronicles.” In his conversation he retained a vehemence that, in his writings, was tempered by hidden wisdom, and I loved even the exaggerations to which his lyricism drove him, and that kind of overflowing generosity which made him continuously forget himself. That same generosity invited him later, when religious conviction became part of it, to the sacrifice of his sensuality; and I’d rather not have to say it: his art.
I have kept all of Ghéon’s letters. I find a pile of them on my return to Paris. Badly catalogued, I seek to restore a little order to them and my eyes fall at once on some unusual sentences I had not remembered, I confess, for the state of mind they reveal was then of very short duration, but which seem to me to-day of revealing importance. Ghéon never dated his letters; but I had taken care to keep the envelopes, too; the stamp informs me that this letter is of July 16, 1905. It begins with a parenthesis:
(on receiving your letter)
A Catholic writer, you said (what the devil could I have written him?) or rather a Catholic cured of writing. I take the road more and more each day. Up to now it is the clearest result of that lamentable story (an allusion to a painfully sentimental out pouring). Since Monday I have been sicker than ever. My past life has decidedly fallen into the pit, with all of the unforeseen, all the temporariness of reckless debauchery. I discovered I was faithful, capable of living only in that atmosphere of certainty and permanence. Evidently it is not love that can give me the guarantees I need in order to live, nor the ups and downs of my art. I say: down with art and down with life!.. But where will I find a refuge?…
* * * *
As strange as this letter seems to me on rereading it to-day, unique in Ghéon’s correspondence (I am speaking of that predating his conversion), without precedent and without follow-ups (for almost immediately afterwards, his letters, without any allusion to that momentary weakness, show him plunged once more into the most hazardous adventure), this letter reveals a latent need that will render less surprising his conversion to Catholicism, at the time of the preceding war, following his encounter with my friend Dupouey.
After his conversion, I ceased to go with Ghéon. We could no longer understand each other. The separation did not come through me alone. He reproached in me what he called the gratuity of my thinking, having put his to the service of the faith. It seemed to me that all his judgments, whose soundness I had admired at first, were bent and inclined from then on. I told him so referring to an article he had just written on the claimed Christianity of Shakespeare. He retaliated in a long letter (May 9, 1920):
“Alas! old man,” he said to me in it, after having defended his new point of view, “how do you expect a certain silence not to tend to come between us once for all? We no longer live on the same plane. (You won’t accuse me all the same of taking advantage of you by proselyting!) Not being able to preach I remain silent. I abominate the Ghéon that I was and whom you regret; that is not much to say; I spew him up. And as for my friendship, which has never been more fraternal, how do you expect it to wish for you anything except what I consider as the greatest good, the only good, as the “one thing necessary?” So I can only pray; I do not fail to do so.”
* * * *
Companion of perfect loyalty, the grief of our separation was on my side alone at first. I could not get along without him; I missed him all the time, and to know that he did not miss me only aggravated my grievance. That, in the last days of his life, he in his turn knew regret and went back to the past, is possible. They tell me so. Nothing in my life, and perhaps nothing in his, was equal or comparable to that first friendship.
12 EUGÈNE DABIT
IT WAS at Sebastopol that I left him after two months of daily companionship during which our friendship became closer and deeper day by day. Scarlet fever that was to get the better of his desire to live and of his hopes broke out the evening of August 17th. That day, during the course of a long automobile ride1 we had had an uninterrupted conversation, one of the most confidential and the best; so that the last memory I keep of him is also the one that permits me to measure best the importance of his loss, which leaves me the most lively image of Eugène Dabit and fills my heart with the most bitter regrets. Our trip in the Soviet Union was drawing to a close; Sebastopol was the last stop, and already ripened by an extraordinary experience, we were dreaming only of our return, and of work.
Yes, we had talked that day as we had never yet done, and as though we both had the presentiment that that conversation was to be the last. I recalled to him the desire he had often expressed to me by letter or during our encounters, that we should live together for a while far from Paris. “At Paris it is so hard to see each other,” he said to me then. “One is always in a hurry.…” With what joy and enthusiasm he had accepted my proposition to come join me in the Soviet Union! Of my four travelling companions: Jef Last, Schriffin, Guilloux and him, whom Pierre Herbart and I had gone to meet in Leningrad, Eugène Dabit seemed by far the most vigorous, the most “unassailable,” the farthest from death; but he spoke ceaselessly of death, as though through a restless need to thrust it from his thoughts. And he spoke in the same way of the war, ceaselessly; but of it like someone who knew it. What a memory of it he preserved! In a precious album where he had taken pleasure in framing with charming drawings the poems he had written in 1924, I read the following quatrains:
I was a soldier at twenty
What misery
To make war
When one is a child.