II
Everything that was natural in my mother, I loved. But it happened that her impulses were checked by convention and the bent that a bourgeois education too often leaves behind it. (Not always; thus I remember that she dared brave the disapproval of all her family when she went to care for the farmers of La Roque attacked during a typhus epidemic.) That education, excellent, doubtless, when it is a question of curbing evil instincts, attacks equally, but then very unfortunately, the generous emotions of the heart; then a sort of calculation restrains or directs them. I should like to give an example of this:
My mother announced to me her intention of making a gift of Littré to Anna Shackelton, our poor friend, whom I loved as a son. I was bursting with joy, when she added:
“The one I gave your father is bound in morocco. I thought that, for Anna, a shagreen binding would be sufficient.”
I understood at once, what I had not known before, that shagreen costs much less. The joy suddenly left my heart. And without a doubt my mother noticed it, for she went on quickly:
“She won’t see the difference.”
No, that shabby cheating was not natural to her. To her, giving was natural. But I was irritated also by that sort of complicity to which she invited me.
I have lost the memory of a thousand more important things. Why did those few sentences of my mother’s engrave themselves so deeply on my heart? Perhaps because I felt myself capable of thinking and saying them myself, in spite of the violent reprobation they aroused in me. Perhaps because I became conscious of that bent against which I should have to struggle and that I was sadly amazed to discover in my mother. Everything else melted into the harmonious ensemble of her face; and it is perhaps just because I did not recognize her any more by that trait, truly unworthy of her, that my memory took possession of it. What a warning! What strength that educational bent had, then, to triumph in this way from time to time! But my mother remained too surrounded by beings deformed in the same way, to be able to sort out and recognize in herself, among all the acquired characteristics, those spontaneous to her nature; above all, she remained too fearful and unsure of herself to give them the upper hand. She remained worried about others and their opinions; always desirous of the best, but a best answering to accepted rules; always tending toward this best, and without even suspecting (and too modest to recognize it) that the best in her was exactly what she obtained with the least effort.
4 THE DAY OF SEPTEMBER 27
TWO friends came to share my breakfast. The one, a Belgian, a workman from the mines of Borinage, in charge of an inquiry into our departments of the North, was making preparations that very evening and wished to consult me on certain points. The other, my traveling companion in the Congo.
“This Friday, the 27th, is special,” I told them, “in that I have to render an exact account of it, and relate all that I have seen and heard in the course of the day.”1
“If that’s the case, I’m going to leave you in the lurch,” exclaimed my traveling companion, slipping away immediately.
So did the events. And since, as the consequence of a long period of close application and for more availability, I had very imprudently given myself a holiday on that day, the twenty-four hours flowed by without bringing to my observation anything of note. Thus, in the succession of days, there are certain ones that seem to come only to make up the number and to bring us, by slow degrees, nearer to death. So I find myself face to face with September 27th like a painter to whom one might say suddenly, in the course of a walk: “Sit down there and paint,” at just the spot where there would be nothing to paint. He would be reduced to casting a spell over the slightest blade of grass and the stones in the foreground.
Before the arrival of my two friends, I had begun my day with the reading of some poems by Ronsard. The fuller my mind is with the distressing problems of to-day, the more important it is for me to cleanse it each morning and each evening with a bath of contemplation absolutely untimely. I need to preserve in me the feeling of endurance; I mean, the need of feeling there are human things that remain secure from injury and degradation; works upon which the changes of time have no hold. Nothing was less timely than what I was reading. It was simply some beautiful lines that had no other purpose than to fill my heart and mind with a sort of dynamic joy very beneficent. And I thought, on reading them, that one had not, perhaps, remarked sufficiently, at the time of the Writers’ Conference, this role of literature: to permit continuity. However far Ronsard’s era may seem to me, however indifferent I may be in face of the problems that took up their minds at that time, the emotion that gives life to the Odes, because outside the limits of time, remain ever present for me; I wed it and I make it mine at once. I feel comfort and joy in thinking that those who come after will find in this food the same savor.
These reflections have no connection with the date. If I communicate them here it is because they were those of that morning and because I have nothing else to say.
Back in Paris since the previous evening, and as no one yet knew that I was there, I had no fear of being disturbed, and could chat peacefully with my friend, then write a few letters, railing all the while, as every day, against that devouring obligation that correspondence becomes. Then I finished correcting some proofs which I went immediately to take back to the Nouvelle Revue Française.
I always carry some printed matter with me, for I like to read as I walk. It is an immaterial screen that one erects between oneself and life; fragile screen, split ceaselessly, for one participates just the same in the bustle of the street; but a special joy comes from the discord between the real and the imaginary. Oh! I am ready to recognize that this habit is contrary to the principles themselves of my ethics; but my ethics also include, most fortunately, inconsistency. So I had taken the last two numbers of the Littérature Internationale, that I had just received, anxious to read a novelette by Waldo Frank and the article by Miraki on The Belle of Basle. And, by chance, my glance caught my name, in the Thoughts Outloud of A. Lejner; which I read immediately with keen pleasure, finding great comfort in that distant and unexpected sympathy.
In the offices of the Revue, I met someone very well informed on the undercurrents of politics, with whom I talked for quite a while, with great interest, certainly, but without much profit, for, in conversations of that kind where I feel the subject escaping my province, the great concern that I have not to appear an idiot makes me immediately become one.
I had lunch alone; then, finding nothing to do, I went to the movies. I am always fond of the movies, but especially after a long stay in the country. I saw an English Colonial picture, dripping with unreality and stupidity, where the whites posed naturally as the champions of courage, of nobility of soul and honor; where the blacks observed as best they could the indications of the stage director to bring out their barbarism. Not all; there was the clan of those who, submissive to English authority and won over to noble sentiments, showed themselves really worthy of becoming British subjects.
Then there was another feature (to tell the truth, it was at the neighborhood theatre, where I went as soon as the colonial picture had ended: I was having a fling!), a French picture, that one; well played, too, and not bad. That film showed, as many others of French production, alas! the painting of moral decay. A pitiful numbskull whom a great paternal love tried to make sympathetic in spite of everything, lent himself, in financial dealings, to the worst forms of complacency, to the filthiest compromises; but this trash took on a sublime air because he committed them for love of the beautiful black eyes of his daughter; with the result that paternal love became as repugnant as love after the manner of des Grieux. I exaggerate, yes, I know; but not much. And, much more than mediocrity, certain forms of complacency in roguery affect me, and the art of finding in love an excuse. If I were not so enamored of the love that exalts, I should not be so resentful of all love that vilifies. And it is this last that, all too often, our literature and our movies like to paint. In three quarters of the novels and pictures that we are offered, it seems that the woman has no other mission than to lead the man into catastrophe.