This primitive soul, when in her normal state — that is when she was hungry — had a refreshing, pleasant side. She had often confessed to me that voluptuous sensuality was frankly what least interested her. She brought everything back to family life, to the austere nature of family life. She merely aspired to a small farmstead on the outskirts of Paris and marriage to a man who could repair bicycles. That young woman sought no more from life. She was a sincere, discreet, positive individual.
She felt so indifferent towards her profession — that, by the way, was perfectly legal — she could only refer to it in jest. She deeply regretted that the activity of her trade, as projected into the room I occupied, might lead me to waste time I should be dedicating to work. We reached an agreement: whenever a noisy, affectionate, thrusting gentleman came up to her room — un monsieur tapageur — she’d tap on the wall to indicate the nature of her situation so I could act accordingly. One tactic might be, for example, to leave my room. If her customer was quieter and more considerate, she’d tap twice to suggest that the outcome would be less disruptive. If love climbed those stairs — something that rarely happened — she said nothing. Then tolerance was in order.
When I was busy working, I sometimes heard a tap on the wall.
“Well, well! The show’s on its way …!” I’d say, gathering up my papers and preparing to join the flow on the street for a short or long time. The interruptions that sabotage the consolidation of culture, the hazards confronting serious study, are permanent and systematic.
If love was coursing, I’d hear innocent words being whispered.
“Oh, Marcel, buy me a canary!” Ivonne would say, alternating whimpers with a ray of hope.
“I’ll buy you a canary later. Of course, it will be a chirpy canary. Now I must buy you a hot-water bottle, because it is freezing and coughs are not a good idea at our age.”
Nevertheless, I never saw Ivonne become the owner of a canary, whether it was chirpy or apathetic.
“Are you all happy at home?” asked the young woman.
“Very happy, thank you.”
One day a gentleman fond of poetry visited, who turned out to be a poet, as I later discovered. I expect he was a poet from the provinces.
“Do you like Victor Hugo?” asked the visitor meaningfully
“Who is Victor Hugo? His name’s buzzing round the back of my head …”
“Of course … the Victor Hugo!”
“Yes, yes, the Victor Hugo! Of course …”
“Who else could it be … I mentioned him because I’ve written some verse.”
“The long sort?”
“Oh … on the long side …”
“I’ll be frank. Don’t be angry. You know how much I love you. Long verse …”
“No! They’re not as long as you imagine. Long verse isn’t the thing nowadays. They’re old-fashioned.”
And the good gentleman began to declaim …
It was at 145, Boulevard Saint-Michel that I started to become aware of the significance and boundless range of human vanity.
Henri Gide’s mind was more devious, distorted as it was by conventional social attitudes. He was a typical product of his times. He got up at five o’clock. He caught the first bus. He started work punctually at six at the Porte d’Orléans octroi. It amounted to giving a green ticket to all owners of carriages, of whatever type, who came through that gate up to three P.M. Another man — his worst enemy — collected the money the people in the carriages handed over when they surrendered their green tickets. Both officials believed they were indispensable and were convinced the octroi ticketing system was a pillar of civilization. A matter of hierarchy separated them. Gide thought he had a higher status than his colleague because he held the tickets. The other fellow, as he was the one collecting the money, thought he was above him in the pecking order.
“I love you …” Madame Gide said early at night between the matrimonial sheets (they didn’t go to bed late).
“Meaning what?” asked her husband unpleasantly.
“Why do you say ‘meaning what’…?”
“It’s a mystery to me …”
“You’ll always be a worrier.”
Generally General Cambronne’s mot abruptly curtailed this cordial family exchange.
Monsieur Henri was an orderly man like most men with his temperament, and unbearably grumpy. On the outside he was a good-natured, easy-going, well-balanced, and reasonable man. In reality he was violent. A frightened Marianne told me as much one day.
“My poor small upstanding hubby is intolerable … He has it in him to kill me if he was to get up and not find his small cup of coffee waiting for him, just as he likes it.”
Marianne was fond of using the adjective “small.” This mania for adjectives made her sound very French. She’d talk about small income, small savings, a small coffee, a small supper, a small trip, a small dress. She described everything as petit.
“Donne-moi une petite goutte, mon petit chéri,” she’d say when her husband was dunking a sugar lump in his glass of cognac.
In our country everybody inflates, ups the ante. That lady championed the diminutive. Initially, accustomed as I was to our macro manner, I thought she was suffering from a shortsightedness that brought with it petty, rampant selfishness — selfishness that would provoke cruelty if her small pleasures and well-being were ever threatened. However, later, when I’d thought things through, I realized that everyone defends things that are infinitely small, even if they describe them as large, as they do in our country. In our neck of the woods people speak of this or that as being big, because things are smaller than anywhere else. That’s perfectly understandable.
I still remember the outcry that went up in this couple’s room the day Monsieur Henri opened a socialist newspaper for the first time in the presence of his good lady, L’Humanité, to be precise. Socialism had been dancing around the dues collector’s head for some time — supposing that socialism could ever dance one way or the other — but he’d never dared open his daily paper before in the presence of Marianne. In the course of my conversations with him, I noticed that he was familiar with the vocabulary of socialist dialectics. On the day of that row I heard him say to his wife in a gruff, churlish voice: “You are a contradictory, paradoxical cell …”
“Talk plainly …!”
“One must accept scientific terminology. If not, one immediately risks appearing to be ridiculous …”
“You’ll lose your post, Henri!” she replied sobbing. “Don’t you appreciate what it is to possess an octroi in Paris? We’ll be thrown into poverty …”
“Will you be so good as to shut up? You are not familiar with the experimental method.”
“Think of your family, Henri!”
“Don’t worship false idols, Marianne!”
The result was completely obtuse in respect to the conversation I just noted. On the excuse that socialism might have brought him bad luck, he surrendered to an orgy of order, anxiety over punctuality and a bacchanalian doing of his duties — and needless to say fulfillment from duty done. The moment came when he had to restrain his efforts, because his superiors found them obscene. Socialism led him to be excessively zealous.