My mother said to me, I come from a long line of unmarried mothers, and I don't want you to be the same. (It was her idea of a joke. I refused to laugh then but I do now.) But I am the same, and my little girl too, if she hadn't died. But perhaps in her lifetime things would have changed and the choice would not be between a safe husband and being an outcast or eccentric. (Stendhal's advice to his sister Pauline.) In Paris or any big city I'd be thought a bit eccentric, a sort of vagabond, and find a place in the theatre and with artists. Why am I writing like this? I don't want anything else. I am happy with my little house among the trees and the rocks, with the waterfall and the wind singing my music to me. But this excerpt was from after she had regained an equilibrium.
For months — no, more, years, at least two years, for it is hard to mark the point where the tone of her journals changed, Julie raved. She was rather mad. This was when they sent her Rémy off to the Ivory Coast as a soldier and her child had died. She was knocked clean off balance: All our balances are so precarious, a touch can do it, send us spinning, and down we go, into the whirlpool. Sometimes her pages are so scrambled and scratched only odd phrases are readable. The devil… the devil… who is the devil, if he has such sweet music? She scrawled variations of this phrase over many pages: these were clearly verbal equivalents of the music itself.
The name Rémy filled pages. Rémy, Rémy, Rémy, she wrote, blotching pages with tears. The pages she wrote about Paul are dry and her tone ironical. But she wrote retrospectively about Pauclass="underline" thus do we make safe stories about the raw pain of the past. Not all the comments are self-mocking. When I think of Paul, she wrote, and this was before she loved Rémy and was still full of pain because Paul had gone,I feel a smile on my face. I hold the smile and go to the little mirror. I see an angry and even vicious curl to my lips. I don't know myself in that smile. I remember Maman gave me a doll. It came from the 'big house' — that is, my so-called father brought it from Paris. She was beautiful. She had long fair ringlets and blue eyes. She wore a dress like those after the Revolution when the rich people returned to Paris and fashions mocked the guillotine. She had a bright red ribbon around her neck. It was an expensive doll. I broke the doll and buried it. Maman said, What are you doing? I said, I have killed Marie. Maman gave me one of her looks. I can sometimes feel that look on my face. She was not angry. She wanted to understand. She watched me put a little cross on the grave. Then I put a gift of bananas and wine by the cross for the forest spirits and Vaval. I did not know then how in parts of the world the old spirits, and even devils, have become part of Christianity. I said to Maman, 'I didn't kill Marie, Vaval killed her.' Maman didn't say anything. She was smiling. That is the smile I have on my face when I think of Paul. But it was he who killed me. I believed I would die when they sent him away. I looked at him in his uniform when he came to say goodbye to me. He was crying and so was I. But I thought, When you are killed there will be blood on that beautiful tunic of yours. But he hasn't been killed. He is having a distinguished career in the army in Indo-China. His father told me when he came to find out how I was getting on. He is a fine man, Paul's father. He told me he himself had to give up the girl he loved, because his parents made him. I asked if he thought parents were compelled to make sure their children suffer as they had themselves. He said, 'I am sorry; believe me, I'm sorry.' He had tears in his eyes. Such tears come cheap.
In the period when Julie was off balance, the music she wrote sounded, as the Russians put it, like cats scratching the heart. And then she recovered, and wrote about God and the Devil like a true daughter of the Enlightenment. And yet she did believe that she heard voices in the river sounds and in the wind. No one calls people crazy who enjoy conjuring up faces in the fire.
Theatrically there was a difficulty, condensing the 'scratching' music coming between the 'troubadour' music and the 'second-period' music so that it was merely suggested. But was it honest to compress the period of rage and despair into a few bars, when she herself said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her? But art has to be a cheat and a sleight of hand, we all know that. Using time as a measure, it was honest, for there were years to come before the friendship with Philippe and his sensible proposal for her future, the years when she wrote the music that was all pure cool sound, and painted her charming pictures. There was another difficulty too. After all, the Master Printer had a son Robert, met just once but with such a potential for reviving everything she had renounced. In the play he was not mentioned at all. There was too much of everything: too many ragged ends, false starts, possibilities rejected — too much life, in short, so it all had to be tidied up. Julie's journal, where she imagined her married life with Philippe, which would suffocate her, was not in the play. Instead her rejection of him was in a song: Good man, you are not for me, good man, you don't know who sings to me at night among the rocks… These words were in her journals.
Act Three, then, was the Master Printer's Act. It will be seen that the shape of this play had after all turned out to be Act One: Paul. Act Two: Rémy. Act Three: Philippe.
During Act Three, Bill Collins and Andrew Stead, Julie's two former lovers, sat about on the edge of the action, watching. Sometimes they sat on either side of Sarah, and then she was divided. With only Bill there, she allowed herself to submerge in a bath of warm sympathy, not to mention anything else, while Andrew seemed cool and ungiving. But sitting with Andrew, when Bill was not there, seeing Bill through his eyes, then the young man was certainly too much of a good thing, and Sarah felt uneasy. 'Pretty baby' — she had found the words of the song on her tongue when she woke, not once but several times. It never does to ignore these messages from the depths. Nor the 'snapshots' — when people you love and have become used to are seen as if for the first time.