“You’re right there, you’ve disrupted my dearest habits; you’ve jostled me, you’ve hypnotized me! You were never in the least grateful for the lessons you attended at my school, because the good antique dealer, the artistic antique dealer, is me and not you; you’ve got a nose, that’s all.”
“My dear Placide, I’ve never disputed any of your great virtues, but you do have a few small faults: you’re meticulous, fussy, cautious, circumspect; admit that without me you would have daydreamed your life away… don’t you think?”
“I don’t intend to continue this discussion,” said Placide very curtly, “let’s just say that we’re divorcing due to incompatibility of temperaments. At Saint-Vallier, when we had that accident and after you had almost killed me, you left me on my own all night in your abandoned car by the banks of the Rhône; I was already so furious that I’d decided never to see you again. I felt sorry for you and I changed my mind, but since then your frantic express-train frenzy has only got worse. As in the meantime an international association of antique dealers has been set up in Rome and I have been asked to join as an expert on Gothic art, I’ve accepted. Does that vex you?”
Pierre considered the matter:
“No,” he said. “Better that than you blaming me later on for not allowing you to try your luck.”
“As you can see, I am delighted by this ready agreement,” said Placide, who was feeling both offended and consoled, for he had feared rather more resistance. “No hard feelings, dear fellow, no hard feelings, my slippery old eel!”
And he went out giving an affected little wave.
Pierre was left alone gazing at the ceiling for a while. He was thinking of the way in which he would reorganize his business, without a partner. A great deal of boring work in prospect, assets to be shared out, further funds to be found. He would have to get down to it straight away. For once, his “straight away” did not signify “immediately”, since Pierre did not stir; he even sat down again in his armchair and reflected.
“That idiot has ruined my day!”
His bad mood filled him with unpleasant images. In his mind’s eye he thought about the evening before last with the two girls that had begun so happily and ended so gloomily. What could have cast such a spell on him?
He kicked his chair away and rang for Chantepie, who did not come. He rang again. The sound of the bell, which failed to activate the late, limping arrival of the elderly servant, grew mournful. It was like a stone falling into a well. Pierre opened the doors and shouted:
“Chantepie!”
He looked around to see whether one of those notes was not lying around that Chantepie left whenever he went out shopping to inform or ask questions of his master: “Has monsieur thought about tomorrow’s dinner?” or “The shirts have not come back, there was no word from the laundryman: monsieur must not scold me”.
Lying on top of the kitchen scales, Pierre found an envelope addressed to him:
Monsieur,
I want to respectfully say to monsieur that I no longer wish to serve him and that I’m off and that’s that. I’ve been to see Doctor Abraham the same one who cancels monsieur’s fines for me becoz he is the town councillor and who also gives me free consultations without making me pay even though he’s Jewish. “Chantepie you must calm down, you’re the delicate sort and cannot endure for long the heavy work that is put upon you, you’re killing yourself Chantepie.” “Monsieur Abraham,” I replied to him, “I would be happy to die on the job for I have no children and nothing but disappointments and no money.”
It’s not the muscles shrinking it’s the nerves that are killing me and I can’t stand monsieur any longer I’m fed up with rushing around for him all the time without a break and always at the double I can’t wait to slow down I swallow my tears but I’m going after so many years without whingeing I’m not angry with monsieur who was always honest with me and good and who often picked me up when I was feeling gloomy and when I couldn’t stand up on account of my rheumatism, monsieur is not stupid monsieur will understand.
Sincerely yours.
Chantepie (Gasparin)
“So Chantepie’s leaving too!” said Pierre mockingly. “Here I am twice cuckolded, and in the rarest manner, cuckold without a wife. Chantepie and Placide both agreeing to blame me for excessive speed. It’s comical!
“Meanwhile, here I am alone. Alone, alone,” he repeated as he paced up and down the hall. “If this continues I shall soon have no one to speak to. I shall think aloud like the polar explorers.
“Alone! In fact, it’s only right. What is speed if not a race that is won, the prize for which is loneliness. We sow what we reap… we sow in the hope that the seed will not grow again,” Pierre concluded angrily. “I’m the champion of adversity. I’ve endured that invisible pressure that infiltrates us and is known as slowness better than others. I am a sporting spectacle,” he concluded proudly.
“Yes, but what about when I’m old? When I’ll have lost my spurt (it’s the spurt that loses its edge first), and then my starting speed, when my pace has slowed down, when I start to look like everyone else, what will become of me?
“No, I’ll never be old. The day that slowness gets the better of me I shall die of asphyxiation. Death is probably nothing more than a difference of pressure between our outer and our inner beings. When the outer one becomes the stronger, we die.
“Nevertheless, I won’t always be able to pass through people like a ray, without clinging on to any of them. Human beings have a reality, a volume, movement: what a shock there’ll be when we meet one another! Or what they call meeting! That is to say exchange faithfulness, warmth, vitality, and all part of an intimacy that I have never known until now. In short, the day I fall in love with a woman, when there will be someone else close to me apart from colleagues or servants, from people I lunch, dine, sleep with, paddle or pedal with — the day when I shall have to split a part of myself in two, hoping that that part also splits into new sections which will be my children…
“It’s strange that with other people, all this should happen smoothly, without their even seeming to notice it; they must have an instinct that’s lacking in me and that operates differently. They bond together somehow… haphazardly… but it’s happiness all the same. What’s more,” he added to comfort himself, “it’s not without its difficulties: the pieces function and get stuck and even break up… at the law courts. But since the universal mechanism encompasses specific cogs, the world continues to roll along. Therefore I don’t have to worry about it.
“It’s me I ought to worry about. I’m frightened of not being normal, of being unnatural. I’m not sure that an understanding between me and other people is possible. The proof: Placide and Chantepie.
“Love is a dangerous territory for athletes. During the wars, the clearest skies were those in which the greatest number of aviators were killed. What will happen to me when I experience love?
“For I’m ready for love just as I am for death, or for poverty; I’m not the kind to tiptoe his way around the elemental forces and the great affairs of life. I shall pay cash on the nail when the time comes for me to become involved and commit myself.
“To do so you need to know yourself well, know who you are, what you’re worth. I believed myself to be a man like any other man, one merely endowed with a little more liveliness. Is this liveliness that I’m so proud of speed? Or is it a way of dissembling and dragging one’s feet, a delaying tactic, a way of avoiding the real answers, of substituting the great leap that every man must make into the unknown with a series of small hops? But Chantepie has left me. My cat has left me. Placide is leaving me. I have no friends. (He always dwelt on this.) Were I to ransack my bottom drawer, all I would come up with are relatives or colleagues. Am I a monster? My pulse is regular and my blood pressure is about normal. I know of no physical defects, my family background is excellent, my spinal cord would be the envy of a tightrope-walker. So why do people avoid me? Why am I left on my own? I thought of myself as a ball of fire; perhaps I’m just burnt out.”