But Pierre had just reached his thirty-fifth birthday. Not having discovered love, he began to treat it with respect. “The day I find a woman whom I don’t throw myself at,” he told himself, “I shall have arrived at my destination.” He sensed that when that day came, it would not be he who would have to give up his bad habits, it would be they that would give him up.
Hedwige was waiting for him in the drawing room. The tea stood steaming on the tray; an indoor dress, red like that of the old silks of the Orient, flowed down her firm body in lovely folds, like a waterfall over a rock. This scenario immediately made him want to be outside.
“Let’s go out,” he said, “take a coat. I won’t be able to speak unless I have fresh air.”
They went for a walk on the nearby terrace, in the winter twilight, with the early evening lights of Paris below them and the tall forest trees that stopped in a straight line at the edge of the lawn.
Hedwige agreed to accompany him without making any fuss. She found it natural that a hand other than hers should record her fate. She relied on God to take good care of her. Following Pierre in this park did not bother her. She is serene, sensible and brave. The geese are keeping watch.
Pierre was also very self-possessed, very calm. With gravitation causing them to lean towards one another, their fingers became entwined and they were able to reach a deeper understanding of a situation that distinguished them from other people and yet made them similar to everyone else.
This coral-red and sulphur-yellow dusk, this garden filled with naked statues beneath the snow-filled sky, these dark oak trees swaying in the breeze — all these romantic incantations, far from exciting Pierre, cautioned him to exercise modesty and restraint. He felt an expectation growing inside him and he was trying hard to fill it because it was leading him beyond, not just his desires, but what he felt himself capable of. Just as a Christian hopes for a holy death, he was hoping for a real life. His respect for what was happening to him and for the person who was causing it to happen — since Hedwige is innocent and spotless in every respect — preclude him from making any aggressive move.
For the first time ever he is taking his time and he is doing so with infinite pleasure, for he has his life in front of him and he is moving, at a natural pace, along the widest and best-known of roads; a road whose surroundings he does not recognize and whose name he is even unfamiliar with, since he has never been along it; it’s a road designed for pedestrians, where fast cars cannot go. He is going to knock at the oracle’s door, like peasants at the door of the Blessed Virgin, to ask whether their land will be fertile. He is leaving daily life behind and is entering a dream in which children, inventors, madmen and those who draw the jackpot live, a dream conducive to the fulfilment of grand designs, not of petty desires. That is why he moves with the heaviness of a man asleep, at the slow pace of a deep-sea diver.
Hedwige regards this immemorial man as a man of today. Every generation of young women has its particular type of man just as every generation has one author and every author is only ever loyal to one hero.
Night has fallen. Pierre no longer knows how long he has been sitting on this bench without uncrossing his legs; beside him, Hedwige has not stirred, she whose pliant movements are so beautiful. The ground at their feet, ravaged by winter, is arid and skeletal and the frozen pebbles by the balusters shatter into splinters.
Up above, the Milky Way resembles a caravan trail worn away by ancient suns.
“Before God or before any other maker of the stars,” Pierre said suddenly, “I am ready to wait for you as long as is needed, and I have made up my mind not to marry anyone else but you.”
Hedwige drew closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder.
PART TWO The Price of Time
CHAPTER XIV
PIERRE AND HEDWIGE were married at the end of the month and went to live in Neuilly in an apartment that Pierre had hastily furnished and one that suited his wife’s nonchalant habits; in this way domestic problems were reduced to choosing common parts and drawing up demarcations of which drawers and wardrobe space were whose.
The layout of an apartment is often indicative of the layout of the heart. Pierre and Hedwige had adjoining but separate bedrooms. Pierre had wanted this partition; between him and his wife there was this enormous structure, this mountain of plaster which for two weeks had divided what the law had brought together. The two parties spoke to one another through it from their beds at night and were woken merrily each morning by knockings on the wall; and from each side of this equator, like poles apart, they kept away from each other for the night.
This was what Pierre had wanted (and Hedwige, both serious and prudish, had not appeared surprised, quite the contrary), not that he had not desired her immediately, for he was in love, youthful and deeply moved by her feelings for him. But he experienced a sharp and bitter pleasure in disciplining himself and starting life as though he had been married for thirty years. He was put off by the notion of throwing himself at Hedwige and taking her by surprise or by legal agreement. Firstly, the fulfilment of conjugal rights had something ridiculous and bestial, judicial and Louis Philippe-like about it. Undressing a woman, tearing off her dress and displaying the wife’s nightgown at the window to neighbours gathered in the street, as in certain Jewish rites, is not really the greatest homage you can pay her. Pierre had sworn to himself not to cast Hedwige all of a sudden into a new universe, that of the senses. And so it was that they lived so chastely that they might have been mistaken for campsite friends, for one of those couples innocently introduced to one another through the small ads at the Touring Club de France. Pierre had used all his strength as a man to stop himself from violating Hedwige as he violated everything else. It was the finest gift he could give her, the greatest proof of his love and respect he could pay her. He had had to make a colossal effort; proceeding slowly is not easy when you are not used to it. And, of course, he also forbade himself that sexual chemistry, those kitchen recipes for voluptuous pleasure invented over the idle centuries. No love in the saddle, no touching-up in the gods, but none of that intimate touching-up that our fathers resorted to either, none of that figure-skating beneath the mirrors of the canopy, none of those breaks at billiards that only entertain old men while they still have the means.
It was between himself and his passion for Hedwige, rather than between Hedwige and him, that Pierre had erected this partition. He had wanted to put himself to the test: “If I can restrain myself in this matter, I will be able to control myself in all other respects. Other successes will come easily to me, I shall have disassociated love with gluttony and I shall have triumphed over my demon for good.”