However you may have behaved, dear Paul, no one would believe you. Or were you, rather, thinking of the way you treated women when in your Journal inutile you noted sharply:
“I’m a shit.”
Said none too soon! Did Hélène not give her blank cheque? It would have been very grudging of her to blame you for affairs that were foreseen in your agreement. The fact that she may have suffered as a result made her love you all the more. She was not made of marble. In your fictional works, which are sometimes transparent — the new generations, or whoever they were, not having inherited their parents’ skills — the preliminaries are brief. It’s depriving oneself of the best part.
I open… Ouvert la nuit. No single favourite story, they’re all gems. ‘La nuit nordique’ has delighted me ever since I was a teenager. Aïno, a cool Scandinavian girl, yields to the traveller’s fine words on the shortest night of the year in Sweden:
Aïno gripped her hands around my neck.
“You’re an international swine,” she said.
I took her in my arms. She remained there the rest of the night, for the sun, after a quick shower, was already bustling about.
Since I complained to you that such a night was far too brief, you came back at me:
“Ten minutes is a long time. Two would have been enough.”
Women were never angry with you. They treasured your notes, which were often written in lead pencil, which was easier to rub out. In the inscription to a press officer, I recalclass="underline" “To X… in memory of the Savoy, affectionately, P. Morand.” Not exactly a cheap hotel. The drawing rooms in which these beautiful ladies entertained you bear witness to your lightning passage through a life that had come to a halt following your departure (or your flight, if you prefer). Your photograph could be seen everywhere, on mantelpieces, on bedside tables, in a desk with drawers that contained expeditious love letters from you, and in particular the photo that I like very much: three-piece suit, an elbow resting casually on a dresser beneath a delicate portrait of a young girl by Marie Laurencin; sometimes you are in a bathing suit or dressed as a deep-sea diver on the Passable beach at Cap-Ferrat, or now and then wearing dungarees at the wheel of a racing Bugatti, the famous 57. One of your former priestesses owned a bronze bust of you and used to say: “According to the mood I’m in, I tap him on the cheek as I pass by or stroke his forehead.” Would you ever have written such a poignant story as ‘La Mort du cygne’ without your intimate relationship with Josette Day, the one-time ballet student at the Opéra before she became famous as a film star thanks to the close attention of Marcel Pagnol and her friendship with Cocteau? One of these ladies whom I shall not name said to me: “I am Hécate!” To be as precise as possible, she was not the only woman to make such a claim, and, perhaps, at the time that Lewis et Irène was published, there may have been a woman who claimed to have inspired the character of Elsie Magnac, the earlier version of Hécate. Elsewhere, in the same novel, people thought they recognized a famous fashion designer who protected herself admirably from the ogres of finance. This lady friend was not very pleased when, at a fancy dress ball given at her private mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, among the Pierrots, the cardinals and the Punches, you appeared in evening dress and a white tie, immaculate apart from one minor detaiclass="underline" a strip of shirt-tail was sticking out from your fly-buttons. Lewis himself could not have provided more of a shock. I take the liberty of reminding you of these scraps from the past and from your books, since novelists easily forget their waxen or flesh-and-blood characters after having imprisoned them for life in two hundred pages. The reader is a better keeper of memory than the author.
Your short note of the 11th of November 1975 has occasioned a very long reply. I can sense you longing to go outside for some fresh air, but I should like to add a comment about the body of your work that reflects you like a revolving mirror.
Hiver caraïbe, Bouddha vivant, Air indien, those portraits of cities, Londres, New York, Bucarest, reread today are perfect faded snapshots akin to Lartigue’s beautiful photographs.
You make little of your travel writing. Wrongly so. The world deserved the very rare example you provide of a simultaneously loving and lucid eye. These tales are your roving memory, your silhouette standing out amid the chaos.
Whenever a writer sees “other people” he ceases to inspect his own navel.
I was saying that your note had occasioned a long response to which, for all your chronic impatience, I should like to add a word about your books. A tornado suddenly shattered this work that was so self-confident and we probably then assessed its vulnerability, which made it more precious still. An accident along the way humanized and sensitized it. Did it need this? Perhaps it was necessary for it to move forward openly and less hurriedly. Let us refer to Ernst Jünger’s diary, kept during the years 1991–6:
Politics is the pox of literature, writes Paul Morand. An excellent maxim that he himself did not adhere to sufficiently, still less so his wife. I had put them on their guard. He was one of those writers on whom his youngest disciples relied, however much they may have compromised themselves politically or morally.
In fact, you did not affect politics, politics affected you. You made fun of it thanks to a scepticism inherited from Philippe Berthelot, your sponsor as well as Jean Giraudoux’s at the Quai d’Orsay. A senior civil servant serves the state and the state decrees, well or badly, its political policies. At a particular moment in the history of France, our state was split in two as if with an axe. It had two half-heads. We hesitated between serving the one or the other. Millions of lives and their futures were caught in two nets. This time, luck was not on your side. From being First Minister in Berne, you found yourself virtually on the street. In Switzerland:
… the knot on which saws are broken; invasions have shaped it like a joiner’s plane, obliged to deflect in the midst of the grain.
In exile? Not really. Let us say rather: in purgatory. One gets out eventually. In the meantime, borders are closed or closely watched, you are struck off the ministerial list, your salary is suspended, in Romania the Soviets confiscate Hélène’s income, in France publishers show caution and your books have little success except in bibliophile circles, which is a far better sign of posterity than you might think.
Not destitute, but you could be seen pedalling on an old bicycle to do your shopping in the market. Hélène and you nibble away together. The winter is particularly harsh and you shiver in gloomy rooms. By great good fortune, the Lausanne municipal library in the canton of Vaud is a warm shelter. Deprived of geographical space, you spend the afternoons there consulting the histories of Europe and Asia, the greatest possible escape. A copy of Montociel, rajah aux Grandes Indes is inscribed to Josette Day: “… this account of a journey during a time when I no longer travelled, Paulm. 1944–6.” Montociel, unfortunately, was a failure as a novel. One does not look for the “new Morand” there. In another book, you write to the same person: “… this journey in time, her devoted Pmorand.” The two condensed signatures, which already look like text messages, recall L’Homme pressé [The Man in a Hurry]. The pill is not merely bitter, it is sad, as you had foreseen in 1931:
There is something lovelier than Paris; it is nostalgia for Paris.
In the full ripeness of his years (fifty-seven), a man whose books flew from one success to another was unwisely approaching the Tarpeian Rock. You responded courageously with the writer’s supreme weapon: some masterpieces, Le Bazar de la Charité, Milady, Parfaite de Saligny, Fouquet and one of the greatest and most dramatic novels of the twentieth century: Le Flagellant de Séville. Venices would be the testament and farewell to the friends of your youth, to the ghosts, to a miracle of serene beauty, the city that overcomes everything that is ponderous: