Thus the conversation would go on till Georges looked at Catherine, and Catherine looked at me, and we all slowly rose to go. How lonely poor Oncle Charles felt. He would come to the door of the car, and stand with one foot on the running-board, talking of coughs and colds or of clients and municipal rates, till Tante Zoubie would shout, and say, ‘Don’t catch cold! You haven’t taken your coat, Papa.’ And the car would shake and hum and swing us away — Catherine driving carefully and with authority, while I, seated by her, turned to Georges at the back, and we talked of anything that came to our minds.
Georges’s research in Chinese had led him to further very interesting theories about the relation between Nestorianism and Buddhism; he was still working on the Fou’kien stele, and on the connection between the lotus and the cross. His mind, wheresoever it went, took Christianity with it, as mine conspired with history to prove Vedanta. In fact it would seem, speaking objectively, that almost any theory will fit in with most facts, just as almost any system makes it possible to play chess efficiently. The only difference is, in how many cases can you say you really are convinced yourself? It is easy to convince others: you cannot fool yourself. And this, finally, is the only touchstone of good research.
Catherine was happy driving the car, and pointing to some corner of Mantes where she had come with Grandfather, or where she had fallen from a horse at the fair of St Ouen. For her, life was a series of remembered facts. And a good life was one where there was such a series of remembered facts. Death itself when it came would be a remembered fact.
Passing in the night by the Seine, that quiet, self- assured river, which had given kings their strength and the French language its precision, how I fell back on myself, and remembered myself as the other. I would wonder, too, coming back home on those Sunday nights, whether Madeleine would one day let me speak to her again, or whether Savithri had reached India yet — would she be happy, truly happy? — whether the radar had indeed contacted the plane. I wondered what it would be like for Savithri to go back to the Surajpur Palace, with the Nine Musics of the day, the gunfire for the birthday of the maharaja — he had a right to five rounds — and the parties at night, where the new crude Congressmen and the old vulgar aristocracy mingled for the building of a magnificent India. But it would never be my India, it could never be Savithri’s India. It would in fact be nobody’s India, till someone sat and remembered what India was.
India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea, a metaphysic. Why go there anyhow, I thought; I was born an exile, and I could continue to be one. My India I carried wheresoever I went. But not to see the Ganges, not to dip into her again and again… No, the Ganges was an inner truth to me, an assurance, the origin and end of my Brahminic tradition. I would go back to India, for the Ganges and for the deodars of the Himalayas, and for the deer in the forests, for the keen call of the elephant in the grave ocellate silence of the forests. I would go back to India, for that India was my breath, my only sweetness, gentle and wise; she was my mother. I felt I could still love something: a river, a mountain, the name of a woman…
I wished I could be a river, a tree, an aptitude of incumbent silence.
My work was making a patient, and sometimes even a rapid progress. I had just finished my ninth chapter, on the Holy Grail, its historical significance and destiny, and had only two more chapters to finish. When I came, however, to the tenth chapter — it was on Paradise — I had to go very cautiously, for the old professors at the Sorbonne were not only clever men but often conservative and doctrinaire; you had to be sure that every perspective had been foreseen, or you could get into a mesh of futile and often exasperating discussion. I had been at too many soutenances des theses not to know how often the self-evident seemed the least obvious to scholarly minds, especially if they have sat for too long in the same seat, and at the Sorbonne. For them there is nothing more to achieve, except it be the College de France — and that does not come everyone’s way either. For the rest you go on punctuating your Racine according to historical rules and point out mistakes in the spelling of some text of Pascal, or an Agrippa d’Aubigné, that a former colleague, now dead, had taken some ten or twenty years to edit. For these old scholars, said Dr Robin-Bessaignac, who was no typical professor of the Sorbonne, every hypothesis had a way of opening somebody’s else’s grave. The autopsy always proved intriguing. For that matter all bodies do behave differently, whatever their commonplace diseases — which again Dr Robin-Bessaignac pointed out, indicated the great significance of individuality; even in death you are different, whether you die of cancer or of heart trouble. But the dead scholar was the particular passion of the Sorbonnards: he smelt bad. ‘All graves smell bad,’ said Dr Robin-Bessaignac, ‘and they enjoy this delicious humectus of fermenting toxins. It replaces their Dubonnet,’ said Dr Robin- Bessaignac, and he was done with the subject.
My tenth chapter was especially difficult because it was going to deal with the metaphysical symbolism of Paradise. According to the Hindu concept there is not only satya and asatya, Truth and untruth, but also mitya, illusion — like the horns on the head of a rabbit, or the son of a barren woman. Paradise, I argued, was the inversion of Truth. To see frankly is not necessarily to see fairly — you can look at a thing upside down. After all the deer went to drink water at the mirage. The Impossible becomes the beautiful. Love becomes divided against itself, just as Avignon is split into Petit Avignon and Avignon des Papes. In between is the Rhone and the broken bridge of St Benezet. You can go far into the river, but you cannot go across. Petit Avignon will always be Paradise. It is like Avignon seen in the river: you see the reflection and you enjoy it; you can see it like a child and enjoy it; but put your hand into the water and try to catch it, to palp it, and you have only water in your hand. So does the deer drink water of the mirage or the barren woman have her son.