A Singular Man Read online

  One evening, as I was coming in, the owner asked me to accompany him into his office.

  "You don't look," he said to me, "as if you realize the situation you're in."

  "Oh, but I do, I do, I realize it perfectly."

  "One wouldn't think so. You're not doing anything. I see you pass by every day without even showing so much as a trace of embarrassment. I'd say that takes a fair amount of cheek."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "It isn't for me to tell you."

  "You know very well that I will pay you."

  "That's precisely what I wonder about."

  "Any day now."

  I went up to my room. " 'Any day now.' Why did I say that?" I muttered. I was tempted to go back down to confess to the owner that nobody would ever again be giving me any money. But I decided to wait until the next day.

  "What do you intend to do if I do not pay my bill?" I asked the owner, drawing him aside.

  He gazed at me, dumbfounded. He did not understand my question.

  "What do you mean?"

  When I put my question to him a second time, his immediate impulse was to declare that he would throw me out. But he feared a trap.

  "I think there's a misunderstanding," he said.

  "There is no misunderstanding."

  "Yes, there is. Since you've been here, you've always been on time. There's something behind your question. I'll tell you what. If you're having money troubles, just say so. I'd prefer knowing."

  "I'm not having any troubles. I shall pay you. And if I don't, you will do whatever you like."

  These conversations were being repeated more and more often. I then noted a very strange phenomenon. My fatalism inspired confidence in the hotel owner and even aroused in him the hope of heaven only knows what future windfall.

  One evening I received a pneu from Edith. She directed me to call at her parents' home the next day at four o'clock. The comminatory tone clearly showed that to her mind she was doing me an honor. What did she have to tell me? Was the time nigh when my life was to be filled with tedious questings? I had to run, at four o'clock in the afternoon, to a far corner of Auteuil. And, of course, it was raining. Trembling reflections, sprouting from the sky like mistletoe, disappeared into the asphalt. Up until this point my actions had proceeded from a series of reasonings. The result had hardly been encouraging. Now I had decided to follow my impulses.

  At present I felt, without knowing why, as if I were a sort of creditor. The punishment was beginning. To get rid of me I would be sent off to one address after another. I would have to wait everywhere. I would be treated like a tradesman who pads his bills. Shouldn't I have written to Richard that I fully understood his attitude, thanked him for having wished to have a relatively large sum turned over to me, not given him the impression that I was withdrawing into my shell, always a sign of weakness? It was too late. In Auteuil I was going to hear dead things talked about by a woman who thought they were alive. Well, all I'll have to do is keep still, maintain a good respectful silence.

  Mirrors cast back reflections of me and when a door opened I saw myself being whisked away and then back to where I stood. I walked up to the mezzanine. No need to summon the elevator into action. I climbed the shallow, carpeted stairs without needing to shorten my stride. What was I doing in such a setting, with all that height above me? I leaned on the thick polished banister to catch my breath, or at least I thought that was the reason.

  An elderly lady was sitting near a marble fireplace where some logs were burning. Edith introduced me, invited me to sit down.

  "I asked you to come to my mother's," she said, "because I was anxious to have a conversation with you without my husband present. I have the feeling that, without him there, it will be easier for us to reach an understanding."

  But an understanding about what, for God's sake?

  MY LIFE

  What is one to make of the following story?

  After two hours of battling tooth and nail, the daughter of a poor woodcutter gives up the struggle. The scene takes place in the garden of an old house belonging to a charitable lady in Compiègne. There is a lowering sky. Spring has just begun. The still leafless branches have the suppleness of switches. Now and then the man has paused for a little rest, showing no shame at thus seeming to be harnessed to a lengthy undertaking. Yet he is neither a soldier, nor a laborer, nor a domestic, nor a tradesman. He is an officer in the dragoons, Second Lieutenant Le Claud.

  He is a fine sort of fellow, not very intelligent, who received a good education from the Christian brethren. He knows that he has just willfully transgressed religious law. He could not live in a state of sin. At mess he is not in his usual gay spirits. He is preoccupied. He notices the fact, and not without a little glow of pride. It is not given to every man to have a moral life, is it? That evening he sees his victim again. She is charming in her confusion. He desires her yet more ardently than he did the first time. But he will respect her.

  Nine months later, a child is about to be born on the small estate at Cuts where Madame Mobecourt has sent her protégé. The caretakers convey the news. The old lady hastens to Cuts, even though night has fallen. There is frost. She contemplates the stars inserted at varying depths within the sky, the watery whiteness of the moon above a frozen landscape. On arriving, she makes out lights in the central part of the manor. She thinks: "The caretakers have taken it upon themselves to open the house. They did well." The child? He is red enough to explode. He really does not correspond at all to the tiny, defenseless creature Madame Mobecourt had been expecting to find. He waves his fists. He shrieks. When he stops, you are eager to believe he has calmed down. But all he is doing is catching his breath.

  I am that child.

  There exist people who are convinced that it is how you start out that counts most in life. If it is a bad start we get, the worst misfortunes may well befall us. By this they are not disturbed. For it was inevitable. But if our start is a good one and the worst misfortunes befall us anyway, the same people are sincerely distressed. And so, when the moment has come to register the infant's birth, Madame Mobecourt exerts her authority to defer the establishing of the certificate, so as to permit the father to make himself known. Monsieur Nicaise, recently arrived from a third-rank sub-prefecture, takes no little pride in giving the departmental seat an idea of the tact to be deployed in his district. And the response to Madame Mobecourt is couched in customary and kindly-disposed administrative reserve: "To oblige you, Madame, we shall wait, but we entreat you not to delay too long." This detail has its importance for, nineteen years later, it was accountable for the child's inclusion in the 1919 draft rather than in that of 1918.

  A few days later, Madame Mobecourt, who has succeeded in getting the young mother to talk, requests a visit from Second Lieutenant Le Claud. There then ensues the strangest of conversations. The officer accepts no blame. He does not acknowledge the right of anyone to meddle in his moral life. He will not tolerate anyone likening him to an everyday seducer, still less so to a satyr. "One must not forget after all that Mademoiselle Marguerite was compliant." Furthermore, he has a clear conscience. He knows what he did afterward. Madame Mobecourt utters an exclamation of surprise. Why yes, absolutely, he did his duty. If he does not wish to say in what way, it is out of respect for his interlocutor. There are subjects that he is unable to broach with a lady. What would her opinion of him be if he spoke to her about masculine desire? "Only a man can understand me," he says by way of conclusion.

  Accordingly my grandfather, François Thély (derived from theil: tilleul, linden tree, in langue d'oïl) was a woodcutter. He exaggerated his misfortunes, which was altogether needless. A widower with eight children, alcoholic, his right side paralyzed following a stroke, I picture him living in a rustic but nonethelesss squalid hut in the middle of the Laigle forest. He was, it seems, a draft dodger, an anarchist, without even the instinct to pull off the tatters hanging from his clothes. He refused all help from other
s, thereby, he fancied, instilling in them some sort of guilt. Everyone had grown tired of him. The officials and staff at the various charitable organizations in the region had finally foisted him off on Madame Mobecourt, not without proposing among themselves to observe in what manner she would handle the situation.

  How strangely the word grandfather rings to the ear of a man who never knew his parents! And the nicely balanced sentence which follows: "I am the son of an officer who seduced a poor girl taken in by a charitable lady"—does it not, it too, ring strangely to my ear? I am the son of an officer who seduced a poor girl. . . "Officer," "seduced," "poor girl"—all they are is words, like "grandfather."

  They say that after giving birth to me, my mother remained in Cuts for two years. She must have done chores at the farm. The place had nothing pastoral about it. Heavens no. One hundred seventy acres of beet fields. My mother loved me, I have been told, as only misfortunate young mothers can. Then, one day, she disappeared. They didn't know whether she had left, whether she had dropped dead in the middle of the woods, whether she had drowned herself in the Aisne. Madame Mobecourt had a sister in Versailles who, by happy coincidence, adored children. I was taken there. What happened then? I don't know. In any event I was brought back to Cuts a few years later. But while the gatekeepers still occupied the lodge at the entrance to the estate, the latter no longer belonged to Madame Mobecourt. The elderly lady had for a long time hesitated to sell it, uncomfortable at the idea of abandoning all the humble folk who gravitated around her. But in all likelihood she was eventually obliged to do so.

  The buyer, a Parisian by the name of Rigal, succeeded her. He had the usual features of a newcomer. He was attentive lest he commit a mistake. From fear of doing the wrong thing, he was equally polite with everyone.

  I imagine him being taken about the estate. Monsieur Rigal looks with interest at what he is being shown, but his mind is far away. What interests him is invisible. It is the position he will occupy in the region. Passing the gatekeepers' lodge, Madame Mobecourt advises him to retain these excellent servants.

  On his second visit she returns to the question of the gatekeepers, then, for the first time, she talks about the abandoned little boy—me—whom they look after with such devotion. Later on, she will tell my story, ask the buyer to allow the gatekeepers to keep me under their roof.

  Actually Monsieur Rigal enjoyed playing a role in the countryside. He saw himself intervening in disputes, maintaining some privileges, doing away with some abusive ones, granting still others. He informed himself carefully regarding local customs. Already a property owner in Paris, he tried to cut the figure of a man of experience. But that was not the same thing. He was forever discovering new prerogatives which filled him with secret joy. He agreed to buy.

  The deeds signed, he will not concern himself about the extent to which my insignificant person is in his charge.

  Freed of the worry of running this estate, Madame Mobecourt will not be concerned about it either.

  As for the gatekeepers, their belief is that, for the time being, others are grateful to them for raising me.

  One day my mother reappeared. There was that kind of decorousness about her bearing and dress that one finds in people who have risen from poverty. Her clothes, her hat, her gloves, her stockings, her boots, her handbag made one think they had been bought with honest money. What had she done during those years? I shall not talk about that. I shall say simply that a guardian angel must have been watching over her, since she had come out of those obscure years with her health intact, and because a vice squad inspector had released her one night, not out of pity, but out of momentary disgust for the profession he exercised.

  So then, my mother had come back. She was only twenty-seven years old. She was convinced that hard times would never return. She appeared not to remember her relationship with Madame Mobecourt. The latter was somewhat shocked by this. Did it not thus seem that my mother meant to place herself on an equal footing with her benefactress? She charged no one with responsibility for her misfortunes. In return, she asked that in her regard others give proof of the same generous attitude.

  She came, she kissed me, and that very same evening, she left again. Why this lone and brief visit in the middle of my childhood?

  A year later, Monsieur Rigal was forced to leave Cuts for a reason unknown to me. He was regretted by no one, although with time he had made himself attractive and had begun to be liked.

  After him a certain Monsieur Vialatte bought the estate.

  My memories grow sharper. I am eleven years old. I am still living with the gatekeepers. They had not lost their jobs despite all the changes. But they had lost most of the virtues that had made them faithful and loyal servants. They did not hide the fact that I was an encumbrance (in Cuts!), that what Madame Mobecourt paid them for my keep was insufficient to feed me. And, too, they had children of their own. They did not complain openly, however. They were afraid that I would be placed with relatives or friends, and end up better off than their own children here.

  Monsieur Vialatte's daughter, Jacqueline, took six months to distinguish me from the other children. This was my first discovery of how difficult it is in life to get the obvious acknowledged. In any case, she took particular notice of me. I must say that I did my utmost to attract her attention, to make her understand that I had nothing in common with the gatekeepers' children. Be that as it may, she did not speak to me. From fear of having to make a choice, she preferred leaving things such as they were. I remember that the gatekeepers would pat me on the head while she was there, but that, once we were out of her sight, they would slap me about. Then she avoided passing by the gatehouse. She probably suspected what was going on behind her back, but as she couldn't do anything to prevent it, and as she may have liked me a little, she refrained from going out by the main gateway.

  From that moment on I beheld the gatekeepers as my enemies. Whatever brutalizing my pretension earned me, I refused to follow the other children towards their fate. Whenever I caught sight of Mademoiselle Vialatte in the distance, I tried to catch her attention. I would provoke thrashings. I sensed that especially cruel treatment could alone rescue me from my wretched condition. But the moment any person apt to report what he had seen would appear on the horizon, kindnesses were substituted for backs of the hand. It was doubtless during this period that I developed the shameful fault of feeling myself diminished by the presence at my side of anybody of a quality inferior or even equal to mine.

  Impossible to get myself mistreated before witnesses? One day, however, I had the luck of receiving a blow with a stick at the very moment Jacqueline, returning from Compiègne, rolled up in her "break". I let myself sink to the ground, howling.

  Abel Moreux' profession was that of a real estate agent. He had no children. He knew everything that went on in and around about Compiègne. Hence he knew of my existence. Spending your life as an intermediary in other people's dealings does not mean that you are satisfied with such a minor role. Along with everyone else, you have secret ambitions. Though you pretend to be content with a simple percentage, you keep your eyes peeled nonetheless. And when a genuine bargain comes along, it's natural that you earmark it for yourself.

  Had word of the blow with the stick got around? I don't recall. The fact remains that Abel suddenly appeared at that juncture. He called on Madame Mobecourt. In the end it was generally agreed that I be entrusted to this man. Conditions were imposed upon him, however. He had to do for me what no one had dreamt of doing, he had to agree to put me in a private school, had to treat me like a son.

  I experienced one of the greatest joys of my life when, these negotiations completed, Jacqueline refused to let me leave Cuts. Madame Mobecourt backed out of the agreement without the slightest compunction. She liked to appear fickle with businessmen.

  I was persuaded that the next day I would say goodbye to my tormentors. But after two months had passed without my life changing in the least, I went back to provok
ing beatings. To my great surprise, the gatekeepers betook themselves to Monsieur Vialatte with the announcement that they couldn't look after me anymore. For an instant I was seized by panic. I had just learned that to know what we want is not easy.

  A mile away lies another estate which, unlike Monsieur Vialatte's, is not in a languishing condition. It belongs to Jules Dechatellux. In the neighboring village they still talk about the considerable sums he spent making the house livable and transforming the inextricable tangle that surrounded it into a charming French garden. It should be added that the species of respect such expenditures inspired in the neighboring landowners had vanished when, over the course of years, they perceived that all this derived less from a desire to live luxuriously than from some sort of craze.