Читать книгу The Mandarins - Simone Beauvoir de - Страница 11

Nadine went to meet Henri several evenings in a row at the offices of the newspaper. One night, in fact, they even took a room in a hotel again, but it didn’t amount to much. For Nadine, making love was clearly a tedious occupation and Henri, too, tired quickly of it. But he enjoyed going out with her, watching her eat, hearing her laugh, talking to her. She was blind to a great many things, but she reacted strongly to those she did see – and without ever cheating. He was convinced she would make a pleasant travelling companion, was touched by her eagerness. Each time she saw him she would ask, ‘Did you talk to her about it yet?’ And he would answer, ‘No, not yet.’ She would lower her head in such utter desolation that it made him feel guilty, made him feel as if he were depriving her of all those things she had for so long gone without: sun, plenty of food, a real trip. Since he had decided in any case to break off with Paula, why not let Nadine profit from it? Besides, it would be a lot better for Paula’s sake if he explained things to her before leaving, rather than let her ruin herself with hope while he was gone. When he was away from her, he felt he was in the right; he had rarely acted falsely towards her and she was only lying to herself when she pretended to believe in the resurrection of a dead and buried past. But when he was with her, it often occurred to him that he, too, might be at fault. ‘Am I a bastard for not loving her any more?’ he would ask himself, watching her come and go in the apartment. ‘Or was I wrong ever to love her in the first place?’

He had been at the Dôme with Julien and Louis and seated at the next table, making a great show of reading The Accident, was a woman of extraordinary beauty, dressed from head to foot in mauve. She had placed her long violet gloves on the table and, as Henri arose to leave, he remarked, ‘What beautiful gloves!’

‘Do you like them? Take them, they’re yours.’

‘And just what, may I ask, would I do with them?’

‘You can keep them as a souvenir of our first meeting.’

They exchanged a soft, lingering look. A few hours later he was holding her naked body in his arms and saying, ‘You’re too beautiful, much too beautiful.’ No, he really couldn’t blame himself. How could he have helped but be captivated by Paula’s beauty, by her voice, by the mystery of her words, by the distant wisdom in her smile? She was slightly older than he, knew many things of which he was ignorant and which seemed at that time much more important to him than the bigger things. What he admired in her above all was her complete disdain for worldly goods; she soared in some supernatural region, and he despaired of ever joining her there. He was amazed that she permitted herself to become flesh in his arms. ‘Naturally, it went to my head a little,’ he admitted to himself. And she, for her part, had believed in his declarations of eternal love and in the miracle of being herself. Therein no doubt was where he had been guilty – by first exalting Paula immoderately and then too lucidly taking her true measure. Yes, they had both made mistakes. But that wasn’t the question; the question now was to break it off. He turned over words in his mind. Did she have any suspicion of what was about to come? Generally, when he remained silent for any length of time, she was quick to question him.

‘Why are you moving things around?’ he asked.

‘Don’t you think the room looks nicer this way?’

‘Would you mind sitting down for just a minute?’

‘Why? Am I annoying you?’

‘No, not at all. But I’d like to have a talk with you.’

She let out a choked little laugh. ‘How solemn you look! You aren’t going to tell me you don’t love me any more, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Then anything else does not matter.’ She sat down, leaning towards him with a patient, slightly mocking expression. ‘Go ahead, darling, I’m listening.’

‘Loving or not loving each other isn’t the only thing in the world,’ he said.

‘To me, it’s all that matters.’

‘But not to me; I’m sure you know that. There are other things that count, too.’

‘Yes, I know – your work, travelling. I’ve never tried to dissuade you from them.’

‘There’s another thing that’s important to me, and I’ve told you this often – my freedom.’

She smiled again. ‘Now don’t tell me I haven’t given you enough freedom!’

‘As much as living together permits, I suppose. But for me, freedom means first of all solitude. Do you remember when I first came here to stay? We agreed then that it would only be till the end of the war.’

‘I didn’t think I was a burden on you,’ she said, no longer smiling.

‘No one could be less of a burden than you. But I do think it was better when we lived apart.’

Paula smiled. ‘You used to come here every night. You used to say you couldn’t sleep without me.’

True, he had told her that, but only during the first year, not after. He didn’t, however, contest the point. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but at least I used to work in my room at the hotel …’

‘That room was just one of your youthful whims,’ she replied in an indulgent voice. ‘No promiscuity, no living together – you must admit your code was rather abstract. I really can’t believe you still take it seriously.’

‘But it’s not at all abstract. When two people live together, you can’t avoid building up tensions on the one hand and becoming negligent on the other. I realize I’m often disagreeable and negligent, and I know it hurts you. It would be much better for us not to see each other except when we really felt like it.’

‘But I always feel like seeing you,’ she said reprovingly.

‘When I’m tired, or out of sorts, or when I’m working, I prefer being alone,’ Henri said coldly.

Again Paula smiled. ‘You’re going to be alone for a whole month. When you get back, we’ll see whether or not you’ve changed your mind.’

‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘it won’t change.’

Suddenly, Paula’s smile vanished and a look of fear appeared on her face. ‘Promise me one thing,’ she murmured.

‘What?’

‘That you’ll never live with another woman.’

‘What an idiotic notion! Don’t be a fool! Of course I promise.’

‘Then I suppose you can go back to your cherished old habits,’ she said with resignation.

He studied her curiously. ‘Why did you make me promise that?’

Again a look of panic appeared in Paula’s eyes. She was silent for a moment. ‘Oh, I know that no other woman could ever take my place in your life,’ she finally said. There was a false calmness in her voice. ‘But I cling to symbols, you know.’ She started to get up, as if she dreaded hearing any more. He stopped her.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I want to be completely frank with you. I’ll never live with another woman. Never. But I have an urge to do things, meet new people, have a few little affairs. I think it’s because of these four years of austerity we’ve just gone through.’

‘But you are having an affair now, aren’t you?’ Paula said calmly. ‘With Nadine.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You don’t lie very well.’

At times she was so completely blind – and at times so clear-sighted! He was disconcerted. ‘I was an idiot not to talk to you about it,’ he said embarrassed. ‘I was afraid of hurting you. But there’s absolutely no reason for you to feel hurt; practically nothing has happened, and it won’t last long, in any case.’

‘Don’t let it upset you. I’m not one to be jealous of a child, especially Nadine!’ She walked over to Henri and sat down on the arm of his chair. ‘On Christmas Eve I told you a man like you isn’t subject to the same laws as other men. I still believe that. There’s a commonplace form of faithfulness that I’ll never demand of you. Have a good time with Nadine, and anyone else you like.’ She ruffled Henri’s hair. ‘You see how much I respect your freedom!’

‘Yes,’ he said. He was both relieved and disappointed; his too-easy victory led him nowhere. He felt he had to carry it at least to its conclusion. ‘As a matter of fact, Nadine doesn’t have a shadow of feeling for me. All she wants is for me to take her along. But it’s completely understood that we’ll stop seeing each other just as soon as we get back.’

‘Take her with you?’

‘Yes, she’s going to Portugal with me.’

‘No!’ Paula exclaimed. Suddenly her serene mask shattered into a thousand pieces and Henri saw before him a face of flesh and bones, with trembling lips and eyes glistening with tears. ‘You said you couldn’t take me!’

‘You didn’t seem anxious to go, so I didn’t try very hard.’

‘I wasn’t anxious! I’d have given an arm to go with you! Only I thought you wanted to be alone. I’m perfectly willing to sacrifice myself to your beloved solitude,’ she cried out in revolt, ‘but not to Nadine! No!’

‘It doesn’t make much difference whether I take Nadine or whether I go alone, since you say you’re not jealous of her,’ he said bitingly.

‘It makes all the difference in the world!’ she replied, her voice breaking with emotion. ‘Alone, I would still be with you, in a way; we would still be together. The first trip since the war! You haven’t any right to take someone else.’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if you see any sort of symbolism in this trip, you’re completely wrong. Nadine simply wants to see something of the world. She’s just an unhappy kid who’s never had a chance to see anything, and it would make me feel good to give her this pleasure. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘If that is really all there is to it,’ Paula said slowly, ‘then don’t take her.’ She looked at Henri pleadingly. ‘I ask it of you in the name of our love.’

They looked at each other silently for a moment. Paula’s whole face was a longing plea. But suddenly Henri grew stubborn. He felt as if he were facing an armed torturer rather than a woman at her wits’ end. ‘You have just told me that you respected my freedom,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied fiercely. ‘But if you wanted to destroy yourself I’d try to stop you. And I’m not going to let you betray our love.’

‘In other words, I’m free to do as you please,’ he said ironically.

‘How can you be so unfair!’ she said, sobbing. ‘I’d take anything from you, anything! But I know inside me I mustn’t take this. No one but I should be going with you.’

‘That’s your opinion,’ he said.

‘But it’s obvious!’

‘Not to me.’

‘Because you’re blind, because you want to be blind. Listen,’ she said, forcing her voice to be calm, ‘you’re really interested in that girl, and you see how much you’re hurting me. Please don’t take her.’

Henri was silent for a moment. There wasn’t very much he could say in answer to that argument, and he resented it as much as if Paula had used physical force to stop him.

‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘I won’t take her!’ He got up and walked towards the stairway. ‘Only don’t talk to me any more about freedom!’

Paula followed him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Does your freedom have to make me suffer?’

He shook off her hand. ‘If you suffer when I do what I want to, then I’ll have to choose between you and my freedom.’

He took a step away from Paula, and she cried out to him anxiously. There was panic in her eyes. ‘Henri,’ she pleaded, ‘what do you mean by that?’

‘Just what I said.’

‘You’re not going to destroy our love on purpose, are you?’

He turned and faced her. ‘All right!’ he said. ‘Since you insist on it, let’s have it out once and for all!’ He was irritated enough by now to want to get to the very heart of the matter. ‘There’s a basic misunderstanding between us. We don’t have the same conception of love …’

‘There’s no misunderstanding,’ Paula said quickly. ‘I know what you’re going to say – my love is my whole life and you want it to be only a part of yours. I know, and I agree.’

‘Yes, but with that as a start, there are other questions that have to be answered,’ Henri said.

‘Oh, no,’ Paula said. ‘It’s all so stupid,’ she added in an agitated voice. ‘You’re not going to question our love just because I’ve asked you not to take Nadine!’

‘I’m not taking her. That part is settled. But there’s something entirely different involved.’

‘Listen,’ Paula said abruptly, ‘let’s get it over with. If you absolutely must take her with you to prove you’re free, then take her with you. I don’t want you to think of me as a tyrant.’

‘I certainly will not take her if you’re going to eat your heart out the whole time I’m away.’

‘I’d eat my heart out even more if you chose to destroy our love out of spite.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You’re capable of doing it too. Your least little whims are so important to you!’

She looked at him imploringly, hopefully waiting for him to say, ‘I hold no grudge against you.’ She could wait a long time for him to say it. She sighed. ‘You love me,’ she said, ‘but you’re never willing to sacrifice anything for our love. It always has to be me who gives everything.’

‘Paula,’ he said amicably, ‘if I make that trip with Nadine, I repeat to you again that when we get back I’ll stop seeing her, and nothing will be changed between you and me.’

Paula remained silent. ‘I’m blackmailing her, that’s just what it amounts to,’ Henri thought. ‘It’s rather disgraceful.’ And the ugliest part of it was that Paula was aware of it, and would play at being the generous one, knowing all the time that she was accepting a rather sordid bargain. But what of it! You want what you want. And what he wanted was to take Nadine.

‘Do as you please,’ Paula said with a sigh. ‘I suppose I give too much importance to symbols. Really, it makes hardly any difference whether the girl goes with you, or not.’

‘It makes no difference whatsoever,’ Henri said emphatically.

During the days that followed, Paula didn’t mention the matter again. Except that with each of her gestures, with her every silence, she was saying, ‘I’m defenceless, and you’re taking advantage of it.’ It was true she had no weapons to fight back with, not even the most ineffectual. But her defencelessness was itself a trap; it left Henri no choice but to become either the hangman or the hanged. He had no desire to play the hanged, but the trouble was that neither was he a hangman.

The night he met Nadine on one of the platforms of the Gare d’Austerlitz, he had a gnawing, uneasy feeling inside him.

‘You’re not early,’ she grumbled.

‘I’m not late, either.’

‘Let’s hurry and get on. If the train should leave …’

‘It won’t leave ahead of schedule.’

‘You can never tell.’

They boarded the train and chose an empty compartment. With a perplexed look on her face, Nadine stood motionless for a long moment between the two seats. Then she sat down next to the window, her back to the locomotive. After a moment, she opened her suitcase and began preparing for the night with the meticulous care of an old maid. She slipped on a bathrobe and slippers, wrapped a blanket around her legs, and propped a pillow under her head. From a small basket that served her as a purse, she took a stick of chewing gum. Then she remembered that Henri was present and smiled at him engagingly.

‘Did she moan very much when she saw you were dead set on taking me?’

Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘Naturally, she wasn’t overjoyed.’

‘What did she say?’

‘It’s none of your business,’ he said dryly.

‘But I’d really like to know.’

‘And I really don’t want to tell you about it.’

She took a garnet-coloured piece of knitting from her basket and began clicking the needles together while chewing her gum. ‘She’s laying it on too thick,’ Henri thought peevishly. Perhaps she was annoying him on purpose because she suspected his remorse and felt that he was still, in spirit, in the red apartment. Actually Paula had kissed him good-bye without tears. ‘Have a nice trip,’ she had said. But at this very moment, he knew she would be weeping. ‘I’ll write to her as soon as I get there,’ he promised himself.

The train got under way and sped through the sad dusk of the Parisian suburbs. Henri opened a detective story and glanced quickly at the sullen face opposite him. At the moment, he could do nothing about Paula’s unhappiness, but there was no point in spoiling Nadine’s pleasure, too. He made an effort and said cheerfully, ‘Tomorrow at this time we’ll be passing through Spain.’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re not expecting me so soon in Lisbon. We’ll have two whole days all to ourselves.’

Nadine did not answer. For a moment or so, she continued to knit diligently, and then she stretched herself out on the seat, stuffed a ball of wax in each ear, tied a kerchief around her eyes and turned her back on Henri. ‘And I was hoping Nadine’s smiles would make up for Paula’s tears!’ he said to himself. He closed the book and turned out the lights. The blue paint that had covered the train windows during the war had been scraped off, but the fields outside were completely black under the starless sky. Inside the compartment, it was cold. Why, he wondered, was he in this train, opposite that almost total stranger who was breathing heavily in her sleep? Suddenly, it seemed impossible that the past would really be waiting for him in Lisbon.

‘She could at least be a little more agreeable!’ he said to himself angrily the next morning as the train made its way towards the border. When they had changed trains at Hendaye, where a light breeze and the warm sun played against their skins, Nadine hadn’t so much as smiled; instead, she yawned unrestrainedly while their passports were being checked. Now she was walking in front of him with her long boyish strides as he struggled with their two heavy suitcases, growing hotter by the minute under the unaccustomed sun. He looked with distaste at her strong, rather hairy legs; her socks underlined their ungracious bareness. Behind them, a barrier closed; for the first time in six years he was walking on soil that wasn’t French. Another barrier rose before them and he heard Nadine cry out unbelievingly: ‘Oh!’ It was an impassioned sound, a sound he had tried in vain to wring from her with his caresses.

‘Oh! Look!’

Alongside the road next to a burned-out house was a stand covered with oranges, bananas, chocolate. Nadine rushed over to it, grabbed two oranges and handed one to Henri. At sight of this carefree joy, so completely cut off from France by only a little over a mile, he felt that hard black thing inside his chest, that thing which for four years had taken the place of his heart, suddenly become soft wax. He had looked unflinchingly at pictures of Dutch children starving to death; now, at the sight of that sudden burst of joy, he felt like sitting down at the edge of the road, his head in his hands, and never moving again.

Nadine’s good humour came back. She gorged herself on fruits and candies all across the Basque countryside and the Castilian desert, looked smilingly at the clear Spanish skies. They spent one more night stretched out on the dusty seats. In the morning they followed the course of a pale blue stream which wound its way among countless olive groves. Gradually the stream turned into a river and finally a lake. And then the train stopped. They were in Lisbon.

‘All those taxis!’ Nadine exclaimed.

A line of taxis was waiting in the driveway of the station. Henri checked the suitcases in the baggage room, got into a cab with Nadine, and said to the chauffeur, ‘Drive us around.’ Nadine gripped his arm and cried out in terror as they plummeted down steep streets at a speed that seemed dizzying to them; they had forgotten what it was like to ride in a car. Henri laughed along with Nadine and held her arm tightly. He turned his head rapidly from side to side, joyful and yet incredulous. The past was there to meet him; he recognized it. A southern city, a fresh, hot city with its ancient clanking streetcars, and on the horizon the promise of salty winds and the sea beating against high walls. Yes, he recognized it, and yet it astonished him more than ever had Marseilles, Athens, Naples, Barcelona. Because now everything new, everything unknown, was a thing to be marvelled at. It was beautiful, that capital, with its quiet heart, its unruly hills, its houses with pastel-coloured icing, its huge white ships.

‘Let us off somewhere in the centre of town,’ Henri said. The taxi stopped at a large square surrounded by cinemas and cafés. Seated at tables in front of the cafés were men in dark suits. No women sat there. The women were busily moving along the shop-lined street which led down to the estuary. Suddenly Henri and Nadine stopped dead simultaneously.

‘Will you please look at that!’

Leather! real thick, supple leather! You could almost smell it through the shop window. Cowhide suitcases, pigskin gloves, tawny-coloured shoes you could walk in without squeaking, without getting your feet wet. Real silk, real wool, flannel suits, poplin shirts! It suddenly occurred to Henri that he looked rather seedy in his suit of ersatz cloth and his cracked shoes with their upturned tips. And alongside the women in their furs and their silk stockings and hand-made pumps, Nadine looked like a rag picker.

‘Tomorrow we’re going to buy things,’ he said. ‘A lot of things!’

‘It just doesn’t seem real!’ Nadine exclaimed. ‘I wonder what everyone in Paris would say if they saw all this!’

‘Exactly what we’re saying,’ Henri replied, laughing.

They stopped before a pastry shop, and this time it wasn’t a look of greed, but rather one of shock which appeared on Nadine’s face. Henri, too, stood there for a moment, frozen in unbelief. Then, ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, nudging Nadine.

Except for an old man and a little boy, there were only women seated around the tables, women with oily hair, weighed down with furs, jewels, and fat, religiously performing their daily gorging. Two little girls with black braided hair, wearing blue sashes across their chests and a lot of religious medallions around their necks, were sitting quietly at a table casually sipping thick hot chocolate overflowing with whipped cream.

‘Do you want one?’ Henri asked.

Nadine nodded. A few minutes later, a waitress placed a cup of chocolate before her, but when Nadine brought it to her lips the blood drained from her face. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘My stomach just isn’t used to it any more,’ she added apologetically. But it wasn’t her stomach that had rebelled; she had suddenly thought of something – or someone. He did not question her.

Crisp, fresh cretonne curtains hung in their hotel room; in the bathroom there was hot water, real soap, and soft, fluffy terry-cloth robes. All of Nadine’s gayness came back to her. She insisted upon rubbing Henri with a rough bath-glove, and when his skin was red and burning from head to foot she laughingly tumbled him on to the bed. And she made love with such high spirits that it seemed as if she actually enjoyed it. The next morning they went to the shopping district, and her eyes shone as she fingered the rich silks and wools with her rough hands.

‘Were there ever such beautiful shops in Paris?’

‘Much more beautiful. Don’t you remember?’

‘I never went to the expensive shops. I was too young.’ She looked hopefully at Henri. ‘Do you think we’ll have them again some day?’

‘Some day, maybe.’

‘But how are they so rich here? I thought Portugal was a poor country.’

‘It’s a poor country, with some very rich people.’

For themselves and for their friends in Paris, they bought materials, stockings, underclothes, shoes, sweaters. They lunched in a basement restaurant the walls of which were covered with colourful posters of mounted picadors defying furious bulls. ‘Meat or fish – even they have their shortages!’ Nadine said laughingly, as they ate steaks the colour of cinders. Afterwards, in their supple, thick-soled, blatant yellow shoes, they wandered along cobblestoned streets which rose towards the working-class quarters. At one street corner barefoot children were solemnly watching a faded puppet show. The sidewalks became narrow, the fronts of the houses scaly.

A shadow darkened Nadine’s face. ‘It’s disgusting, this street. Are there many like this?’

‘There are.’

‘It doesn’t seem to upset you.’

He was in no mood for indignation. In fact, it even gave him a twinge of pleasure to see again the multi-coloured wash drying at sun-drenched windows above the streets’ shadowy crevasses. They walked down a passageway in silence. Suddenly, Nadine stopped in the middle of the greasy, stone stairway. ‘It’s disgusting!’ she repeated. ‘Let’s get out of it.’

‘Let’s go on just a little farther,’ Henri said.

In Marseilles, Naples, Piraeus, in Chinatowns of many cities, he had spent hours wandering through these same squalid streets. Of course, then as now, he wished that all this misery could be done away with. But the wish remained an abstract thing. He had never felt like running away, and the overpowering human odour of these streets went to his head. From the top of the hill to the bottom, the same swarming multitudes, the same blue sky burning above the roof tops. It seemed to Henri that from one moment to the next he would rediscover his old joy in all its intensity. That was what he sought from street to street. But it wouldn’t come back. Barefooted women – everyone here went barefooted – were squatting before their doors frying sardines over charcoal fires, and the stench of stale fish mingled in the air with the smell of hot oil. In cellar apartments opening on to the street, not a bed, not a piece of furniture, not a picture; nothing but straw mats, children covered with rashes, and from time to time a goat. Outside, no happy voices, no laughter; only sombre dead eyes. Was misery more hopeless here than in the other cities? Or instead of becoming hardened to misfortune, does one grow more sensitive to it? The blue of the sky seemed cruel above the unhealthy shadows; he began to share Nadine’s silent dismay. They passed a haggard-looking woman dressed in black rags who was scurrying through the street with a child clinging to her bare breast, and Henri said abruptly, ‘You’re right; let’s get out.’

But the next day, at a cocktail party given at the French Consulate, Henri found that it was useless to have tried to flee from that wretched hill. The table was laden with sandwiches and rich cakes, the women were wearing dresses in colours he had long ago forgotten, every face was smiling, all were speaking French, and the Hill of Grace, for a time, seemed far off, in a completely foreign country whose misfortunes were no concern of his. He was laughing politely with the others when old Mendoz das Viernas came and led him off to a corner of the drawing-room. He was wearing a stiff collar and a black tie; before Salazar’s dictatorship, he had been a cabinet minister. He looked at Henri suspiciously.

‘What is your impression of Lisbon?’ he asked.

‘It’s a very beautiful city,’ Henri answered. He saw das Viernas’ face darken and he hastily added with a smile, ‘I must say, though, I haven’t seen very much of it.’

‘Usually, the French who come here somehow manage to see nothing at all,’ das Viernas said bitterly. ‘Your Valéry, for example. He admired the sea, the gardens, but for the rest – a blind man.’ The old man paused a moment. ‘And you? Do you also intend to blindfold yourself?’

‘On the contrary!’ Henri said. ‘I intend to keep my eyes as wide open as I can.’

‘Ah! From what they have told me of you, that is what I had hoped,’ das Viernas said, his voice gentler now. ‘We shall make an appointment for tomorrow and I shall then show you Lisbon. A beautiful façade, isn’t it? But you will see what is behind it!’

‘I’ve already taken a walk on the Hill of Grace,’ Henri said.

‘But you did not go into the houses! I want you to see for yourself what the people eat, how they live. You would not believe me if I told you.’ Das Viernas shrugged his shoulders. ‘All that writing about the melancholy of the Portuguese and how mysterious it is. Actually it’s ridiculously simple: of seven million Portuguese, there are only seventy thousand who have enough to eat.’

It was impossible to get out of it. Henri spent the following morning visiting a series of wretched hovels. At the end of the afternoon, the former cabinet minister gathered his friends for the sole purpose of having them meet him. It was impossible to refuse. All of them were wearing dark suits, stiff collars, and bowlers; they spoke ceremoniously but every now and then a look of hatred crossed their sensitive faces. They were mostly former cabinet members, former journalists, former professors who had been crushed because of their obstinate refusal to rally to the new régime. All of them were poor and trapped, many had relatives in France who had been deported. Those who stubbornly continued to take what action they could knew that the Island of Hell awaited them. A doctor who treated poverty-stricken people without remuneration, who tried to open a clinic or introduce a little hygiene into the hospitals, was immediately suspect. Whosoever dared organize an evening course, whosoever made a generous gesture, or simply a charitable one, was branded enemy of both Church and State. And yet they doggedly persisted. They wanted to believe that the destruction of Nazism would somehow bring to an end this hypocritical fascism, and they dreamed constantly of overthrowing Salazar and creating a National Front like the one which had been formed in France. But they knew they were alone: the English capitalists had large interests in Portugal and the Americans were negotiating with the government for the purchase of air bases in the Azores. ‘France is our only hope,’ they repeated over and over. ‘Tell the people of France the truth,’ they begged. ‘They do not know; if they knew they would come to our rescue.’

They imposed daily meetings on Henri, overwhelmed him with facts, figures, statistics, took him for walks through the starving villages surrounding Lisbon. It wasn’t exactly the kind of holiday he had dreamed of, but he had no choice. He promised that he would wage a campaign in the press in order to get the facts to the people. Political tyranny, economic exploitation, police terror, the systematic brutalization of the masses, the clergy’s shameful complicity – he would tell everything. ‘If Carmona knew that France was willing to support us, he would join our ranks,’ das Viernas said. Years ago he had known Bidault, and he was thinking of suggesting to him a kind of secret treaty: in exchange for France’s backing, the future Portuguese government would be able to offer advantageous trade concessions in connection with the African colonies. It would have been difficult to explain to him, without being brutal, how completely fantastic his project was!

‘I’ll see Tournelle, his administrative assistant,’ Henri promised on the eve of his departure for Algarve. ‘He was a friend of mine in the Resistance.’

‘I shall map out a precise path and entrust it to you when you return,’ das Viernas said.

Henri was glad to get out of Lisbon. For greater convenience in making his round of lectures, the French Consulate loaned him a car and told him to keep it as long as he wanted. At last he would have a real holiday! Unfortunately, his new-found friends were counting on his spending his last week in Portugal conspiring with them. While he was away, they were going to assemble exhaustive documentation and also arrange for meetings with certain Communists from the Zamora dockyards. Turning them down was unthinkable.

‘That means we have exactly two weeks and no more to see the country,’ Nadine said sulkily.

They dined that night at a roadside inn on the opposite bank of the Tagus. A waitress served them slices of fried codfish and a bottle of cloudy pink wine. Through the window they could see the lights of Lisbon rising tier upon tier between the water and the sky.

‘With a car, you can cover an awful lot of ground in two weeks!’ Henri said. ‘Do you realize what a stroke of luck that was?’

‘Exactly. And it’s a shame we can’t take more advantage of it.’

‘Those men are all counting on me; I’d really be a louse to disappoint them, wouldn’t I?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There’s nothing you can do for them.’

‘I can speak for them. That’s my job. If I can’t at least do that, there’s no point in my being a newspaperman.’

‘Maybe there isn’t.’

‘Don’t start thinking already about going back,’ he said soothingly. ‘Just think of the wonderful trip ahead of us. Look at those little lights along the water; they’re pretty, aren’t they?’

‘What’s so pretty about them?’ Nadine asked. It was just the sort of irritating question she enjoyed asking. ‘No, seriously,’ she added, ‘what makes you think they’re pretty?’

Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘They’re pretty, that’s all.’

She pressed her forehead agains the window. ‘They might be pretty if you didn’t know what’s behind them. But once you know, it’s … it’s just another fraud,’ she concluded bitterly. ‘I hate that filthy city.’

It was a fraud, no doubt of it. And yet he was unable to keep from seeing a certain beauty in those lights. No longer did he fool himself about the hot stench of poverty, the colourfulness of rags and tatters, but those little flames twinkling along the edge of the dark waters moved him in spite of everything. Perhaps it was because they made him recall a time when he was unaware of the reality hiding behind appearances, or perhaps it was nothing but the memory of an illusion that made him like them. He looked at Nadine – eighteen years old and not a single illusion to remember! He at least had a past. ‘And a present, and a future,’ he said to himself. ‘Fortunately, there are still some things left in the world to like.’

And there were, fortunately. What a joy to have a wheel in your hands again! And those roads stretching out before you as far as the eye can reach! The first day out, after all those years of not having driven, Henri felt unsure of himself. The car seemed endowed with a life of its own, and so much the more so since it was heavy, had bad springs, was noisy and rather erratic. And yet it soon began obeying him as spontaneously as his own hand.

‘It’s really got speed! It’s terrific!’ Nadine exclaimed.

‘You’ve driven in cars before, haven’t you?’

‘In Paris, in jeeps. But I never went this fast.’

That, too, was a lie – the old illusion of freedom and power. But she gave into it without a qualm. She lowered all the windows and greedily drank in the wind and dust. If Henri had listened to her they would never have got out of the car. The thing she seemed to enjoy most was driving as fast as they could towards the horizon. She hardly took any interest at all in the scenery. And yet how beautiful it was! Hillsides covered with golden mimosas; endless groves of round-topped orange trees which brought to mind calm, primitive paradises; the twisted, frenzied rocks of Battaglia, the majestic pair of stairways which rose crisscrossing to a white-and-black church, the streets of Beja through which echoed the ancient cries of a lovesick nun. In the south, with its African atmosphere, little donkeys moved in endless circles to force a trickle of water from the arid ground. At distant intervals, half-hidden among blue century plants rising from the red earth, they came across the false freshness of smooth, milky white houses. They began driving back towards the north through country in which stones and rocks seemed to have stolen their intense colours from the most brilliant flowers – reds, ochres, violets. And then, on the gentle hills of Minho, the colours once more became flowers. Yes, a beautiful setting, a setting that flashed by so rapidly that there was no time to think of what lurked behind it. Along these granite shores as on the burning roads of Algarve, the peasants they saw all went barefooted. But they did not see many of them.

The holiday ended at red Oporto, where even the filth was blood-coloured. On the walls of hovels darker and danker than those of Lisbon and teeming with naked children, notices had been pasted up, reading: ‘Unhealthy! It is forbidden to live in this house.’ Little girls of four or five, clad in torn sacks, were rummaging about in garbage pails. For lunch, Henri and Nadine sought refuge in a dark corner of a restaurant, but all through the meal they had the uneasy feeling that, outside, faces were glued to the windows. ‘I hate cities!’ Nadine said furiously. She stayed in her room the whole day, and the following day on the road she hardly unclenched her teeth enough to speak. Henri made no attempt to cheer her up.

The day they were to return to Lisbon, they stopped to eat in a little port town three hours from the city. They left the car in front of the inn and climbed one of the hills overlooking the sea. At the summit stood a white windmill with a roof shingled in green tile. Small, narrow-necked, terra-cotta jars were attached to its vanes, and the wind sang through them. Henri and Nadine ran down the hill past leafy olive trees, past blossoming almond trees, and the childish music followed them. They dropped down on the sandy beach of the cove. Boats with rust-coloured sails were moving lazily on the pale sea.

‘Let’s stay here a while; it’s pleasant,’ Henri said.

‘All right,’ Nadine replied sullenly. ‘I’m dying of hunger,’ she added.

‘Naturally. You didn’t eat a thing.’

‘I ask for soft-boiled eggs and they bring me a bowl of lukewarm water and raw eggs.’

‘Well, the cod was good, and so were the beans.’

‘Another drop of oil and I’d have been sick,’ she said, spitting angrily. ‘There’s even oil in my saliva.’

Suddenly and calmly she pulled off her blouse.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Can’t you see?’

She was wearing no brassiere. Lying on her back, she offered up to the sun the nakedness of her firm, small breasts.

‘Nadine! No! Suppose someone should come …’

‘No one’ll come.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Anyhow, I don’t give a damn. I just want to feel the sun on my body.’ Her breasts exposed to the wind and sun, her hair spread out on the sand, she looked up at the sky and said reproachfully, ‘It’s our last day; we’ve got to take advantage of it.’

Henri said nothing.

‘Must we really go back to Lisbon tonight?’ she asked in a whining voice.

‘You know very well they’re expecting us.’

‘We haven’t even seen the mountains yet. And everyone says they’re beautiful. With a whole week left, we could see a lot of them.’

‘Nevertheless, as I’ve already told you a dozen times, I’ve got to see those people.’

‘Your old gentlemen in stiff collars? They might look pretty good in the showcases of the Musée de l’Homme. But as revolutionaries … don’t make me laugh.’

‘Well, they affect me differently,’ Henri said. ‘And they do take big risks.’

‘They talk a lot,’ Nadine said, sifting the sand between her fingers. ‘Words, nothing but a lot of words.’

‘It’s always so easy to feel superior to people who are trying to accomplish something,’ he said, slightly annoyed.

‘What I have against them is that they’re really not trying to accomplish anything at all,’ she replied irritably. ‘Instead of gabbling so much, I’d blow Salazar’s brains out.’

‘That wouldn’t help much.’

‘He’d be dead, and that would help. Like Vincent says, at least death doesn’t forgive.’ She looked meditatively at the sea. ‘If you’re willing to be killed with him, you could certainly get rid of him.’

‘Don’t you try it!’ Henri said with a smile. He placed his hand on Nadine’s sand-encrusted arm. ‘That’d be quite a spot you’d put me in.’

‘It would be quite an exit,’ Nadine said.

‘Are you in such a hurry to make yours?’ he asked.

She yawned. ‘Do you enjoy living?’

‘I’m not bored,’ he said cheerfully.

She raised herself on one elbow and studied him curiously. ‘Tell me. Scribbling from morning to night the way you do, does that really fill your life?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When I’m writing my life is full. In fact, I’m damned anxious to get back to it.’

‘What made you want to become a writer?’

‘Oh, that goes a long way back,’ Henri replied. Yes, it went very far back into the past, but he couldn’t decide how reliable his memories of the beginning were. ‘When I was a young boy,’ he said, ‘a book seemed like a magic thing to me.’

‘But I like books, too,’ Nadine said spiritedly. ‘Only there are so many of them already! What good will it do to add one more?’

‘We all have different things to say. Every writer has his own life, his own way of seeing things, his own way of writing about them.’

‘And it doesn’t upset you to realize that things have been written that are far above anything you’ll ever pound out?’ Nadine asked in a vaguely irritated voice.

‘At first I didn’t think that was true,’ Henri replied, smiling. ‘You’re very arrogant when you haven’t done anything. And then, once you get into it, you’re too interested in what you’re writing to waste time comparing.’

‘Naturally,’ she said sullenly. ‘You can always justify yourself.’ She let herself fall back on the sand and stretched out lazily, at full length.

He didn’t know how to answer her. It’s hard to explain the joys of writing to someone who doesn’t enjoy it. Besides, was he capable of explaining it even to himself? He didn’t for a moment imagine he would be read forever and yet while he was writing, he felt as if he were secretly settled in eternity. Whatever ideas he was able to shape into words on paper seemed to him to be preserved, fully rescued from oblivion. But how much truth was there in that feeling? How much of that also was only an illusion? That was one of the things he should have figured out during his vacation, but as a matter of fact he had figured out nothing at all. One thing was certain: he felt an almost agonizing pity for all who did not even attempt to express themselves – Paula, Anne, Nadine. Suddenly he remembered that this was the day on which his book was to be published. It had been a long time since he had last faced the public and it frightened him a bit to think that at that very moment people were reading his novel and talking about it.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked, bending over Nadine and smiling at her gently.

‘Yes, it’s nice here,’ she said a little peevishly.

‘It is, isn’t it?’

He lay back on the warm sand and laced his fingers in Nadine’s. Between the listless, sun-faded sea and the stark blue of the sky, happiness hung lazily in the air; a single smile from Nadine and he might have been able to grasp some of that happiness. She was almost pretty when she smiled, but now her lightly freckled face remained impassive.

‘Poor Nadine!’ he said.

She bolted upright. ‘Why poor?’

Certainly, she was an object of pity, but he wasn’t quite sure why. ‘Because you’re disappointed in the trip.’

‘Oh, I didn’t really expect too much out of it, you know.’

‘But you have to admit we had some pleasant moments, anyhow.’

‘And there could still be more,’ she said, the cold blue of her eyes growing warmer. ‘Why don’t you just forget those old dreamers? They’re not what we came here for. Let’s keep on the move; let’s enjoy ourselves while we can, while we still have flesh on our bones.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s not so easy to enjoy oneself.’

‘Well, let’s try, anyhow. Let’s drive through the mountains! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? You like driving so much. But those meetings and investigations, all they ever do is bore you.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘Well, why do you always have to be doing things that bore you? That’s no way to live.’

‘Try to understand. Can I tell those poor old men that no one’s interested in their misfortunes, that Portugal is too small, that no one gives a damn what happens to her?’ Henri leaned over Nadine and smiled gently. ‘Can I?’

‘You could ring them up and tell them you’re sick, and then we could head for Evora.’

‘It would break their hearts,’ Henri replied. ‘No, I just can’t.’

‘Say instead that you don’t want to,’ Nadine retorted bitterly.

‘All right,’ he answered impatiently. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘You’re even worse than my mother,’ she grumbled, turning her face to the sand.

Henri fell back and stretched out alongside Nadine. ‘Let’s enjoy ourselves!’ Years ago, he had known how to enjoy himself; yes, he would unhesitatingly have sacrificed the dreams of those old conspirators for the pleasures he had known then. He closed his eyes. He was lying on another beach beside a golden-skinned woman clad in a flowered sarong – Paula, the loveliest of all women. Palm trees were swaying lazily above their heads, and through the reeds he was watching three plump, laughing Jewish women inching their way into the sea, encumbered by their dresses, veils, and jewels. Sometimes at night they would sit together on the beach and watch Arab women, wrapped in their long garments, venturing into the water. And afterwards, in a tavern in an ancient Roman basement, they would sip syrupy coffee. Or they would sit in the market place and Henri would smoke a narghile while chatting with Amur Harsin. And then they would come back to their room and tumble happily on the bed. But what Henri remembered most nostalgically now were those mornings spent on the terrace of the hotel beneath the blue sky, amid the exciting fragrance of flowers. In the freshness of the newborn day, in the intense heat of noon, he would write; he would write, and under his feet the cement was burning hot. And then, dizzy from the sun and from words, he would go down to the shaded patio and drink a tall, cool anisette. The sky, the pink laurel bushes, Djerba’s violent waters, the gay talk of idle nights, and especially the freshness and excitement of the mornings – these were things he had come here to recapture. Why hadn’t he recaptured that burning, sweet taste his life had once had? He had wanted so much to take this trip; for days he had thought of nothing else, for days he had dreamed of lying on the sand under the sun. And now he was here, stretched out on a sandy beach, beneath a hot sun. Only something was missing, missing from inside himself. Happiness, pleasure – he was no longer quite sure what those old, familiar words really meant. We have only five senses, and they become satiated so quickly. Even now his eyes were growing weary of looking out on that endless blue which never ceased being blue. He felt like ripping apart that smooth, satiny surface, felt like tearing Nadine’s tender skin.

‘It’s getting cool,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied. Suddenly she pressed her whole body tight against him, and through his shirt he could feel her naked young breasts against his chest. ‘Warm me,’ she said.

He gently pushed her away. ‘Get dressed. Let’s get back to the village.’

‘Afraid someone will see us?’ Nadine’s eyes were gleaming, her cheeks were slightly flushed. But he knew her mouth would still be cold. ‘What do you think they’d do to us? Do you think they’d stone us?’ she asked, as if the prospect appealed to her.

‘Get up. It’s time to start back now.’

She pressed the whole weight of her body against him; he was barely able to resist the desire that was sweeping through him, numbing his arms and legs. He liked her young breasts, her limpid skin; if only she would let herself be gently lulled by pleasure instead of romping about in bed with determined shamelessness … She looked at him, her eyes half closed, and her hand crept down his linen trousers.

‘Let me … won’t you let me?’

Her mouth and hands were adroit, but he hated that look of triumphant assurance he saw in her eyes every time he gave in to her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, not here. Not like this.’

He freed himself and stood up. Nadine’s blouse was lying on the sand; he threw it over her shoulders.

‘Why not?’ she asked resentfully. ‘Maybe it would be a bit more fun out here in the open,’ she added languidly.

He dusted the sand off his clothes. ‘I wonder if you’ll ever grow up to be a woman,’ he murmured in a falsely indulgent voice.

‘I’ll bet there isn’t one woman in a hundred who enjoys getting laid. Most of them are just putting on an act, trying to be sophisticated.’

‘Let’s go; let’s not argue,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘Come on, we’ll buy you some cakes and chocolate to eat in the car.’

‘You’re treating me like a child,’ she said.

‘No, I know you’re not a child. I understand you a lot better than you think.’

She looked at him suspiciously, and then a little smile formed on her lips. ‘You know, I don’t always hate you,’ she said.

He squeezed her arm a little harder, and they walked silently together towards the village. The light of day was growing soft; boats were returning to the port and oxen were pulling them towards the beach. The villagers, standing or sitting together in small groups, watched silently. The men’s shirts and the women’s full skirts were brightly checkered, but the joyousness of those vivid colours was congealed in dismal immobility. Their stony faces were framed by black kerchiefs; their eyes, staring blankly at the horizon, were drained of hope. Not a gesture, nor a word; it was as if a curse had withered all their tongues.

‘They make me want to scream,’ Nadine said.

‘I doubt if they’d even hear you.’

‘What are they waiting for?’

‘Nothing. And they know they’re waiting for nothing.’

In the main square, life sputtered feebly. The widows of fishermen who had drowned at sea were sitting at the edge of the sidewalk, begging; children were bawling noisily. At first Henri and Nadine had detested those rich women with their thick furs, whose majestic reply to all beggars was a curt, ‘Have patience!’ But now, they, too, fled like thieves when the hands were held out to them; there were just too many.

‘Buy yourself something,’ Henri said, stopping before a pastry shop.

She went in. Two children with shaven heads were pressing their noses against the window pane. When she came out again, her arms laden with paper bags, the children began squalling. She stopped.

‘What are they saying?’

Henri hesitated. ‘They say you’re lucky to be able to eat when you’re hungry.’

‘Oh!’

With a furious gesture, she threw the swollen bags in their arms.

‘No, I’ll give them some money instead,’ Henri said.

She pulled him away. ‘Forget it; I’ve lost my appetite. Those filthy urchins!’

‘But you said you were hungry.’

‘I told you I lost my appetite.’

They got into the car and drove for a while in silence. Then, ‘We should have gone to some other country,’ Nadine muttered in a choked-up voice.

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. But you must know.’

‘As a matter of fact, I don’t know,’ he replied.

‘Well, there must be some country in the world where people live decently,’ she said.

Suddenly, Nadine burst into tears. Henri looked at her incredulously; Paula’s tears were as natural as rain, but to see Nadine weeping was as disturbing as if he had stumbled on Dubreuilh sobbing. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close to him.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said, stroking her rough hair. ‘Don’t cry.’ Why had he been unable to make her smile? Why was his heart so heavy?

Nadine wiped her eyes and noisily blew her nose. ‘Were you happy when you were young?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I was happy.’

‘You see.’

‘Some day you’ll be happy, too,’ he said.

He should have held her tightly, should have told her: ‘I’ll make you happy, Nadine.’ At that instant, he felt like saying it – a momentary desire to pledge her his whole life. But he said nothing. ‘The past doesn’t repeat itself; the past won’t repeat itself,’ he thought.

‘Vincent!’ Nadine cried out, racing towards the exit.

Clad in his war correspondent’s uniform, Vincent was waving his hand and smiling broadly. Nadine slipped on her crêpe-soled shoes and caught herself by grabbing Vincent’s arm.

‘Greetings!’ she said.

‘Greetings to the travellers!’ Vincent said cheerfully. He looked Nadine over and whistled admiringly. ‘That’s quite a get-up!’

‘A real lady, huh!’ Nadine said, spinning around. She looked elegant and almost feminine in her fur coat, her nylon stockings, her soft leather shoes.

‘Here, let me take that,’ Vincent offered, relieving Henri of a large duffle bag he was dragging behind him. ‘What’ve you got in here? A body?’

‘One hundred pounds of food!’ Henri replied. ‘Nadine’s going to restock the family cupboard. The problem now is how to get it over to Quai Voltaire.’

‘No problem,’ Vincent said triumphantly.

‘You stole a jeep?’ Nadine asked.

‘I stole nothing,’ he replied. He crossed the driveway and stopped in front of a small black car. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she?’

‘She’s ours?’ Henri asked.

‘Ours,’ Vincent said. ‘Luc finally managed to wangle a deal. What do you think of her?’

‘Very small,’ Nadine said.

‘Well, it’s going to be damned useful to us,’ Henri said, opening the door. They piled the baggage in the back as best they could.

‘Will you take me driving?’ Nadine asked.

‘Are you nuts?’ Vincent said. ‘This car’s a working tool.’ He sat down at the wheel, and the car started off with a painful sputtering. ‘With all your cargo in here, it’s a little crowded,’ he conceded.

‘Are you sure you know how to drive?’ Nadine asked.

‘If you’d seen me the other night zipping along over mined roads in a jeep without headlights, you wouldn’t insult me so gratuitously.’ Vincent turned to Henri. ‘I’ll drop Nadine and take you to the paper,’ he said.

‘Fine. How’s L’Espoir been doing? I didn’t get to see a single copy in that blasted country. Are we still using the postage-stamp format?’

‘We are. They just authorized two new dailies, but for us they can’t seem to find enough paper. But Luc’ll fill you in a lot better than I can; I’ve just got back from the front.’

‘Circulation hasn’t fallen off, has it?’

‘I don’t believe so.’

Henri was anxious to get back to the paper. Only Paula must surely have telephoned the station, must know that the train was on time. She would be sitting there waiting, her eyes riveted to the clock, listening attentively to every sound.

After they had left Nadine in the lift surrounded by her baggage, Henri said, ‘On second thoughts, I think I’ll go home first.’

‘But the boys are waiting for you,’ Vincent protested.

‘Tell them I’ll be over in an hour.’

‘All right. I’ll leave the Rolls to you,’ Vincent said. He stopped the car in front of the house. ‘Should I take the bags out?’ he asked.

‘Just that small one, thanks.’

Unhappily, Henri pushed open the downstairs door, which banged noisily against a garbage pail; the concierge’s dog began barking. Before he even had a chance to knock, Paula had flung open the door to the flat.

‘It’s you! It’s really you!’ For a moment she remained motionless in his arms, and then she stepped back. ‘You look wonderful. You’re all sunburned! Was the trip back tiring?’ She smiled, but a little muscle in the corner of her mouth was quivering spasmodically.

‘Not at all,’ he replied, setting the suitcase down on the couch. ‘Here are some things for you.’

‘How sweet of you!’

‘Open it.’

She opened the suitcase. Silk stockings, doeskin sandals and a handbag to match, lengths of material, scarfs, gloves. He had chosen every article with anxious care and he was a little disappointed when, moved and yet vaguely indulgent, she only looked down at them, without touching them, without even bending over to examine them closely.

‘How really sweet of you!’ she repeated. And then, suddenly turning towards him, she exclaimed. ‘Your suitcases! Where are they?’

‘Downstairs in the car. Did you hear that L’Espoir got a car? Vincent picked me up in it,’ he said animatedly.

‘I’ll call the concierge and get him to bring them up,’ Paula said.

‘Don’t bother,’ Henri said, adding very quickly, ‘How did you spend the month? The weather wasn’t too bad, was it? Did you get out a little?’

‘A little,’ she replied evasively, her face cold and expressionless.

‘Who did you see? What did you do? Tell me all about it.’

‘Oh, nothing very interesting happened,’ she replied. ‘Let’s not talk about me.’ Quickly, but in a listless voice, she added, ‘Your book is a sensation, you know.’

‘I haven’t heard a thing yet. Do they really like it?’

‘Oh, the critics really didn’t understand anything, of course. But even so, they scented a masterpiece in it.’

‘It’s good to hear that,’ he said with a reserved smile. He would have liked to ask her a few questions, but he found Paula’s manner of speaking insufferable. He changed the subject. ‘Did you see the Dubreuilhs? How are they?’

‘I saw Anne for a moment one day; she’s up to her ears in work.’

She answered his questions reluctantly, tight-lipped. And he, he was burning with impatience to get back to his life!

‘Did you keep the back issues of L’Espoir?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t read them.’

‘No?’

‘There was nothing of yours in them. And I had other things to think about.’ She sought his eyes and suddenly her face came to life. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this past month and I’ve come to understand a great many things. I’m sorry about that scene I made before you left. I’m sincerely sorry.’

‘Oh, let’s not talk about that!’ he said. ‘First of all, you didn’t make a scene.’

‘Yes,’ she insisted, ‘I did. And I repeat, I’m truly sorry. I’ve known for a long time that a woman can’t be everything to a man like you. Not even all the women in the world. But I never really accepted it; I’m prepared now to love you with complete generosity, to love you for what you are and not for what I want. You have your mission and that has to come above all else.’

‘What mission?’

She forced a smile. ‘I’ve come to realize that often I must have been a burden to you; I can understand your wanting a little solitude. Well, you need not worry any more. I promise you your solitude, your freedom.’ She looked very intensely at Henri. ‘You’re free, my love, and I want you to know this and believe it. Besides, you’ve just finished proving it, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, adding feebly, ‘but as I explained to you …’

‘I remember,’ she said. ‘But with the change that’s taken place in me, I can assure you you no longer have any reason to move to a hotel. Listen, you want independence, adventures; but you want me, too, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then stay here. I swear you won’t have any reason to regret it. You’ll see for yourself how much I’ve changed and how little I’ll get in your way from now on.’ She stood up and reached for the telephone. ‘The concierge’s nephew will bring your things up.’

Henri rose and walked towards the stairway leading to the bedroom. ‘Later,’ he said to himself. He couldn’t after all, begin torturing her again the moment he came back. ‘I’m going to clean up a little,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting for me at the office. I just stopped off to give you a kiss.’

‘I understand perfectly,’ she replied tenderly.

‘She’s going to bend over backwards to prove to me I’m free,’ he thought unhappily as he got into the little black car. ‘But it won’t last. I won’t stay there indefinitely,’ he said to himself bitterly. ‘I’ll start taking care of that little matter tomorrow.’ But for the moment, he no longer wanted to think about Paula; all he wanted was to luxuriate in his happiness at being back in Paris. The streets were grey and the people had been cold and hungry that winter; but here, at least, everyone wore shoes. And then, you could speak to them, speak for them. In Portugal, the thing that was so depressing was the feeling of being a completely impotent witness to a totally foreign disaster.

Getting out of the car, he looked affectionately at the façade of the building. How had things gone at the paper while he was away? Was it true his novel was a success? He climbed the stairs quickly and when he reached the top he was greeted with cheers. A streamer hanging across the hallway read ‘Welcome Home!’ Standing with their backs to the walls, his colleagues formed a military arch, but in place of swords, they held their fountain pens. They began singing an unintelligible couplet in which ‘Salazar’ rhymed with ‘gal and car’. Only Lambert was missing. Why?

‘Everyone to the bar!’ Luc cried out, giving Henri a hearty slap on the back. ‘How did it go?’

‘What a sunburn!’

‘Look at those clodhoppers.’

‘Are you going to do an article on Portugal?’

‘Hey! Look at that shirt!’

They fingered his suit, his tie; they shouted and joked and asked question after question while the bartender filled and refilled their glasses. Henri in turn questioned them. Circulation had dropped off a little, but the paper would soon be going back to a larger format, which would help make up the loss; there had been some trouble with the censor – nothing very serious; everyone had nothing but praise for his book, and he had received a tremendous amount of mail; on his desk, he would find every issue of L’Espoir for the month he had been away. Preston, the Yank, was trying to arrange for a larger allotment of paper, enabling them to put out a Sunday magazine supplement. And there were a great many other things to discuss. But all this noise, the voices, the laughter, the problems, added to three nights of fitful sleeping, made him dizzy – dizzy and happy. What a silly idea to have gone to Portugal in search of a past that was dead and buried, when the present was so joyfully alive!

‘All I can say is I’m damned happy to be back!’ he exclaimed, his face beaming.

‘And we’re not exactly unhappy to have you back, you know,’ Luc said. ‘In fact we were even beginning to need you. I warn you, though, you’re going to have a hell of a lot of work to catch up on.’

‘Well, I hope so!’

The typewriters were clicking away. They separated in the hallway after a few more jokes and bursts of laughter. How young they seemed after coming from a country in which everyone was ageless! Henri opened the door to his office and sat down in his chair with the satisfaction of an old bureaucrat. He spread out the latest issues of L’Espoir before him. The usual by-lines, the same careful layout – not a fraction of an inch of space wasted. He jumped back one month and began leafing through the issues, one after another. They had got along wonderfully without him, and that, of course, was the surest proof of his success. L’Espoir wasn’t merely a wartime adventure; it was a solid enterprise. Vincent’s articles on Holland were excellent, and Lambert’s on the concentration camps even more so. No question about it, they had hit precisely the right note – no nonsense, no lies, no humbug. Because of its scrupulous honesty, L’Espoir appealed to the intellectuals, and it attracted the masses because it was so alive. There was only one weak point: Sézenac’s articles were rather thin.

‘Can I come in?’ Lambert asked, standing in the doorway and smiling timidly.

‘Of course! Where’ve you been hiding? You could at least have come to the station, you lazy bum.’

‘I didn’t think there’d be enough room for four,’ Lambert explained. ‘And their little party …’ he added with a grimace. ‘Am I disturbing you?’

‘Not at all. Pull up a chair.’

‘Was it a good trip?’ Lambert asked. ‘I guess you’ve been asked that question twenty times already,’ he added with a shrug of his shoulders.

‘Good and bad. A beautiful setting, and seven million people starving to death.’

‘They certainly have excellent cloth,’ Lambert remarked, examining Henri approvingly. He smiled. ‘Is that the style there, orange shoes?’

‘Orange or lemon. But it’s good leather. There’s plenty of everything for the rich; that’s the lousiest part of it. I’ll tell you all about it later, but first fill me in on what’s been happening here. I’ve just finished reading some of your articles; they’re damned good, you know.’

‘I felt as if I were back in school writing a composition: Describe your impressions while visiting a concentration camp,’ he said ironically. ‘I think there were more than twenty of us there writing on the same subject.’ Suddenly his face brightened. ‘Do you want to know something that’s really good? Your book. I started it after driving a whole night and day without sleep, and believe me I was really beat. But I read it straight through, couldn’t go to sleep until I finished it.’

‘You make me happy,’ Henri said.

Compliments always embarrassed him. Yet what Lambert said gave him real pleasure. It was precisely the way he had dreamed of being read – straight through in a single night by an impatient young man. That alone made writing worthwhile. Especially that.

‘I thought maybe you’d like to see the reviews,’ Lambert said, tossing a thick yellow envelope on the desk. ‘You’ll find my two cents’ worth in there, too.’

‘You’re damned right I’d like to see them. Thanks,’ Henri said.

Lambert looked at him questioningly. ‘Did you do any writing there?’

‘An article on how I found things.’

‘And now you’ll be starting another novel?’

‘I’ll get to it as soon as I have the time.’

‘Find the time!’ Lambert said. ‘While you were away, I was thinking …’ he began, his face colouring. ‘You have to defend yourself.’

‘Against whom?’ Henri asked with a smile.

Lambert hesitated again. ‘It seems that Dubreuilh has been waiting impatiently for you to get back. Don’t let yourself get involved in his schemes …’

‘I’m already more or less involved in them,’ Henri said.

‘Well, if I were you, I’d get myself disinvolved fast!’

‘No,’ Henri replied, smiling. ‘It just isn’t possible nowadays to stay apolitical.’

Lambert’s face grew sombre. ‘I suppose that means you disapprove of me, doesn’t it?’

‘Not at all. What I mean is that it’s impossible for me. We’re not the same age, you know.’

‘What’s age got to do with it?’ Lambert asked.

‘You’ll find out. You change, you begin to understand a lot of things when you get older.’ Henri smiled and added, ‘But I promise you I’ll find time enough to continue writing.’

‘You have to,’ Lambert said.

‘I just remembered something, my sermonizing friend! What happened to those short stories you were telling me about?’

‘They aren’t worth a damn,’ Lambert replied.

‘Let me have them. And then we’ll have dinner together some evening and talk about them.’

‘Right,’ Lambert said. He got up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll want to see her, but little Marie-Ange Bizet is dead set on interviewing you. She’s been waiting for two hours. What’ll I tell her?’

‘That I never give interviews and that I’m up to my ears in work.’

Lambert closed the door behind him and Henri emptied the contents of the yellow envelope on his desk. On a bulging folder, his secretary had written: ‘Correspondence – Novel.’ He hesitated a moment. He had written the novel during the war without ever having given any thought to what the future might hold for him; he hadn’t even been sure that the future would hold anything at all for him. And now the book had been published, people had already read it. All at once, Henri found himself judged, discussed, classified, as he himself had so often judged and discussed others. He spread out the clippings and began going through them one at a time. ‘A sensation’, Paula had said, and he had thought she was exaggerating. But, as a matter of fact, the critics also used some pretty impressive words. Lambert, of course, was prejudiced; Lachaume, too. All those young critics who had just come into their own had a natural predisposition for the writers of the Resistance. But it was the admiring letters sent by both friends and strangers that confirmed the verdict of the press. Really, without getting a swelled head about it, it was certainly enough to make any man happy. His pages, written with deep feeling, had actually stirred people! Henri stretched happily. In a way, it was miraculous – what had just happened. Two years earlier, thick curtains had veiled blue-painted windows; he had been completely shut off from the black city, from the whole earth; his pen would pause hesitantly over the paper. Now those unformed sounds in his throat had become a living voice in the world; the secret stirrings in his heart had been transformed into truths for other hearts. ‘I should have tried explaining it to Nadine,’ he said to himself. ‘If others don’t count, it’s meaningless to write. But if they do count, it’s wonderful to gain their friendship and their confidence with words; it’s magnificent to hear your own thoughts echoed in them.’ He raised his eyes; someone was opening the door.

‘I’ve been waiting for you for two hours,’ said a plaintive voice. ‘You could at least give me fifteen minutes.’ Marie-Ange planted herself solidly in front of his desk. ‘It’s for Lendemain. A big front-page spread, with pictures.’

‘Look, I never give interviews.’

‘Exactly. That’s why mine will be worth its weight in gold.’

Henri shook his head, and Marie-Ange said indignantly, ‘You wouldn’t ruin my whole career just because of a principle?’

He smiled. Fifteen minutes meant so very much to her, and it would cost him so very little! To tell the truth, he even felt like talking about himself. Among the people who liked his book, there were certainly some who wanted to know the author better. And he felt like telling them about himself, telling them so that their approval would really be directed at him.

‘You win,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’

‘First of all, where do you come from?’

‘My father was a pharmacist in Tulle.’

‘And?’

Henri hesitated. It isn’t easy to begin talking about yourself out of a clear sky.

‘Go ahead,’ Marie-Ange prodded. ‘Tell me a few things about your childhood.’

Like everyone else, he had memories enough, only they didn’t seem very important to him. Except for that dinner, in the Henri II dining-room, when he finally delivered himself of his fear.

‘All right, here’s one for you,’ he said. ‘Actually, it’s nothing, but for me it was the beginning of a great many things.’

Her pencil poised above her note-book, Marie-Ange gave him an encouraging look.

‘The major subject of conversation between my parents,’ he began, ‘was the disasters that were menacing the world – the red peril, the yellow peril, barbarism, decadence, revolution, bolshevism. And I imagined them all as horrible monsters who were going to swallow up all humanity. Well, at dinner one evening, my father was doing his usual prophesying – the revolution was imminent, civilization was foundering. And my mother was nodding agreement, a look of terror on her face. And then suddenly I thought, “But no matter what happens, the winners will still be men.” Maybe those aren’t exactly words I used, but that’s the gist of it.’ Henri smiled. ‘The effect was miraculous. No more monsters. It was all here on earth, among human creatures, among ourselves.’

‘And then?’ Marie-Ange asked.

‘So, ever since then I’ve been hunting down monsters,’ he replied.

Marie-Ange looked perplexed. ‘But your story?’ she asked. ‘How does it end?’

‘What story?’

‘The one you just began,’ she replied impatiently.

‘It’s finished; there is no other ending,’ Henri answered.

‘Oh,’ Marie-Ange said, disappointed. ‘I was hoping for something picturesque,’ she added plaintively.

‘There was nothing picturesque about my childhood,’ Henri said. ‘The pharmacy bored me to death and living out in the country was annoying. Fortunately, I had an uncle in Paris who managed to get me a job with Vendredi.’

He hesitated. There were a great many things he could say about his first years in Paris, but he didn’t know which ones to choose.

‘Vendredi was a leftist paper?’ Marie-Ange said. ‘You had leftist ideas even then?’

‘Let’s say I loathed all rightist ideas.’

‘Why?’

Henri thought for a moment. ‘I was very ambitious when I was twenty, and that’s precisely why I was a democrat. I wanted to be the best – but the best among equals. If the race is fixed from the start, there’s no point betting.’

Marie-Ange scribbled in her note-book. She didn’t look too intelligent, and Henri tried to think of simple words with which to express himself. ‘Between a chimpanzee and the lowliest of men,’ he thought to himself, ‘there’s an enormously greater difference than between that man and an Einstein! A consciousness that gives evidence that it exists is one of the absolutes.’ He was about to open his mouth, but Marie-Ange spoke first.

‘Tell me about your start.’

‘What start?’

‘Your start in literature.’

‘I’ve always scribbled a bit.’

‘How old were you when The Accident was published?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Dubreuilh was the one who gave you your start, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, he helped me a lot.’

‘How did you get to know him?’

‘They sent me over to interview him once, and he made me do the talking. He asked me to come back and see him again, and I did …’

‘Give me more details,’ Marie-Ange said plaintively. ‘You’re not very good at explaining things.’ She looked at him. ‘What do you talk about when you’re together?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Everything and nothing, like everyone else.’

‘Did he encourage you to write?’

‘Yes. And when I finished The Accident, he got Mauvanes to read it, and Mauvanes accepted it at once.’

‘Was it successful?’

‘Call it a succes d’estime. You know, it’s funny …’

‘Yes, tell me something funny!’ she said eagerly.

Henri hesitated. ‘It’s funny how you begin by having big dreams of glory. And then, with the first little success, you’re completely happy.’

Marie-Ange sighed. ‘I already have the titles and dates of your other books. Were you in the service?’

‘In the infantry. Ordinary private. I never wanted to be an officer. Wounded the ninth of May at Mont Dieu near Vouziers; evacuated to Montélimar; back in Paris in September.’

‘What exactly did you do in the Resistance?’

‘Luc and I founded L’Espoir in 1941.’

‘You did other things, too, didn’t you?’

‘Nothing very interesting. Skip it.’

‘Right. Exactly when did you write your last book?’

‘Between ’41 and ’42.’

‘Have you started a new one?’

‘No, but I’m going to.’

‘What’ll it be? A novel?’

‘A novel. But it’s still very vague.’

‘I’ve heard some talk about a magazine.’

‘That’s right. Dubreuilh and I are going to put out a monthly called Vigilance. It’ll be published by Mauvanes.’

‘What’s this political party Dubreuilh’s founding?’

‘It’d take much too long to explain.’

‘In a few words, then.’

‘Ask him.’

‘You can’t get near him.’ Marie-Ange sighed. ‘You’re funny, you know. If I were famous, I’d be getting myself interviewed all the time.’

‘Then you’d have no time left to do anything and you’d stop being famous. Now, you’re going to be a nice little girl and let me get back to my work.’

‘But I still have a lot of questions. What did you think of Portugal?’

Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘It stinks.’

‘What stinks?’

‘Everything.’

‘Make that a little clearer. I can’t just say to my readers: It stinks.’

‘Well, tell them that Salazar’s paternalism is nothing but an unspeakable dictatorship, and that the Americans ought to get rid of him in a hurry,’ Henri said rapidly. ‘Unfortunately, it won’t happen tomorrow; he’s going to sell them air bases in the Azores.’

Marie-Ange frowned, and Henri added, ‘If that upsets you, don’t use it. I’m going to break it soon in L’Espoir, anyhow.’

‘Of course I’ll use it!’ Marie-Ange said emphatically. She studied Henri seriously. ‘What inner motives made you take that trip?’

‘Listen, you don’t have to ask idiotic questions to be a success as a newspaperwoman. And I repeat again that that’s enough. Be a nice girl and leave quietly.’

‘I’d have liked a few anecdotes.’

‘I don’t have any.’

Marie-Ange minced out. Henri felt a sense of disappointment; Marie-Ange hadn’t asked the right questions, and he had said none of the things he had had to say. But after all, just what did he have to say? ‘I’d like my readers to know who I am, but the trouble is I’m not quite sure myself.’ At any rate, in a few days he would get back to his book and he would try to define himself systematically.

He began going through his correspondence again, and he was staggered by the number of telegrams and clippings there were to be read, the letters to answer, the people to see! Luc had warned him; he had his work cut out for him. The following days he spent shut away in his office; he went home to Paula’s only to sleep. He had just barely enough time to prepare his article and the printers grabbed it from him page by page. But after his too-long holiday, he was happy to get back to this excess of activity.

Without enthusiasm, he recognized Scriassine’s voice on the telephone. ‘Listen here, you quitter, you’ve been back four days now, and nobody’s seen you. Come over to the Isba right away. Rue Balzac.’

‘I’m sorry but I’ve got work to do.’

‘Stop feeling sorry and come over. We’re all waiting to drink a champagne toast to you.’

‘Who’s we?’ Henri asked cheerfully.

‘I, among others,’ said Dubreuilh’s voice. ‘And Anne, and Julien. I’ve got a thousand things to tell you. What in hell are you doing over there anyhow? Can’t you crawl out of your hole for an hour or two?’

‘I was planning to come over to see you tomorrow,’ Henri said.

‘Well, come over to the Isba now.’

‘All right! All right! I’m on my way.’

Henri hung up the telephone and smiled; he was really looking forward to seeing Dubreuilh again. He picked up the telephone and called Paula. ‘It’s me. The Dubreuilhs and Scriassine are waiting for us at the Isba … Yes, the Isba … I don’t know any more about it than you. I’ll come and pick you up in the car.’

A half hour later they went down a stairway flanked on either side by magnificently dressed Cossacks. Paula was wearing a new evening dress and he realized that green did not, as a matter of fact, become her.

‘What a peculiar place!’ she murmured.

‘With Scriassine, you can expect just about anything.’

Outside, the night had been so empty, so quiet, that the Isba’s lush luxury was disturbing; it made one think of a perverse antechamber to a torture dungeon. The quilted walls were blood-red, the folds of the draperies dripped blood, and the gypsy musicians’ shirts were made of crimson satin.

‘There you are! Did you slip by them?’ Anne asked.

‘They look safe and sound to me,’ Julien said.

‘We were just attacked by a mob of reporters,’ Dubreuilh explained.

‘Armed with cameras,’ Anne added.

‘Dubreuilh was wonderful,’ Julien exclaimed, stammering with enthusiasm. ‘He said … Well, I forget exactly what he said, but anyhow it was damned well put. A couple of questions more, and he’d have sailed right into them.’

They were all speaking at once, except for Scriassine, who was smiling and wearing a slightly superior look.

‘I really did think Robert was going to start swinging,’ Anne said.

‘He said: “We’re not a bunch of trained monkeys,”’ Julien quoted, beaming broadly.

‘I’ve always considered my face my own personal property,’ Dubreuilh remarked with dignity.

‘The trouble is,’ Anne said, ‘that for people like you nudity begins with the face. Just showing your nose and eyes is exhibitionism.’

‘They don’t take pictures of exhibitionists,’ Dubreuilh replied.

‘That’s a shame,’ said Julien.

‘Drink up,’ Henri said, handing Paula a glass of vodka. ‘Drink up; we’re way behind.’ He emptied his glass, and asked, ‘But how did they know you were here?’

‘Yes,’ Julien said, looking at the others in surprise. ‘How did they know?’

‘I imagine the maître d’hôtel telephoned,’ Scriassine said.

‘But he doesn’t know us,’ Anne said.

‘He knows me,’ Scriassine said. He bit his lower lip, looking like a woman caught in the act. ‘I wanted him to give you the kind of attention you deserve, so I told him who you were.’

‘Well, it looks as if you succeeded,’ Henri said. Scriassine’s childish vanity never failed to astonish him.

Dubreuilh burst out laughing. ‘So it was he who betrayed us! Now I’ve heard everything!’ He turned abruptly towards Henri. ‘Well, what about that trip? Instead of playing, it would seem as if you spent your entire time attending conferences and conducting investigations.’

‘Oh, I managed to get in a lot of sightseeing, too,’ Henri said.

‘Your articles make one want to do one’s sightseeing somewhere else. It’s a sad country!’

‘It was sad, but it was beautiful too,’ Henri said cheerfully. ‘It’s primarily sad for the Portuguese.’

‘I don’t know whether you do it on purpose,’ Dubreuilh said, ‘but when you say that the sea is blue, blue somehow becomes a sinister colour.’

‘And at times it was. But not always,’ Henri smiled. ‘You know how it is when you write.’

‘Yes,’ said Julien, ‘you have to lie to avoid telling the truth.’

‘Anyhow, I’m happy to be back,’ Henri said.

‘But you didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to see your friends again.’

‘You’re wrong; I was,’ Henri replied. ‘Every morning I’ve been telling myself that I’d drop over to see you. And then, all of a sudden it was after midnight.’

‘Well, keep a sharper eye on your watch tomorrow,’ Dubreuilh said grumpily. ‘There’s a pack of things I have to bring you up to date on.’ He smiled. ‘I think we’re getting off to a good start.’

‘You’re beginning to recruit? Has Samazelle decided to go along?’ Henri asked.

‘He doesn’t agree on all points, but I’m sure we’ll be able to compromise,’ Dubreuilh answered.

‘No serious talk tonight!’ Scriassine said, motioning to the monocled maître d’hôtel. ‘Two bottles of Mumm’s, brut.’

‘Is that absolutely necessary?’ Henri asked.

‘Yes. Strict orders!’ Scriassine followed the maître d’hôtel with his eyes. ‘He’s really come down a notch or two since ’39. Used to be a colonel.’

‘Do you come to this joint often?’ Henri asked.

‘Whenever I feel like breaking my heart, I come here and listen to the music.’

‘But there are so many less expensive ways of doing it,’ Julien said. ‘Besides, all hearts were broken long ago,’ he concluded vaguely.

‘Well, my heart breaks only to jazz,’ Henri said. ‘All your gypsies do to me is ruin my feet.’

‘Oh!’ Anne exclaimed.

‘Jazz,’ Scriassine said musingly. ‘I wrote several definitive pages on jazz in The Son of Abel.’

‘Do you really believe it’s possible to write something definitive?’ Paula said haughtily.

‘I won’t discuss it; you’ll be reading the book soon,’ Scriassine said. ‘The French edition will be out any day now.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Five thousand copies! It’s ridiculous! They ought to make exceptions for worthwhile books. How many did they allow you?’

‘The same. Five thousand,’ Henri replied.

‘Absurd! After all, what you’ve written is the book on the Occupation. A book like that should have a printing of at least a hundred thousand copies.’

‘Fight it out with the Minister of Information,’ Henri said. Scriassine’s overbearing enthusiasm irritated him. Among friends, one avoids speaking of one’s books; it embarrasses everyone and amuses no one.

‘We’re bringing out a magazine next month,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘Well, let me tell you, getting paper was one hell of a job!’

‘That’s because the Minister doesn’t know his business,’ Scriassine said. ‘Paper? I’ll find him all he wants!’

Once he began attacking a technical problem in his didactic voice, Scriassine was inexhaustible. While he was complacently flooding France with paper, Anne said quietly to Henri, ‘You know, I don’t think there’s been a book in the last twenty years that’s affected me as much as yours. It’s a book … Well, exactly the kind of book you’d want to read after these last four years. Some parts moved me so much that I had to put it aside and take a walk in the street to calm myself down.’ Suddenly she blushed. ‘You feel idiotic when you say things like that, but it’s just as idiotic not to say them. Anyhow, it can’t do any harm.’

‘In fact, it even gives pleasure,’ Henri said.

‘You moved a great many people,’ Anne continued. ‘All those who don’t want to forget,’ she added with passion.

He smiled at her gratefully. Tonight she was wearing a Scotch-plaid dress which made her look years younger, and she had applied her make-up with care. In one way, she looked much younger than Nadine. Nadine never blushed.

Scriassine raised his voice. ‘That magazine could be a very powerful instrument of culture and action, but only on condition that it expresses more than the opinions of a tight little coterie. I maintain that a man like Louis Volange ought to be a member of your team.’

‘Out of the question,’ Dubreuilh stated flatly.

‘An intellectual’s lapse isn’t that serious,’ Scriassine said. ‘Name me the intellectual who has never made a mistake.’ Gravely he added, ‘Should a man be made to bear the weight of his mistakes all his life?’

‘To have been a Party member in Russia in 1930 wasn’t a mistake,’ Dubreuilh said.

‘If you have no right to make a mistake, it was a crime.’

‘It’s not a question of right,’ Dubreuilh replied.

‘How dare you set yourselves up as judges?’ Scriassine said, without listening to him. ‘Do you know Volange’s reasons, his explanations? Are you sure that all the people you accept on your team are better men than he?’

‘We don’t judge,’ Henri said. ‘We choose sides. There’s a big difference.’

Volange had been clever enough not to compromise himself too seriously, but Henri had sworn that he would never shake hands with him again. When he read the articles Louis wrote in the Free French Zone, he hadn’t been the least bit surprised by what they said. From the moment they left college, their friendship had gradually become an almost open enmity.

With a blasé air, Scriassine shrugged his shoulders and motioned to the maître d’hôtel. ‘Another bottle!’ Again, he stealthily studied the old émigré. ‘A striking head, isn’t it? The bags under the eyes, the droop of the mouth, all the symptoms of decay. Before the war you could still find a trace of arrogance on his face. But the weakness, the dissoluteness of their caste gnaws at them. And their treachery …’ He stared in fascination at the man.

‘Scriassine’s serf!’ Henri thought. He, too, had fled his country, and there they called him a traitor. That probably was the reason for his immense vanity: since he had no homeland, no one to stand up for him but himself, he needed always to reassure himself that somewhere in the world his name meant something.

‘Anne!’ Paula exclaimed. ‘How horrible!’

Anne was emptying her glass of vodka into her champagne glass. ‘It livens it up,’ she explained. ‘Why don’t you try it? It’s good.’

Paula shook her head.

‘Why aren’t you drinking?’ Anne asked. ‘Things are gayer when you drink.’

‘Drinking makes me drunk,’ Paula answered.

Julien began to laugh. ‘You make me think of that girl – a charming young thing I met on the Rue Montparnasse in front of a little hotel – who said to me, “As far as I’m concerned, living kills me.”’

‘She didn’t say that,’ said Anne.

‘She could have said it.’

‘Anyhow, she was right,’ Anne said in a drunk’s sententious voice. ‘To live is to die a little.’

‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ Scriassine half shouted. ‘If you don’t want to listen, at least let me listen!’ The orchestra had begun an enthusiastic attack on Dark Eyes.

‘Let him break his heart,’ Anne said.

‘In the breaking surf a broken heart …’ Julien murmured.

‘Will you please shut up!’

Everyone fell silent. Scriassine’s eyes were fixed on the violinist’s dancing fingers; a dazed look on his face, he was listening to a memory of time long past. He thought it manful to impose his whims on others, but they gave in to him as they would to a neurotic woman. Their very docility should have made him suspicious, as it did. Henri smiled as he watched Dubreuilh tapping his fingers on the table; his courtesy seemed infinite – if you didn’t put it too long to the test. You then learned soon enough that it had its limits. Henri felt like having a quiet talk with him, but he was not impatient. He didn’t care for champagne, or gypsy music, or all this false luxury; nevertheless, simply to be sitting in a public place at two o’clock in the morning was cause for celebration. ‘We’re home again,’ he said to himself. ‘Anne, Paula, Julien, Scriassine, Dubreuilh – my friends!’ The word crackled in his heart with all the joyfulness of a Christmas sparkler.

While Scriassine was furiously applauding, Julien led Paula on to the dance floor. Dubreuilh turned towards Henri. ‘All those old codgers you met in Portugal, are they really hoping for a revolution?’

‘They hope. Unfortunately Salazar won’t fall before Franco goes, and the Americans don’t seem to be in a hurry.’

Scriassine shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can understand their not being anxious to create Communist bases in the Mediterranean.’

‘Do you mean to say that out of fear of Communism you’d go so far as to endorse Franco?’ Henri asked incredulously.

‘I’m afraid you don’t understand the situation,’ Scriassine replied.

‘Don’t worry,’ Dubreuilh said cheerfully. ‘We understand it very well.’ Scriassine opened his mouth, but Dubreuilh cut him off with a laugh. ‘Yes, you’re farseeing all right, but you’re still no Nostradamus. Your crystal ball is no clearer than ours when it comes to predicting things that’ll happen fifty years from now. One thing is sure right now though, and that is that the Stalinist menace is purely an American invention.’

Scriassine looked at Dubreuilh suspiciously. ‘You talk exactly like a Communist.’

‘Do you think a Communist would ever say aloud what I just said?’ Dubreuilh asked. ‘When you attack America, they accuse you of playing into the hands of the fifth column.’

‘The line’ll change soon enough,’ Scriassine replied. ‘You’re just anticipating it by a few weeks, that’s all.’ He knitted his brow. ‘I’ve often been asked in what ways you differ from the Communists. And I have to admit I’m always at a loss for an answer.’

Dubreuilh laughed. ‘Well, don’t answer then.’

‘Hey!’ Henri said. ‘I thought serious talk was out of order tonight.’

With an irritated shrug of his shoulders, Scriassine indicated that it was frivolity that was now out of order. ‘Is that a way of getting out of it?’ he asked, looking at Dubreuilh accusingly.

‘Now look,’ Dubreuilh answered. ‘I’m no Communist, and you know it.’

‘I’m not so sure of that.’ Scriassine’s face underwent a sudden transformation; he gave Dubreuilh his most charming smile. ‘Really, I’d like to learn more about your point of view.’

‘I believe the Communists are backing the wrong horse just now,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘I know why they’re supporting Yalta; they want to give Russia enough time to get on her feet again. But as a result, the world is going to find itself divided into two camps with every reason to pounce on each other.’

‘Is that the only thing you have against them? An error of judgment?’ Scriassine asked severely.

‘What I have against them is not being able to see farther than the end of their noses,’ Dubreuilh shrugged his shoulders. ‘Reconstruction is all very well and good, but not when it’s done without considering the means. They go on accepting American aid, but one of these days they’re going to be sorry. One thing will lead to another, and eventually France will find herself completely under America’s thumb.’

Scriassine emptied his glass and banged it down on the table. ‘Now that’s what I call an optimistic prediction!’ In a serious voice, he continued rapidly, ‘I don’t like America and I don’t believe in the Atlantic community. But I sincerely hope America predominates, because the important question in this day and age is one of abundance. And only America can give it to us.’

‘Abundance?’ Dubreuilh said. ‘For whom? And at what price? That would be a pretty picture, to be colonized by America!’ he added indignantly.

‘Would you rather Russia annexed us?’ Scriassine asked. He stopped Dubreuilh with a sharp gesture. ‘I know. You’re dreaming of a united, autonomous, socialist Europe. But if Europe refuses the protection of the United States, she’ll inevitably fall into the hands of Stalin.’

Dubreuilh shrugged his shoulders. ‘Russia has no intention of annexing anything at all.’

‘In any case, that Europe you dream so much about will never come about,’ Scriassine said.

‘That’s what you say!’ Dubreuilh protested. ‘Anyhow,’ he continued heatedly, ‘here in France we have a clear-cut objective – to achieve a real popular front government. And for that, we need a non-Communist left that’s able to hold its own.’ He turned towards Henri. ‘We mustn’t lose any more time. At the moment people feel that the future is wide open. Let’s not wait until they become discouraged.’

Scriassine downed a glass of vodka and lost himself in contemplating the maître d’hôtel. He had given up talking sense to fools.

‘You say you’ve got off to a good start?’ Henri asked Dubreuilh.

‘We’ve started, but now we have to continue. I’d like you to see Samazelle as soon as possible. There’s going to be a committee meeting on Saturday and I’m counting on your being there.’

‘Let me have a little time to catch my breath,’ Henri said, giving Dubreuilh a slightly worried look. It wasn’t going to be easy defending himself against that nice, imperative smile.

‘I purposely delayed the meeting so that you could be there,’ Dubreuilh said reprovingly.

‘You shouldn’t have,’ Henri replied. ‘I assure you you’re overestimating my qualifications.’

‘And you your lack of them,’ Dubreuilh said. He looked at Henri severely. ‘You’ve got a pretty good picture these last four days of what’s been happening; things have been moving along at a damned rapid pace. You must have realized by now that neutrality is no longer possible.’

‘But I’ve never been neutral!’ Henri protested. ‘I’ve always agreed to go along with the SRL.’

‘Is that right? Well, let’s see now … Your name and a few appearances – that’s all you ever promised me.’

‘Don’t forget I have a newspaper on my hands,’ Henri replied.

‘Precisely. It’s the paper I have in mind more than anything else. It can’t remain neutral any more.’

‘But it never was!’ Henri said, surprised.

‘How can I get it through your thick skull?’ Dubreuilh said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Being on the side of the Resistance doesn’t constitute a political programme nowadays.’

‘No, I don’t have a programme,’ Henri admitted. ‘But whenever the occasion demands it, L’Espoir does choose sides.’

‘No, it doesn’t, not any more so than all the other papers. You argue about trifles, but when it comes to the big things, all of you somehow manage to agree on covering up the truth.’ There was anger in Dubreuilh’s voice. ‘From Figaro to L’Humanité, you’re all nothing but a bunch of humbugs. You say yes to de Gaulle, yes to Yalta, yes to everything; you act as if you believe there’s still a Resistance and that we’re heading steadily towards socialism. Your friend Luc has really been going to town with that hogwash in his recent editorials. All we’re doing, really, is marking time; in fact, we’re even beginning to retreat. And not a one of you has the guts to tell the truth!’

‘I always thought you agreed with L’Espoir,’ Henri said. He was stunned; his heart began beating rapidly. During the past four days, he had meshed with that paper as one meshes with one’s own life. And then all of a sudden L’Espoir was being indicted. And by Dubreuilh!

‘Agree with what?’ Dubreuilh asked. ‘L’Espoir has no line. You’re constantly complaining that nothing’s been nationalized. And what do you do about it? Nothing. Now what would be interesting would be to tell who’s putting on the brakes, and why.’

‘I don’t want to take a stand for or against any particular class,’ Henri said. ‘Reforms will come about when public opinion demands them, and what I’m trying to do is arouse opinion. I can’t very well do that if I’m going to set half my readers against me, can I?’

‘You can’t possibly believe that the class struggle is outmoded, can you?’ Dubreuilh asked suspiciously.

‘No.’

‘Then don’t come telling me about public opinion,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘On one side, you have the proletariat which wants reforms, and on the other, the bourgeoisie which doesn’t. The middle classes are treading water because they don’t know where their true interests lie any more. But don’t get the idea you can influence them; it’s the situation that will do the deciding.’

Henri hesitated. No, the class struggle wasn’t outmoded. All right. But did that automatically doom any appeal to people’s good intentions, to their common sense? ‘Their interests are quite complex,’ he replied. ‘I’m not at all convinced you can’t influence them.’

Dubreuilh was about to say something, but Henri cut him off. ‘Another thing,’ he said spiritedly. ‘The workers who read L’Espoir read it because it gives them a change from L’Humanité; it gives them a breath of fresh air. If I take a class stand, I’ll either repeat what the Communist papers are saying, or I’ll take issue with them. And either way, the workers will drop me.’ In a conciliatory voice, he added, ‘I reach a lot more people than you do, you know. That means I have to have a much broader platform.’

‘Yes, you do reach a lot of people,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘But you yourself just gave the reason why. If your paper pleases everybody, it’s because it disturbs nobody. It attacks nothing, defends nothing, evades every problem. It simply makes for pleasant reading, like a local sheet.’

Dubreuilh’s outburst was followed by a brief silence. Paula had returned to the table and was sitting next to Anne; she seemed outraged, and even Anne was quite embarrassed. Julien had disappeared. Scriassine, awakened from his meditations, looked back and forth from Henri to Dubreuilh, as if he were watching a tennis match. But it was a strictly one-sided match; Henri had been overwhelmed by the sudden violence of the attack.

‘What are you getting at?’ he asked.

‘Stop shilly-shallying,’ Dubreuilh answered. ‘Take the bit in your teeth and define your position in relation to the Communist Party.’

Henri looked at Dubreuilh suspiciously. It often happened that Dubreuilh would heatedly involve himself in the affairs of others, and, just as often, you came to realize that he had in fact made them his own affairs. ‘In short, what you’re proposing is that I accept the SRL’s entire programme.’

‘Yes,’ Dubreuilh replied.

‘But you don’t really expect L’Espoir to become the official organ of the movement, do you?’

‘It would be perfectly natural,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘L’Espoir’s weakness stems from the fact that it doesn’t represent anything. Besides, without a newspaper the movement has almost no chance of getting anywhere. Since our goals are the same …’

‘Our goals, but not our methods,’ Henri interrupted. Regretfully, he thought, ‘So that’s why Dubreuilh was so impatient to see me!’ The good spirits with which he began the evening had, in the course of the last few minutes, completely deserted him. ‘Isn’t it ever possible to spend an evening among friends without talking politics?’ he asked himself. There was nothing in their conversation so terribly urgent that Dubreuilh couldn’t have put it off for another day or two. He had become as much a crank as Scriassine.

‘Precisely. And take my word for it, it would be to your advantage to change your methods,’ Dubreuilh said.

Henri shook his head. ‘I’ll show you letters I receive every day, letters from intellectuals especially – teachers, students. What they all like about L’Espoir is its fairness. If I tack on a programme, I lose their trust.’

‘Of course. Intellectuals are delighted when you encourage them to be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl,’ Dubreuilh replied. ‘Their trust? Who needs it?’

‘Give me two or three years and I’ll lead them by the hand to the SRL.’

‘If you really believe that, then all I can say is you’re a starry-eyed idealist!’ Dubreuilh said.

‘Possibly,’ Henri replied with a slight show of annoyance. ‘But in ’41 they branded me an idealist too.’ Firmly, he added, ‘I have my own ideas about what a newspaper should be.’

Dubreuilh gestured evasively We’ll talk about it again. But believe me, six months from now either L’Espoir aligns itself with our politics or it’s all washed up.’

‘All right, we’ll talk about it again in six months,’ Henri said.

Suddenly, he felt tired and at a loss. Dubreuilh’s proposition had taken him by surprise, but he was absolutely resolved to do nothing about it. He felt a desperate need to be alone in order to clear his mind. ‘I have to be getting home,’ he said.

Paula remained silent on the way home, but they were no sooner in the apartment than she began her attack. ‘Are you going to give him the paper?’

‘Of course not,’ Henri said.

‘Are you really sure?’ she asked. ‘Dubreuilh wants it, and he is stubborn.’

‘I’m pretty stubborn myself.’

‘But you always end up by giving in to him,’ Paula said, her voice suddenly exploding. ‘Why did you ever agree to join the SRL? As if you didn’t have enough to do already! You’ve been back for four days now, and we haven’t had five minutes together. And you haven’t written a line of your novel!’

‘I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Things are beginning to settle down at the paper.’

‘That’s no reason to burden yourself with new loads,’ Paula said, her voice rising. ‘Dubreuilh did you a favour ten years ago; he can’t expect you to repay him for it for the rest of your life.’

‘But I’m not working with him simply to repay a favour, Paula. The thing interests me.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Don’t give me that!’

‘I mean it,’ he said.

‘Do you believe all that talk about a new war?’ she asked with a worried look.

‘No,’ Henri replied. ‘There may be a few firebrands in America, but they don’t like war over there. One thing you can be sure of – there’s going to be a radical change in the world for better or for worse. What we’ve got to do is to try to make it a change for the better.’

‘The world is always changing. But before the war you let it change without getting yourself involved,’ Paula said.

Henri started up the stairway. ‘It isn’t before the war any more,’ he replied, yawning.

‘But why can’t we go back to living like we did then?’

‘Circumstances are different – and so am I.’ He yawned again. ‘I’m tired.’

Yes, he was tired, but when he lay down in bed beside Paula he couldn’t sleep. The champagne, the vodka, Dubreuilh, all conspired to keep him awake. No, he wouldn’t give him L’Espoir. That was so clear to him that it needed no justifying. Nevertheless, he wished he could find a few good reasons for his stand. Was he really an idealist? And exactly what did that mean? Naturally, and to a certain extent, he believed in people’s freedom, in their basic good will, in the power of ideas. You can’t possibly believe that the class struggle is outmoded, can you? No, he couldn’t believe it, but what, after all, did that mean? He turned over on his back. He felt like lighting a cigarette, but he was afraid of awakening Paula, who would have been only too happy to distract him in his sleeplessness. He didn’t move. ‘My God!’ he said to himself with a sharp feeling of anxiety. ‘How ignorant we really are!’ He read a great deal, but he had little real knowledge excepting in the field of literature. And even in literature … Until now it hadn’t bothered him – no need for any specialized knowledge to fight in the Resistance or to found a clandestine newspaper. He had believed that that was the way it would continue to be. Obviously he had been wrong. What is an opinion? What is an idea? What power do words have? On whom? And under what circumstances? If you publish a newspaper, you have to be able to answer those questions. And what with one thing leading to another, you eventually question everything. ‘You have to decide in ignorance,’ Henri said to himself. ‘Even Dubreuilh often acts blindly – Dubreuilh, with all his learning.’ Henri sighed; he was unable to resign himself to this defeat. There are degrees of ignorance, and the simple fact was that he was particularly ill-equipped for the political life. ‘Well, I’ll just have to start working at it,’ he said to himself. But if he really wanted to extend his knowledge, it would require years of study. Economics, history, philosophy – he would never be done with it! What a job! And all that just to come to terms with Marxism! Writing would be completely out of the question, and he wanted to write. Well? Whatever happened, one thing was sure: he wasn’t going to let L’Espoir fail simply because he wasn’t an expert on all the fine points of historical materialism. He closed his eyes. There was something unfair in this whole thing. He felt obliged, like everyone else, to take an active interest in politics. That being the case, it shouldn’t require a specialized apprenticeship; if politics was a field reserved for technicians, then they shouldn’t be asking him to get mixed up in it.

‘What I need is time!’ Henri thought as he awakened the next morning. ‘The only problem is finding enough time.’ The living-room door opened and closed again. Paula had already gone out; now, back again, she was tiptoeing about the room. He threw back the covers. ‘If I lived alone, I’d save hours.’ No more idle conversations, no more formal meals. While drinking his coffee in the little Cafe Biard on the corner, he would read the morning papers, would work right up to the moment when he would have to leave for the office; a sandwich would do for lunch, and his day’s work over, he would have a quick dinner and read late into the night. That way, he would be able to keep everything going at once – L’Espoir, his novel, his reading. ‘I’ll speak to Paula this morning,’ he told himself firmly.

‘Did you sleep well?’ Paula asked cheerfully.

‘Very well.’

She was arranging flowers in a vase on one of the tables and humming cheerfully to herself. Ever since Henri’s return, she made a point of being always cheerful, ostentatiously cheerful. ‘I made you some real coffee. And we still have a little fresh butter left.’

He sat down and spread a piece of toast with butter. ‘Did you eat?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You’re never hungry.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I eat; in fact I eat quite well.’

He bit into the toast. What could he do if she didn’t want to eat? After all, he couldn’t very well force-feed her. ‘You were up very early this morning,’ he said.

‘Yes, I couldn’t sleep.’ She placed a thick album with gilt-edged pages on the table. ‘I’ve been putting in the pictures you took in Portugal.’ She opened the album and pointed to the stairway of Braga. Nadine, smiling, was sitting on one of the steps. ‘You see, I’m not trying to escape the truth,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know.’

No, she wasn’t escaping the truth but, much more disconcerting, she saw through it. She turned back several pages. ‘Even in these old snapshots of you as a child you had that same distrustful sort of smile. How little you’ve changed!’ Before, he had enjoyed helping her collect and arrange his souvenirs; today it all seemed so futile. He was annoyed by Paula’s stubborn determination to exhume and embalm him.

‘Here you are when I first met you!’

‘I don’t look very bright, do I?’ he said, pushing away the album.

‘You were young; you were very demanding,’ she said. She stood in front of Henri and, in a sudden burst of anger, asked, ‘Why did you give an interview to Lendemain?’

‘Oh! Is the new issue out?’

‘Yes, I just bought a copy.’ She went to get the magazine at the other end of the living-room, brought it back, and threw it on the table. ‘I thought we’d decided you’d never grant any interviews.’

‘If you stick to all the decisions you make …’

‘But this was an important one. You used to say that when you start smiling at reporters, you’re ripe for the Académie Française.’

‘I used to say a lot of things.’

‘It really pained me when I saw pictures of you spread all over the cover,’ she said.

‘But you’re always so delighted when you see my name in print.’

‘First of all, I’m not delighted. And secondly, that’s quite different.’

Paula was not one to stop at a contradiction, but this particular one irritated Henri. She wanted him to be the ‘most glorious of all men’, and yet she affected a disdain for glory. She insisted upon dreaming of herself as long ago he had dreamed of her – proud, sublime. But all the while, of course, she was living on earth, like everyone else. ‘It’s not a very good life she has,’ he thought with a twinge of pity. ‘It’s only natural for her to need some sort of compensation.’

‘I wanted to help the kid out,’ he said in a conciliatory voice. ‘She’s just getting started and doesn’t know her way around yet.’

Paula smiled at him tenderly. ‘And you don’t know how to say no.’

There was no double meaning hidden behind her smile. He smiled. ‘You’re right. I don’t know how to say no.’

He placed the weekly on the table. On the front page, his picture smiled back at him. ‘Interview with Henri Perron.’ He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what Marie-Ange thought of him. Yet reading those printed words, he felt a little of the naïve faith of a peasant reading the Bible. It was as if he had succeeded at last in discovering himself through words he himself had fathered. ‘In the shadows of the pharmacy in Tulle, the magic of red and blue jars … But the quiet child hated the medicinal smells, the restricted life, the shabby streets of his birthplace … As he grew up the call of the big city became more and more pressing … He swore to raise himself above the bleak greyness of mediocrity; in a secret corner of his heart, he even hoped some day to rise higher than all others … A providential meeting with Robert Dubreuilh … Dazzled, disconcerted, torn between admiration and defiance, Henri Perron trades his adolescent dreams for the true ambitions of a man; he begins to work furiously … At twenty-five, a small book is enough to bring glory into his life. Brown hair, commanding eyes, a serious mouth, direct, open, and yet secret …’ He tossed the paper aside. Marie-Ange was no idiot; she knew him pretty well. And yet to titillate the working girls, she had made him into a small-time opportunist.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘There’s no sense in talking to reporters. All a life means to them is a career; work is nothing but the path to success. And what they mean by success is making a big splash and piling up a lot of money. You just can’t get them to think any other way.’

Paula smiled indulgently. ‘Did you notice the nice things she said about your book? Only she’s like all the others – they admire but don’t understand.’

‘As a matter of fact, they don’t admire as much as all that, you know. It’s the first novel published since the liberation; they’re practically forced to praise it.’

In the long run, the symphony of eulogies became annoying. It amply demonstrated the timeliness of his novel, but in no way said anything about its merits. Henri finally even came to the conclusion that the book owed its success to misunderstandings. Lambert believed he had meant to exalt individualism through collective action, and Lachaume, on the other hand, believed it preached the sacrifice of the individual to collectivism. Everyone emphasized the book’s moral character. And yet Henri had set the story in the Resistance almost by pure chance. He had thought of a man and of a situation, of a certain relationship between man’s past life and the crisis through which he was passing, and of a great many other things which none of the critics mentioned. Was it his fault or the readers’? The public, Henri was forced to conclude, had liked a completely different book from the one he believed he was offering them.

‘What are you planning to do today?’ he asked affectionately.

‘Nothing special.’

‘But what?’

Paula considered. ‘Well, I think I’ll ring up my dressmaker and get her to take a look at those beautiful materials you brought back.’

‘And after that?’

‘Oh, I always manage to find something to do,’ she said gaily.

‘By that you mean you have nothing at all to do,’ Henri said. He looked at Paula severely. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you during the last month. I think it’s a crime for you to spend your days vegetating inside these four walls.’

‘You call this vegetating!’ Paula said. She smiled gently, the way she used to long ago, and there was all the wisdom of the world in that smile. ‘When you love someone, you’re not vegetating.’

‘But loving isn’t a vocation.’

She interrupted him. ‘You’re wrong. For me, it is a vocation.’

‘I’ve been thinking over what I said to you on Christmas Eve,’ he said, ‘and I’m sure I was right. You’ve got to take up singing again.’

‘For years I’ve been living exactly the same way I do now,’ Paula said. ‘Why are you suddenly so concerned?’

‘During the war it was possible to be satisfied to just kill time. But the war is over now. Listen to me,’ he said authoritatively, ‘you’re going to tell old man Grépin that you want to go back to work. I’ll help you choose your songs; I’ll even try to write a few for you, and I’ll ask the boys if they’d care to try their hand at it, too. Come to think of it, that would be right up Julien’s alley! I’m sure he’d be able to write a few charming ballads for you, and Brugere could put them to music. Just wait and see the repertoire we’ll put together! Whenever you’re ready, Sabriro’ll give you an audition, and I guarantee he’ll get you star booking at the 45 Club. After that, you’re made!’

He realized he had spoken too volubly, with too much enthusiasm. Paula gave him a look of startled reproach. ‘And then what?’ she said. ‘Will I mean any more to you if you see my name on posters?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t be foolish! Of course not. But it’s better to be doing something than to do nothing. I try to write, and you ought to sing because you’ve got a real gift for it.’

‘I’m alive and I love you. To me, that’s not nothing.’

‘You’re playing with words,’ he said impatiently. ‘Why don’t you want to give it a try? Have you become so lazy? Or are you afraid? Or what?’

‘Listen,’ she said in a voice suddenly grown hard, ‘even if all those vanities – success, fame – still meant something to me, I wouldn’t start out on a second-rate career at the ripe age of thirty-seven. When I sacrificed that tour in Brazil for you, it was a final retirement. I have no regrets. Let’s just forget the whole thing.’

Henri opened his mouth to protest. Without consulting him, she had only too willingly decided to make that sacrifice, and now she seemed to be holding him responsible for it! He held his tongue and gave Paula a perplexed look. He had never been able to decide whether she really scorned fame or whether she was afraid of not being able to attain it.

‘Your voice is as beautiful as ever,’ he said. ‘And so are you.’

‘Not quite,’ she replied impatiently, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I know exactly how it would turn out. To make you happy, a handful of intellectuals would proclaim my genius for a few months. And then – good-bye. I might have been a Damia or a Piaf, but I missed my chance. Well, it’s too bad! Let’s drop it.’

She could never become a great star now, no doubt about that. But it would take only some small success to make her lower her sights. In any event, her life would certainly be less wretched if only she took an active interest in something. ‘And it would be ideal for me!’ he said to himself. He knew only too well that the problem concerned his own life even more than Paula’s.

‘Even if you can’t take the world by storm, it would still be worth it,’ he said. ‘You have your voice, your special talent. Don’t you think it would be interesting to try to get all you can out of it? I’m certain you’d find life a lot more satisfying.’

‘But I find it satisfying enough as it is,’ she replied, a look of exaltation brightening her face. ‘You don’t seem to understand what my love for you means to me.’

‘I do understand! But,’ he continued cuttingly, ‘you won’t do, for love of me, what I ask you to do.’

‘If you had good reasons for asking, I’d do it,’ she said gravely.

‘Actually, of course, you prefer your reasons to mine.’

‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘Because they’re better. You’ve been giving me a purely superficial point of view, worldly reasons that aren’t really your own.’

‘Well, as for your point of view, I honestly don’t see what it is!’ he said peevishly. He stood up; it was useless to continue the discussion. He would try instead to confront her with a fait accompli – bring her songs, make appointments for her. ‘All right, let’s drop it. But I’m telling you, you’re wrong.’

She hesitated a moment, smiled, and then asked, ‘Are you going to go to work now?’

‘Yes.’

‘On your novel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said.

He climbed the stairs. He was anxious to get back to his writing, and he was happy at the thought that his novel, at least, wasn’t going to be the slightest bit edifying. He still had no exact idea of what he was going to do; the only assignment he had set himself was to enjoy himself fully in being sincere. He spread his notes in front of him – almost a hundred pages. It was good to have put them away for a month; now he would be able to reread them with a fresh eye. He plunged into them joyfully, happy to rediscover memories and impressions formed into careful and smooth-flowing sentences. But after a while he began to worry. What was he going to do with all this stuff? These scribblings had neither head nor tail, even though they did have something in common – a certain feeling, a climate, the climate of the pre-war era. And that suddenly bothered him. He had thought vaguely, ‘I shall try to give the flavour of my life.’ As if such a thing were a perfume, labelled, trade-mark-registered, always the same, year after year. But the things he had to say about travelling, for example, were all in terms of a young man of twenty-five, the young man he had been in 1935; they had nothing at all to do with what he had experienced in Portugal. The story of his affair with Paula was equally dated; neither Lambert, not Vincent, nor any of the boys he knew would have any similar reactions today. And besides, with five years of living under the German occupation behind her, a young woman of twenty-seven would be very different from Paula. There was one solution: deliberately to place the book around 1935. But he had no desire to write a ‘period’ novel recreating a world that no longer was. On the contrary, what he had hoped for in jotting down those lines was to throw himself life and whole on to paper. Well then, he would have to write the story in the present, transposing the characters and events. ‘Transpose – what an annoying word! what a stupid word!’ he said to himself. ‘It’s preposterous, the liberties one takes with the characters in a novel. They’re transported from one century to the next, pulled out of one country and pushed into another, the present of one person is glued to the past of a second. And all of it is larded with personal fantasies. If you look closely enough, every character in a novel is a monster, and all art consists in preventing the reader from looking too closely. All right then, let’s not transpose. Let’s make up characters out of whole cloth, characters who have nothing at all in common with Paula, with Louis, with myself. I’ve done it before. Only this time it was the truth about my own experiences that I wanted to tell …’ He pushed aside the stack of notes. Yes, it was a bad idea, this setting things down haphazardly. The best way was to proceed as usual, to begin with an outline, with a precise purpose. ‘But what purpose? What truth do I want to express? My truth. But what does that really mean?’ He looked dully at the blank page. ‘It’s frightening, plunging into empty space with nothing to clutch at. Maybe I have nothing more to say,’ he thought. But instead it seemed to him that he had never really said anything at all. He had everything to say, like everyone else, always. But everything is too much. He remembered an old couplet painted on a plate: ‘We enter, we cry, and that is life; we cry, we leave, and that is death.’ What more was there to add? ‘We all live on the same planet, we are born from a womb, and one day we’ll serve to fatten worms. Yes, we all have the same story. Why then should I consider it mine alone and decide that it’s up to me to tell it?’ He yawned; he had had too little sleep, and that blank page made him feel dizzy. He was sunk in apathy. You can’t write anything apathetically; you’ve got to climb back to the surface of life where the moments and individuals count, individually. But if he shook off that torpor all he would find was worry. ‘L’Espoir – a local sheet. Was it true? When I try to influence opinion, am I simply being an idealist? Instead of sitting here dreaming in front of this piece of paper, I’d do a lot better to start studying Marx seriously.’ Yes, it had become urgent now. He had to set up a schedule and stick to it. He should really have done it long ago. His excuse to himself had been that he was caught up in the tide of events and was forced to give his attention to more pressing problems. But he had also wasted time; ever since the liberation he had been in a state of euphoria, a totally unjustified euphoria. He got up. He was incapable of concentrating on anything at all this morning; his conversation with Dubreuilh the night before had shaken him too much. Besides, he had correspondence to catch up on; he was anxious to find out from Sézenac whether Preston would be able to get them the paper they wanted; and he still hadn’t gone to the Quai d’Orsay to deliver das Viernas’ letter. ‘I’ll take care of that straight away,’ he decided.

‘May I see Monsieur Tournelle for a moment? My name is Henri Perron. I have a message for him.’

The secretary handed Henri a printed form. ‘Please write your name and address and the reason for your visit,’ she said.

He took out his fountain pen. What possible reason could he give? Interest in a wild dream? He knew how futile the whole business was. He wrote: ‘Confidential’.

‘There you are,’ he said.

With an indulgent air, the secretary took the form and walked towards the door. Her smile and her dignified walk made it very clear that the administrative assistant to a cabinet minister was a person much too important to barge in on without an appointment. Henri looked pityingly at the thick white envelope he was holding in his hand. He had played out the comedy, and now it was no longer possible to escape reality. Poor das Viernas would soon find himself the victim of a cruel reply, or of silence.

The secretary reappeared. ‘Monsieur Tournelle will be happy to see you as soon as he has a moment. In the meantime you can leave your message with me and I’ll see that he gets it at once!’

‘Thank you,’ Henri said, handing her the envelope. Never had it seemed more absurd to him than in the hands of that competent young woman. All right, that was it. He had done what he had been asked to do; whatever happened after that no longer concerned him. He decided to stop off at the Bar Rouge. It was a few minutes past noon and Lachaume would surely be there; Henri wanted to thank him for his review. Opening the door, he caught sight of Nadine seated with Lachaume and Vincent.

‘Where have you been hiding?’ she said in a sulky voice.

‘I’ve been working.’ He sat down beside her and ordered a drink.

‘We were just talking about you,’ Lachaume said cheerfully. ‘About your interview in Lendemain. You did right in bringing things out in the open. I mean about allied policy in Spain.’

‘Why don’t you do it?’ Vincent asked.

‘We can’t. At least not just now. But it’s good someone did it.’

‘That’s really funny!’ Vincent said.

‘You just don’t want to understand anything,’ Lachaume said.

‘I understand only too damned well.’

‘No, you don’t, not at all.’

Henri sipped his drink and listened idly. Lachaume never let an opportunity slip by to explain the present, the past, and the future as reviewed and revised by the Party. But this couldn’t be held against him. At twenty, in the Maquis, he had discovered adventure, comradeship, and Communism. And that was excuse enough for his fanaticism. ‘I like him because I did him a favour,’ Henri thought ironically. He had hidden him in Paula’s studio for three months, had obtained false papers for him, and in parting had made him a present of his only overcoat.

‘By the way,’ Henri said abruptly, ‘I’d like to thank you for your review. It was really wonderful.’

‘I said exactly what I thought,’ Lachaume replied. ‘Besides, everyone agrees with me – it’s one hell of a book.’

‘Yes, it’s funny,’ Nadine said. ‘For once all the critics agree. It’s as if they were burying someone or awarding a prize for virtue.’

‘You might have something there!’ Henri said. ‘The little viper,’ he thought with amused bitterness, ‘she found just the words I didn’t want to say, not even to myself.’ He smiled at Lachaume. ‘You’re dead wrong on one point, though. My man will never become a Communist.’

‘What else do you expect him to become?’

Henri laughed. ‘Just what I’ve become!’ he said.

Lachaume laughed in turn. ‘Precisely!’ He looked Henri in the eyes. ‘In less than six months, the SRL will no longer exist and you’ll have realized that individualism doesn’t pay. You’ll join the Communist Party.’

Henri shook his head. ‘But I do more for you as I am. You’re delighted I brought the Spanish thing out in the open instead of your having to do it. And what good would it do if L’Espoir rehashed the same stuff L’Humanité prints? I’m doing much more useful work trying to make people think, asking questions that you don’t ask, telling certain truths that you don’t tell.’

‘But you ought to be doing that work as a Communist,’ Lachaume said.

‘They wouldn’t let me!’

‘Of course they would. It’s true there’s too much factionalism in the Party just now, but that’s because of circumstances. It won’t last forever.’ Lachaume paused a moment and then said, ‘Don’t repeat this, but some of my friends and I are hoping to start a magazine of our own pretty soon, a magazine with a little scope, in which everything will be discussed with complete freedom.’

‘First of all, a magazine isn’t a daily,’ Henri said. ‘And as for being free, I’d have to see it to believe it.’ He gave Lachaume a friendly look. ‘Anyhow, it would be a good thing if you could have a magazine of your own. Do you think it’ll go through?’

‘There’s a good chance of it.’

Vincent leaned forward and looked at Henri defiantly. ‘If you get your sheet I hope you’ll make sure that you’ll explain to the comrades what a lousy stinking thing it is to open your arms wide to all those so-called “repentant” sons-of-bitches.’

‘We? Accepting collaborators with open arms? Tell that to the readers of Figaro. It’ll cheer them up a little.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re not quietly clearing a lot of those lousy bastards.’

‘Don’t confuse the issue,’ Lachaume said. ‘When we decide to clear one of them, it means we think he can be regenerated.’

‘Well, if that’s the way you look at it, how do you know the guys we shot down couldn’t be regenerated?’

‘At the time it was out of the question; they had to be shot.’

‘At the time! But I’ve killed them all my life!’ Vincent smiled maliciously. ‘Let me tell you something. They’re all nothing but shits – all of them, without any exception. And what we ought to do now is get rid of all those we missed.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Nadine asked.

‘I mean we ought to organize,’ Vincent replied, his eyes trying to catch Henri’s attention.

‘Organize what? Punitive expeditions?’ Henri said, laughing.

‘Do you know that in Marseilles they’re throwing everyone who belonged to the Maquis in jail, just as if they were a bunch of common criminals?’ Vincent said. ‘Are we going to let them get away with it?’

‘Terrorism is no solution,’ Lachaume said.

‘No,’ Henri said. He looked at Vincent. ‘I’ve heard talk about gangs who enjoyed playing at being judges. Now if it’s a question of settling a personal account, I can understand. But guys who think they’re saving France by killing a few collaborators here and there are either sick men or stupid bastards.’

‘Yes, I know. The sound thing is to join the Communist Party or the SRL!’ Vincent said. He shook his head. ‘You won’t get me.’

‘I guess we’ll just have to do without you!’ Henri replied amiably.

He got up; Nadine followed his example. ‘I’ll go with you,’ she said.

She seemed to enjoy trying to look like a woman; she had even made an attempt to use make-up. But her eyelashes looked like a sea urchin’s spiny bristles and there were black smudges under her eyes. As soon as they got outside she asked, ‘Are you having lunch with me?’

‘No, I have some work to do at the paper.’

‘At this time of day?’

‘At all times of the day.’

‘Well, let’s have dinner together then.’

‘No again. I plan to work very late. And afterwards, I’m going to see your father.’

‘Oh! That paper! Can’t you ever talk about anything else? After all, you know, it’s not the centre of the world!’

‘I never said it was.’

‘No, but that’s what you think.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, when will we see each other?’

He hesitated. ‘Honestly, Nadine, I haven’t a minute to spare these days.’

‘You do sit down at a table and eat occasionally, don’t you? I really don’t see why I can’t sit down opposite you.’ She looked Henri squarely in the face. ‘Unless I give you a pain in the neck.’

‘Of course you don’t.’

‘Well?’

‘All right. Meet me at the office tomorrow between nine and ten.’

‘I’ll be there.’

He was quite fond of Nadine and seeing her didn’t, as she put it, give him a pain in the neck. But that wasn’t the point. The thing was that he had to organize his life as efficiently as possible. And there was simply no place in it for Nadine.

‘Why were you so hard on Vincent?’ Nadine asked. ‘You really shouldn’t have been.’

‘I’m afraid he’ll do something foolish.’

‘Something foolish! Whenever anyone wants to do something, you call it foolishness. Don’t you think writing books is the most goddamned foolish thing of all? Everyone applauds you and for a while you’re all puffed up. But afterwards they all stick your book in a corner and no one gives it another thought.’

‘That’s my profession,’ he said.

‘It’s a funny profession!’

They continued walking in silence. When they arrived at the door to the newspaper Nadine said dryly, ‘I’m going home. See you tomorrow.’

‘So long.’

Hesitantly, she turned back and stood before him. ‘Between nine and ten – that’s rather late, isn’t it? We won’t have much time to do anything. Can’t we begin the evening a little earlier?’

‘I won’t be free before then.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘All right then, at nine-thirty. But what’s the use of being famous and everything if you don’t take any time out to live?’

‘To live!’ he thought as she turned on her heels and walked briskly away. ‘To them that always means only one thing; to spend your time with them. But there’s more than one way of living!’

He liked that familiar smell of stale dust and fresh ink that greeted him as he entered the building. The offices were still empty, the basement silent. But soon a whole world would rise from this stillness, a world which was his creation. ‘No one will ever lay his hands on L’Espoir,’ he repeated to himself. He sat down at his desk and stretched out his legs. There was, he told himself, no sense in getting upset. He would not give up the paper; somehow you always manage to find time for things you want to do; and after a good night’s sleep his work would move along much more smoothly.

He went through his mail quickly and looked at his watch. He had an appointment with Preston in half an hour, which left him ample time to have it out with Sezenac. ‘Ask Sezenac to come to my office,’ he said to his secretary. He went back to his desk and sat down. It’s all well and good to have confidence in people, but there were a lot of guys who would jump at the chance of taking Sezenac’s place and who deserved it more than he did. When you stubbornly decide to give one man a chance, you arbitrarily deny it to another one. And that was not right. ‘Too bad!’ Henri said to himself. He recalled how promising Sezenac had seemed when Chancel had first brought them together. For a year he had been the most zealous of the liaison agents; maybe he needed extraordinary circumstances to bring out his best. But now, pale, puffy, glassy-eyed, he constantly trailed in Vincent’s wake and he was no longer able to write a coherent sentence.

‘Ah! There you are! Sit down.’

Sézenac sat down without saying a word. Henri suddenly realized that he had been working with him a whole year and that he knew him not at all. He was more or less familiar with the lives of the others, their tastes, their ideas. But Sezenac kept things to himself.

‘When are you going to turn in something better than the junk you’ve been giving us lately?’ Henri said much more sharply than he had intended to.

Sézenac shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

‘What’s wrong?’ Henri asked. ‘Not getting laid enough? Got yourself in a jam?’

Sézenac sat quietly, rolling a handkerchief between his hands and staring stubbornly at the floor. It was really difficult to get through to him.

‘What’s wrong?’ Henri repeated. ‘I’m willing to give you another chance.’

‘No,’ Sézenac said. ‘Journalism just isn’t my dish.’

‘At first you were doing all right.’

Sézenac smiled vaguely. ‘Chancel helped me a little.’

‘He didn’t write your articles for you, did he?’

‘No,’ Sézenac replied without assurance. He shook his head. ‘No use in pressing the matter. It’s not the kind of work I like.’

‘You could have told me sooner,’ Henri said with a trace of annoyance. Again there was a brief silence, and then Henri asked, ‘What would you like to do?’

‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll get along.’

‘How?’

‘I’m giving English lessons. And I’ve been promised some translations.’ He stood up. ‘It’s really been good of you to keep me on so long.’

‘If you ever feel like sending us something …’

‘If I get round to it.’

‘Can I do anything for you?’

‘You can lend me a thousand francs,’ Sézenac said.

‘Here’s two thousand,’ Henri said. ‘But that’s no solution.’

Sézenac shoved his handkerchief and the money into his pocket and then, for the first time, he smiled. ‘It’s a temporary solution; they’re the surest.’ He opened the door. ‘Thanks.’

‘Good luck,’ Henri called after him. He was disturbed. It seemed almost as if all Sézenac had been waiting for was a chance to escape. ‘I’ll get news of him through Vincent,’ he thought in order to reassure himself. But it bothered him a little not to have been able to make him talk.

He took out his fountain pen and placed a sheet of writing paper in front of him. Preston would be along in fifteen minutes. He didn’t want to think too much about the magazine before he was sure, but his head was full of plans. The weeklies that were being published since the end of the Occupation were all rather pitiful; that would make it all the more fun to put out something really good.

Henri’s secretary poked her head in the door. ‘Mr Preston is here.’

‘Ask him to come in.’

In his civilian clothes, Preston didn’t look at all like an American. The very perfection of his French, however, made him somewhat suspect. He came to the point almost immediately.

‘Your friend Luc must have told you that we saw each other several times during your absence,’ he said. ‘Both of us deplored the state of the French press; it’s really sad. It would be a very great pleasure for me to help your paper by furnishing you with additional newsprint.’

‘Yes, that would fix us up fine!’ said Henri. ‘Of course, we couldn’t think of changing our format,’ he added. ‘The agreement with the other papers is still in effect. But there’s nothing to stop us from bringing out a Sunday magazine supplement, and that would open up a whole new area.’

Preston smiled reassuringly. ‘As far as the newsprint is concerned,’ he said, ‘there’s no problem. You could have it tomorrow.’ He slowly lit a cigarette with his black enamelled lighter. ‘I have to ask you a very blunt question. L’Espoir’s political line is not going to change, is it?’

‘No,’ Henri replied. ‘Why?’

‘To my way of thinking, L’Espoir represents precisely the guide your country needs,’ Preston said. ‘That’s why my friends and I want to help it. We admire your independent mind, your courage, your lucidity …’

He stopped speaking, but his voice hung in the air.

‘Well?’ said Henri.

‘I followed the beginning of your series on Portugal with great interest. But this morning I was a bit surprised to read in an interview you recently gave that you intend – in regard to the Salazar régime – to criticize American policy in the Mediterranean area.’

‘As a matter of fact, I do find this policy unfortunate,’ Henri said rather sharply. ‘Both Franco and Salazar should have been booted out a long time ago.’

‘Things aren’t that simple, as you know very well,’ Preston said. ‘It goes without saying that we have every intention of helping the Spanish and Portuguese to regain their democratic freedoms – but at the right moment.’

‘The right moment is immediately,’ Henri said. ‘There are people in Madrid’s prisons who have been sentenced to death. Every day counts.’

‘That’s my opinion, too,’ Preston said. ‘And I’m certain that the State Department will take the same position.’ He smiled. ‘That’s why it seems to me especially inopportune to turn French opinion against us now.’

Henri smiled in turn. ‘Politicians are never in a hurry; the best thing just now, it seems to me, is to back them into a corner.’

‘Don’t fool yourself,’ Preston said amiably. ‘Your paper is well thought of in American political circles. ‘But don’t expect to influence Washington.’

‘I don’t expect to,’ Henri said. ‘I say what I think, that’s all.’ He added heatedly, ‘You were just congratulating me on my independence …’

‘And it’s exactly that independence which you are going to jeopardize,’ Preston said. He looked at Henri reproachfully. ‘In opening that campaign, you play directly into the hands of those who want to picture us as imperialists.’ He paused a moment and added, ‘You take a humanitarian position with which I fully agree, but one which is not politically sound. Give us a year, and the republic will be re-established in Spain – and under the most favourable conditions.’

‘I have no intention of opening a campaign,’ Henri said. ‘All I want to do is point out certain facts.’

‘But those facts will be used against us,’ Preston said.

Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s not my business. I’m a journalist. My job is to tell the truth.’

Preston looked Henri firmly in the eyes. ‘If you knew that printing certain truths would have unfortunate consequences, would you print them?’

‘If I were absolutely certain that truth would be harmful, then I could see only one solution: I’d resign; I’d give up journalism.’

Preston smiled engagingly. isn’t that a rather rigid ethical concept?’

‘I have Communist friends who’ve asked me exactly the same question,’ Henri replied. ‘But it’s not so much the truth I respect; it’s my readers. I admit that under certain conditions telling the truth can be a luxury. That may well be the case in Russia,’ he said, smiling. ‘But in France, today, I don’t recognize anyone’s right to suppress the truth. Maybe it isn’t so simple for a politician, but I’m not on the side of those who are doing the manoeuvring; I’m with the ones they are trying to manoeuvre. They count on me to keep them informed of what’s happening as well as I can, and if I remain silent or if I lie I’d be betraying them.’

He stopped, a little embarrassed by his lengthy speech. He hadn’t addressed it only to Preston; he had a vague feeling of being cornered and he was striking out haphazardly against everyone.

Preston shook his head. ‘We come back to the same basic misunderstanding: you say you simply want to keep them informed, but I call that a form of action. I’m afraid you’re a victim of French intellectualism. As for me, I’m a pragmatist. Do you know the works of John Dewey?’

‘No.’

‘That’s a pity. We pragmatists aren’t very well known in France. Dewey is a very great philosopher.’ Preston paused a moment, and then continued, ‘Mark you, we have no objections at all to being criticized. No one is more open to constructive criticism than an American. Explain to us how to keep the affection of the French and we’ll listen to you with rapt attention. But France is in no position to judge our Mediterranean policies.’

‘I speak in my name only,’ Henri said irritably. ‘Whether you’re in a good position or a bad one, you still have the right to speak your mind.’

There was a brief silence, and then Preston said, ‘You understand of course that if L’Espoir takes a position against America I can no longer continue to sympathize with it.’

‘I understand,’ Henri said sharply. ‘And I imagine that you, for your part, can easily understand how unthinkable it would be for me to subject L’Espoir to your censorship.’

‘But who said anything about censorship!’ Preston replied in shocked surprise. ‘All I want is for you to remain faithful to your guiding principle. I mean your neutrality.’

‘Exactly. I have every intention of remaining faithful to it,’ Henri said with a sudden flash of anger. ‘L’Espoir can’t be bought for a few pounds of newsprint.’

‘Well, if that’s the way you’re going to take it …’ Preston said. He got up. ‘Believe me, I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m not,’ Henri replied.

All day long he had felt vaguely angry. But he had certainly chosen a fine time to blow up. He had been a fool to imagine that Preston would play Santa Claus. He was, after all, an agent of the State Department and Henri had been inexcusably naïve in talking to him as a friend. He stood up and walked towards the editorial room.

‘Luc, old boy, it looks like we’re going to have to do without a magazine supplement,’ he said, sitting down on the edge of the conference table.

‘No!’ Luc said. ‘Why?’ His face looked puffy and old, like a dwarf’s. When his plans were thwarted, he seemed to be on the verge of tears.

‘Because that Yank wants to keep us from opening our mouths about America. He practically offered me a deal.’

‘That’s hard to believe. He seemed to be such a decent chap.’

‘In a way, it’s flattering,’ Henri said. ‘We’re really being courted. Do you know what Dubreuilh suggested last night? That L’Espoir become the official organ of the SRL.’

Luc looked dismayed. ‘Did you refuse?’

‘Of course.’

‘All those parties that are coming to life again, the factions, the movements – we have to stay clear of all those things,’ Luc said pleadingly.

Luc’s convictions were so strong that even when you agreed with them you were sometimes tempted to harry him a little. ‘But it is true that the unity of the Resistance is nothing more than words now,’ Henri said. ‘And we are going to have to state our position clearly one of these days.’

‘They’re the ones who’re sabotaging unity!’ Luc said with a sudden burst of emotion. ‘They call the SRL a “regrouping”, but all they’re doing is to create a new schism.’

‘No, it’s the bourgeoisie who are creating the schism. And when you try to place yourself above the class struggle, you run the risk of playing right into their hands.’

‘Listen,’ Luc said, ‘as far as the paper’s political position goes, you’re the one who makes the decisions; you’ve got more brains than I. But hooking up with the SRL is another story. I’m absolutely opposed to that.’ His face hardened. ‘I’ve spared you the details of our troubles – financial matters and such – but I did warn you that things weren’t going too well. If we get hooked up with a movement that means damned little to damned near everyone, that’s not going to help things.’

‘Do you think we’d lose more readers?’ Henri asked.

‘Obviously! And then we’re done for.’

‘Yes,’ Henri said. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

Circulation had dropped appreciably, for as long as people were forced to buy minuscule tabloids the non-Parisians preferred their local papers to the Parisian dailies. But even if they could go back to the regular-sized format, he wasn’t at all sure that L’Espoir would regain its readers. In any case, he couldn’t afford the luxury of a crisis. ‘I suppose I am just an idealist!’ Henri thought. In arguing with Dubreuilh, he had raised the issues of confidence, influence, roles to be played. And all the while the real answer was plainly written in figures: they would go broke. It was one of those solid arguments that neither sophisms nor ethics could alter. He was anxious to use it.

Henri arrived at Dubreuilh’s apartment on the Quai Voltaire at ten o’clock, but the launching of his planned attack was delayed for a while. As usual Anne produced a light supper: Portuguese sausages, ham, a rice salad, and, to celebrate Henri’s return, a bottle of Meursault. They exchanged stories about their travelling experiences and shared the latest Paris gossip. To tell the truth, Henri did not feel very aggressive. He was happy to be back once more in Dubreuilh’s study, among those well-worn books, most of them inscribed by their authors, among the unpurchased paintings signed with well-known names, among the exotic curios acquired over the years in many travels. As an observer from the outside Henri could truly appreciate the value of that whole discreetly privileged life, and at the same time he felt those rooms were his real home. In the most intimate reaches of his own life, he was warm and comfortable there.

‘It’s really cosy here,’ he said to Anne.

‘Isn’t it? Whenever I go out, I feel lost,’ she said cheerfully.

‘I must say Scriassine picked a weird place to take us,’ Dubreuilh said.

‘What a dive! But all in all, it turned out to be a pretty good evening,’ Henri said. ‘Except for the end,’ he added with a smile.

‘The end? No, not the end. The moment I found particularly difficult was when they played Dark Eyes,’ Dubreuilh said with an innocent air.

Henri hesitated. Perhaps Dubreuilh had decided against bringing it up again so soon. It certainly would be a shame to spoil this moment; why not profit from his discretion? But Henri was impatient to confirm his secret victory.

‘You certainly did a good job of dragging L’Espoir through the mud,’ he said lightly.

‘Not at all,’ Dubreuilh replied with a smile.

‘Anne is my witness! Anyhow, I’ll admit that not all of what you had to say was wrong,’ Henri conceded. ‘And I do want to say that I’ve been thinking seriously about your proposition to tie L’Espoir in with the SRL; in fact, I even spoke to Luc about it. But it’s completely out of the question.’

Dubreuilh’s smile vanished. ‘I hope that isn’t your last word,’ he said. ‘Because without a paper, the SRL will never amount to anything. And don’t go telling me there are other papers; none of them really share our ideas completely. If you refuse, who’ll accept?’

‘I know,’ Henri said. ‘But let me tell you something: at the moment L’Espoir is in a financial crisis, like most of the other papers. I believe we’ll come out of it all right, but for a good long while we’re going to have a hard time making ends meet. Now the day we decide to become an organ of a political party, circulation will drop at once. And we just won’t be able to take it.’

‘The SRL isn’t a party,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘It’s a movement, a movement with a broad enough base so that your readers won’t be shocked by the change.’

‘Party or movement, practically speaking it’s the same thing,’ Henri replied. ‘All those Communist workers and Communist sympathizers I spoke about, they’ll willingly buy an informative paper along with L’Humanité, but they wouldn’t touch another political sheet. Even if the SRL walked hand in hand with the Communist Party, it wouldn’t change a thing. Stick a label on L’Espoir, and it immediately becomes suspect.’ Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘The day we’re read only by the members of the SRL, we may just as well close up shop.’

‘But membership would increase enormously if we had the help of a paper.’

‘In the meantime, though, we’d have to ride out a long storm,’ Henri said. ‘It would be more than enough to sink us. And obviously, that wouldn’t help anyone.’

‘No … no, that certainly wouldn’t help anyone,’ Dubreuilh conceded. He remained silent for a moment, drummed on his blotter with the tips of his fingers. ‘Obviously there’s a certain risk,’ he said.

‘A risk we just can’t allow ourselves to take,’ Henri added.

Dubreuilh reflected again and then said with a sigh, ‘What we need is money.’

‘Exactly. And we haven’t got any.’

‘No,’ Dubreuilh repeated in a subdued voice. ‘We haven’t got any.’

Naturally, Dubreuilh would never admit defeat that easily; he still had hopes that it would somehow work out. But the argument had carried weight, and although Henri saw him frequently during the following weeks Dubreuilh did not broach the subject again. Henri, for his part, was determined to show proof of his good will; he kept two appointments with Samazelle, attended the meetings of the committee, and promised to publish the movement’s manifesto in L’Espoir. ‘Do as you like,’ Luc constantly repeated. ‘As long as we stay independent.’

Yes, they would stay independent; that at least was settled. But now the question was what to do with that hard-earned independence. In September, everything had seemed so simple: a little common sense, a little good will, and that was all that was needed; they would be all right. Now, however, there was an endless stream of new problems, and each one posed a new question. Lachaume had been so effusive in his praise of Henri’s series on Portugal that there was a good chance L’Espoir might be taken for an instrument of the Communist Party. Should he deny that? Henri didn’t want to lose the intellectuals who liked L’Espoir because of its impartiality, and neither did he want to antagonize his Communist readers. But in trying to please everyone, he merely condemned himself to vacuity, and thereby helped to lull people back to sleep. What to do then? As he walked over to the Scribe where Lambert was awaiting him for dinner, he kept turning the question over in his mind. Whatever he decided, he’d be letting himself be swayed by a mood rather than by any concrete evidence. Despite all his resolve, he was still back where he started from; he didn’t know enough, he didn’t know anything. ‘It would certainly be more logical to learn first, and to talk afterwards,’ he said to himself. But that’s not the way things happen. First, you’ve got to speak, because the matter is urgent; afterwards, events prove you right or wrong. ‘And that’s precisely what’s known as bluffing,’ he said to himself unhappily. ‘Yes, even I bluff my readers.’ He had promised himself to speak the truth, to tell his readers things that would enlighten them, that would help them think. And now he was bluffing them. What to do? He couldn’t shut down the newspaper, fire everyone, lock himself up in a room for a year with his books. The paper had to live, and to keep it alive Henri was forced to give himself to it completely, day after day. He stopped in front of the Scribe. He was glad he was dining with Lambert, but it disturbed him a little to have to speak to him about his short stories. He hoped Lambert didn’t take them too seriously. He pushed through the revolving door; once inside, it seemed to him as if he had suddenly been transported to another continent. It was warm here, the men and the women wore American uniforms, the air smelled of mild tobacco, luxurious trinkets were on display in glass show cases. Lambert, smiling and dressed in a lieutenant’s uniform, came to meet him. In the dining-room, reserved for the use of war correspondents, butter and very white bread were on every table.

‘You know, you can get French wine in this drugstore,’ Lambert said cheerfully. ‘Tonight we’ll eat as well as a German prisoner-of-war.’

‘Do you resent the fact that the Yanks feed their prisoners well?’

‘No, not especially. But as for the average Frenchman who’s living on air – it makes him sick. It’s just that the whole thing stinks – the way they handle the Fritzes, including the Nazis, with such consideration, and the way they treat the concentration camp prisoners.’

‘I’d like to know if it’s true that they’re keeping the French Red Cross from going into the camps,’ Henri said.

‘That’s the first thing I intend to look into,’ Lambert replied.

‘We’re not very hot on America these days,’ Henri said as he filled his plate with tinned meat and noodles.

‘And there’s no good reason to be!’ Lambert knitted his brow. ‘It’s just too bad it makes Lachaume so damned happy.’

‘I was thinking about that as I was walking over here,’ Henri said. ‘You say a word against the Communist Party, and you’re playing into the hands of the reactionaries! You criticize Washington, and you’re a Communist. Unless they suspect you of being a fifth columnist.’