Gilles, chapter III

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Best known in the English speaking world for his book Le Feu Follet, which has been adopted into several films, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle considered the semi-autobiographical Gilles to be his greatest work. The literary critic Gaëtan Picon wrote that Gilles “is, without any doubt, one of the greatest novels of the century—and one of those books in which the disarming sincerity of a man rises to the grandeur usually reserved to literary transpositions.”

Chapter III

Myriam Falkenberg’s parents were rich and believed themselves to have taken great care of her education. But they didn’t love each other and they didn’t love her. Her mother didn’t love her father any less than anyone else in the world. First, she had wanted to be rich; then, to paint; then, to know duchesses; later still, to be poor (which meant hanging out with rich socialist ministers). She admired a man who was a great doctor or a great traveler, but she couldn’t see the sensitive being behind the parade of gestures. Like an astronomer about to fall into a well, she was dazzled by a firmament of social signs. She had lost interest early on in her daughter, who was never going to make it big. Her two sons, whom she preferred, did not interest her much either. However, she had thought it fitting to die of grief when their names had appeared on the list of the dead in Le Figaro.

Mr Falkenberg, having conquered a dominant position in several large businesses, had a few peculiarities that businessmen do not generally have. But this man, who loved women and had a liberal taste in life, had one day decided to get married and thus condemned himself to thirty years of torture. He had thought he could bind himself with impunity to a creature he knew he was incapable of loving; having shown insensitivity in his choice, he had then paid for this lapse with all his sensibility; he hated and despised himself for having made such a mistake. He had loved his sons more than his daughter. Myriam was not loved. No one around her cared about her heart, which gradually buried itself under callouses. Femininity had not been gently called to her to become a graceful object; she was left to intelligence alone. When she later complained about her parents, it was only about their intellectual incomprehension; she was as ignorant as they were of her heart and her pain.

Myriam’s two brothers were unequally gifted. The eldest was talentless and lazy, he would have been charming if he had accepted himself completely, but he sought in a laborious and grating humour a compensation for the greatness whose absence, all in all, bothered him so little. The other was better endowed, but an erratic sensibility kept taking away from his intelligence the very object it had just imposed. The death they had met at the start of the war was more suitable for the elder, less so for the younger, destined for intrigue and success according to the monotonous and inescapable fatality of his race. The elder loved Myriam, who consoled herself a little with him from the indifference of his father and mother. The youngest already disliked Jewish women.

Myriam had no close friends. She, who had been arrested in her full growth by the lack of tenderness, recoiled from the blandness of feminine endearments. She was attracted by virility; by a false consequence, she became attached to one of her teachers, a dry wit, who preached feminism to her, the most unfortunate form of modern pretension. This Miss Dafre had the most pernicious influence on Myriam. Horribly ugly, she offered her maxims of austerity and solitude as if Myriam had been ugly too. As her face began to shine in the light, Myriam, in imitation, behaved badly, dressed badly; she ignored the graces, pleasures and impulses of coquetry. The destinies of men and women are so quickly distorted that it is hard not to imagine a jealous god who, having created, would change his mind and break in his creature the impulse towards perfection that is apparently accomplished in plants and animals.

After her mother’s death, Myriam took great care of her father, but she did not overcome her own resentment, nor the idea that he had lost everything by losing his sons. She was beginning to see a bit of the world at the Sorbonne, where she had taken a degree in chemistry and was now working in a laboratory: boys and girls were admiring this case, still quite new, of such a rich and pretty person working.

Her face was becoming beautiful. Her features, which were not perfectly regular, were evened out and magnified by knowledge.

In the days following their meeting, Gilles lived in ecstasy before Myriam. He, who had never felt anything but indifference and disdain for the fates, suddenly accorded them great veneration through her. He raised his head with pride, telling himself that these mysterious and haughty powers were disposed towards him and choosing him. This rather long person, timid and frail, was full of majesty. The material of his white teeth was precious. Her hands were subtle. Everything she said seemed to her to be full of the knowledge of the world, of business, of the secrets of State that her people possessed. There was something of the childish terror of the Christians in front of the Jews. He no longer saw Paris with the same eyes; he was no longer a lost body, given over to the basest and most modest lusts. He was maintained in this state of mind by perfect poverty. Having taken a miserable hotel room, he used the doctor’s last francs to keep from starving to death.

He spent long hours with Myriam, but hardly ever kissed her. He had an urge to make love that made him as dizzy as hunger, but he couldn’t imagine sleeping with the young girl. And the things she represented and offered him were so numerous and so desirable that he forgot all about her body.

Gilles’ adolescence had been indifferent to hardship, occupied by the pleasures that, while available to all, are enjoyed only by the shy few: books, gardens, museums, the streets. Today, after dreaming for a long time about the other pleasures of this world from a distance, he suddenly found them within his reach and he received an unexpected blow. His passive nature was turned upside down. The entry of things into him gave rise to a belated and irritated violence. He saw with frustration that ambition and triumph had only been themes that adorned his daydreams about a statue, a piece of music or a novel; art had given him nothing.

Myriam, for her part, desperately wanted Gilles, but Gilles’ first kisses were enough to overwhelm her innocence. She saw it as a sign of love that he stopped them. Drunk with happiness, she didn’t think about it much.

This state of affairs lasted for two or three days. Gilles had hoped it would last until he was admitted to hospital. But in the evening he was without Myriam, who didn’t think she could go out or see him. So he wandered round the doors of cinemas, bars and music halls. He once again longed for girls and the money that gets girls. He didn’t think at all about women other than girls, he didn’t know any and his eyes didn’t wander to them. It was like living a double life, the contrasts of which made him dizzy. Sometimes he rode with Myriam in a big limousine with an imposing old chauffeur, or he was at her place in the sumptuous little salon where she received him. He waited impatiently for snack time, which made up most of his meal, along with the morning breakfast at the hotel and a few croissants here and there. Sometimes he wandered the streets alone, fumbling in his pocket for the last of his money.

One evening, Myriam offered to walk him back to his hotel, which he had refused with terror for the first few days. He instantly accepted, sensing and wishing for what was about to happen. Indeed, when she saw the sordid facade, she understood.

“But…” she stammered, looking at him with shame.

Then he burst open. In an instant, he made up for all the time he’d lost; he was afraid he hadn’t said enough.

“Well, yes, I haven’t got a penny, I only had my pay when I arrived. I haven’t had a meal in three days.”

He waited with bated breath for her to open her bag, which was empty. He agreed to let her return home to get some money: he couldn’t wait another minute.