Gilles, chapter IV

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 IV

Gilles went to the hospital and was operated on. With his arm in its brace, he lounged in white sheets between four white walls. Enjoying a room of his own, he led the life that suited his laziness, his taste for solitude and his feelings for Myriam. All around him was white, pure, calm. After lunch, as he finished his siesta, the nurse came in and arranged everything so that he could better receive Myriam. Most of the nurses belonged to the American colony of which this elegant hospital in Neuilly belonged. Miss Highland was a tall blond girl, skinny but radiant and young. Perfectly enclosed in her white garment, lowering vast eyelashes over her slightly lively eyes, she was very attentive but very reserved. As she tended the flowers Myriam had brought the day before, Gilles thought that she despised Myriam because she was shy and dressed without elegance. He never thought of desiring this tall white figure, believing her to be as forbidding as the Venus de Milo.

“Do you like negro music? I thought you didn’t like it. But I heard you listening to my records yesterday. So?”

At first he had thought that this music would break his silence, making a disturbing allusion to unknown places and pleasures; but he had found these simple rhythms, in which the pain and joy of life merged, to be fraternal. In the same way, he enjoyed his unfocused thoughts and the signs of spring that reached his window: a branch dappled with soft green, a burst of sunlight. He reveled in the care of women, the kindness of his neighbours, whom he kept at a distance, the books he leafed through, flowers and long naps. Newspapers provided a perverse contrast. At night, he slept in the open air on a terrace. Distant complaints evoked in a muffled way the memory of the front, the anguish of not being there, the anguish of going back.

“Do you dance?” asked Miss Highland. “I went dancing last night.”

“Where did you go?”

She said a name Gilles didn’t know.

He didn’t know how to dance, he didn’t know how to do anything that people of means do. He regretted it, then resigned himself to the delight that he would not remain morose for long.

She didn’t insist. She looked at the books on her bedside table with astonishment and circumspection. She told him the stories of the other wounded with great naivety. She was as proud of her wounded as she must have been of her dogs and horses; she extended to them her joy of living and owning.

Suddenly, she disappeared. She took great care to leave before Myriam arrived.

Gilles waited for Myriam. He forgot Paris again and what he had come there to find: a crowd of women. In these white sheets he had rediscovered his purity. There had been the operation, the shock of the operation, the pain, now there was just a little discomfort, no more insomnia. He could now indulge his spiritual love for Myriam all the more. But he didn’t like the moment when Myriam came in, because she walked awkwardly and her half-mourning dress was ugly. Her shy, somewhat humble smile at Miss Highland, when she had let herself be surprised on the first day, embarrassed him. As soon as she was seated, the door closed, and he was alone with her, he was taken back by her.

They didn’t talk about love. He, at least, didn’t talk about it and she was happy to follow him elsewhere. He spoke of ideas and she listened with ardent devotion. She ignored men. Her workmates were ugly, unkempt and uninterested in love. She had never dreamt of handsome, elegant men. But Gilles, who was not at all handsome, showed a kind of natural elegance. His features were irregular, but together they were charming. Myriam was surprised that he was both pleasant and intelligent.

However, she looked for his faults out of a critical instinct, and accepted them with the realism of a woman in love.

“You have such a round nose,” she had exclaimed the second time they had met.

To tell the truth, for the moment she was only able to grasp Gilles’ outward features. Gilles would flinch at these unexpected little outbursts of acerbity, but would be curious to learn the slightest thing about himself.

She thought she was made for him, and that she shared his taste for intellectuality. Having been hard at work for a long time, she had hardly read anything; she had more or less remained confined to the practical side of the laboratory. With the intemperance of youth, he responded with everything he thought he knew. She believed that everything could be learned.

He also talked to her about what he knew well: war. Gilles’ bitter sincerity seemed all the more remarkable to Myriam because it shed light on feelings unknown to her. In her environment, all physical experience was ignored, whether it was sport, love or war.

After their first conversation on this subject, she exclaimed on arriving home the next day:

“I’ve been thinking all morning in the laboratory about what you told me yesterday about fear and courage. It’s fascinating, and makes you wish you were a woman.”

“Don’t ever say that,” he exclaimed spitefully.

“This idea that you can only really enjoy life by risking it all, right now, from the age of twenty, as soon as you’re conscious, it’s fantastic, it’s what I was looking for. Like a fool, I hadn’t been able to formulate it.”

Her face was such a contrast to that of Miss Highland. But what will always end up looking hard in a Jewish face at first only puts a light, strange and seductive accent on the sweetness of youth.

“I would never have understood that, had it not been for the war.”

“But me, my brothers, my father… I should have thought about it.”

She was sorry to have been caught in her ignorance.

“But you also took a risk,” he continued with tender flattery, “by giving yourself completely to your work.”

She took his hand, vibrating at his slightest kindness.

“Yes, in the laboratory, that’s what I was looking for; I worked like a brute. Only I didn’t have the idea… how shall I put it…”

“There’s no philosophy guiding your research… We could… Obviously I know nothing about your science. But…”

“Oh, now so many things are becoming clearer.”

She moved her hand towards his again. He drew her towards him. The whiteness of her teeth touched him. But because of his brace, their kisses could only be light.

They had a lot to talk about. She was telling him about her childhood. It was the first time she had spoken about it; she had suffered without understanding or complaining; she was astonished to discover so many things in her past, and such pain. It was to him that she owed this light. Apart from his questions, his silences as he listened haunted her. She felt a relief, an unknown sweetness; at the same time as her mind was opening, her heart was bursting. He brought her life. So she easily put up with the small, obscure disappointments that Gilles’ many physical shortcomings brought her.

She was not so curious about Gilles’ childhood. In fact, he was not very forthcoming about anything to do with his past. An orphan, he had been brought up by a wet nurse under the distant supervision of his guardian, Mr Carentan, and was soon locked up at school. She might have been moved by this exceptional fate, but he never complained about it. He spoke of his solitude with pride, as if it were a rare spring from which he had drunk his disdain for everything that did not capture his mysterious enchantment. She cared little for his origin, she had no sense of social things; she enjoyed the fact that he was impressive in her eyes because of his own qualities. She was more curious about the time when he had begun to think for himself. Before the war, he had known not so much men, but personalities on which he had sharpened his own. Carentan alone had struck him as an extraordinarily free spirit. As for the others, they had all been killed, except for a certain Claude Debrye.

They were also talking about the future. If, for a few days, they hadn’t mentioned the word marriage, it had been for fun. Gilles took pleasure in playing with this certainty, but Myriam waited with delicious trepidation for the moment when the word would be uttered.

One day Gilles said it in a rather unexpected way. She was talking about his father, whom he had not met, and whose intervention she seemed to fear a little.

“Your father, who would never allow our marriage…”

She turned pale with pleasure.

“No, he wouldn’t. Besides, what does it matter?”

She paled again, swelled up with tears, poured out her heart and fell on her hand.

“Why do you think that?” she asked later, her eyes shining with curiosity.

“Because I’m nothing.”

“But you can’t be yet… you hadn’t even finished your studies… and then the war…”

He darkened slightly.

“That’s not what I meant…”

She looked at him, without apprehension.

“By the way, you never asked me. What do you think I’ll do?”

She answered in one breath:

“Oh, you’ll be a politician.”

“You think so,” he said, highly displeased.

She stopped, worried.

“Am I mistaken? Yes, it’s true, I don’t know… Will you write? You’re already writing.”

His discontent grew.

“I don’t write.”

She pointed to the bedside table.

“All these papers…”

“They’re notes. They don’t mean anything.”

“Anyway, you’ll have a great influence on people.”

Gilles looked embarrassed. She was terrified that she hadn’t understood him better.

“Bah!” he said, looking decidedly disappointed.

“Why this look?”

“Writing… One only writes because they have nothing better to do.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Something that betrays all labels. How can you classify me so quickly?”

“You’ve got time,” she murmured, disconcerted and sheepish.

With that, he looked at her with relief, stretching out voluptuously in his bed. He lay down so well that his arm ached and a complaint was wrung from him. She hurried back to him.

When she had gone, Miss Highland soon appeared. When she returned after Myriam’s departure, she always examined his face with a quick, penetrating glance; then she seemed more absorbed than ever in her care and the charm of her own gestures.

When Gilles began to get up and walk around the hospital, spring was in bloom. He made two or three new friends; he watched the nurses and the visitors with a little less distance; he thought a little about the outside world.

However, long torpor made him feel his imprisonment again, long torpor interspersed with brief flashes of clarity. He thought, and from time to time his hand tensed to write. And he wrote. Afterwards, reading himself, he was filled with astonishment. For, before the war, his thinking, which had been bubbly during adolescence, soon overwhelmed by various studies, had become hesitant, timid, inert. Away from books, for the last three years, he had become looser and more muscular. He meditated on his experience of the war and saw that it gave him a picture of life.

Spring, walks and sudden inspirations brought him into a new relationship with Myriam, without him suspecting it. One day, as he was waiting for her in the park, he saw her coming towards him. She was coming up a long driveway. We rarely get a complete view of the people we live with. What he had lightly noted before was severely underlined: she walked badly. Just a moment before, Miss Highland’s long stature and long, gangly, yet sure gait had worked wonders in the same place. Gilles was shocked: there was something essential in Myriam he didn’t like. He was stunned, and then a movement of rage made him take a sudden step forward.

“What’s the matter, Gilles? Are you still suffering? I thought you weren’t suffering any more,” Myriam exclaimed, turning pale.

He was reassured: he thought he’d lost her.

Myriam’s candour seemed unalterable: he could easily hide his feelings from her and he would still marry her. He couldn’t not marry her: he couldn’t waste a chance like this. He took her by the waist and held her close to him, and with a fierce ambiguity, he exclaimed:

“I need you.”

He felt an irresistible agility of concealment at his fingertips. She raised her face towards him, so clear, so relieved.

He spent two or three days coping with the shock he had received. He tried to blame himself. Wasn’t he slyly repressing all of Myriam’s impulses? Wasn’t he creating an atmosphere around her where she could only withdraw? If he had wanted her to, she would already have become bolder and more authoritative. Her waist, slightly bent, would have straightened, her long, frail legs would have loosened and strengthened. There is no woman for whom love cannot be a miracle. He hated to think that he was depriving Myriam of that miracle. It would have been enough to desire her, but he realised that he didn’t desire her, that he had never desired her.

Myriam had performed a miracle for him, the miracle of money. The appearance of money in some lives can be a miracle like that of love: it stirs the imagination and the senses powerfully, at least in the first moment.

But Gilles was already getting used to it. Since he had moved to Neuilly, he had lived penniless, but full of the many gifts Myriam had given him. She also brought him pyjamas, linen, handkerchiefs, cologne and toiletries. He was used to being pampered.

But it’s not the same thing to receive objects and the money that pays for them. He was now allowed to go into town. One day, Myriam said to him:

“Tomorrow, since you’re going out, buy those books yourself. You know better than I do where to find them.”

And she put the money on the bedside table, under a book, a thin piece of paper, so thin that no one could notice it.

Gilles went out and wondered if he would buy the books; he suddenly had a burning desire to go to the brothel; he went.

Gilles was going to get out of hospital and move to an electrotherapy centre where he would be free and could sleep outside. Where would he live? In a hotel. But how would he pay for the hotel? These questions didn’t bother Myriam, who gave him 3,000 francs.

“You’re going to have a lot of expenses. The hotel, the meals. You have to get dressed, you’ve got nothing. You can’t stay in that trench coat, it looks like an affectation.”

She was so happy to be having an effect on his life and to be expanding it. Gilles thought with regret that all this would have been charming and praiseworthy, if his heart had been pure.