Gilles, chapter V

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 V

It had to pass that, sooner or later, he would see Mr Falkenberg. On the day when this finally happened, he had left the electrotherapy centre at the Grand-Palais in a state of great irritation. Two or three hours there was already too much. And today he had been on door duty; instead of leaving at midday, he hadn’t been able to escape until five o’clock. Now he had to enjoy himself, to make up for lost time. Alas, the time for enjoyment was still going to be contested; he would have to go to Myriam’s in a little while. But first he was going to give himself a break. He took a taxi and gave the address of his tailor.

He defied the rules with reckless audacity. His slate-coloured tunic was open over a blue-grey hunting tie held in place by a gold pin; his long trousers had a crease; his kepi could be the envy of the most gallant aviator. But his well-tailored boots showed that his luxury had been learned and revealed his class in small details.

Life was now for him a tangle of frivolous pleasures, where like a stale odour only the memory of the wild sensations of his previous months lingered, when he waded through the mud, between fear and courage.

He entered the tailor’s shop with the same intimate, slow trembling that he felt with girls. He loved this Ali-Baba cave where, on all sides, English fabrics piled up and fell in long pleats. He had to restrain himself from rolling around in this solid, supple material, not enjoying it enough with his nose, eyes and fingertips. How is it that this silly tailor can tell from my every move that I’m an upstart? Gilles tried on a terrycloth coat; as he left the fitting room he was tempted by a light blue jumper that he didn’t need. When he saw a civilian jacket lying on a table, he remembered his jacket from before the war, with its dreadful, deceptively elegant cut, which he had had so much trouble getting his guardian to pay for. Could he have lived any other life than he did today? Certainly not.

It was time to go to the Avenue de Messine. He took the path on foot, lazily. He went into a tobacco shop and bought some American cigarettes, the new aroma of which intoxicated him. This small intoxication made him think of a bigger one: should he wait until this evening? He saw the time at a shop. If he went to see a girl, he could only come back for a quarter hour on the Avenue de Messine, because after that he had an appointment at Maxim’s with Benedict. It was better to save himself for this woman who, at midnight…

He thought of Myriam who was waiting for him anxiously; his heart clenched, containing the fury of desire. He continued walking towards the Avenue de Messine. It wasn’t that he no longer had any desire to be with Myriam, but rather the hold of the voluptuous solitude which he had been caressing in the streets, bars and concert cafés. And yet all this came from her, and by losing her he was convinced that he would lose all this. Losing her, it sent a shiver down his spine, and that shiver made him tremble for her.

He went up to Myriam’s house. The wide, quiet staircase had become half-familiar. The chambermaid, who had received him the first time and who almost single-handedly served in the vast flat, as Mr Falkenberg had not wanted to replace the male servants who had been mobilised, smiled at him with a lovingly knowing expression. He was not at ease: the thought of Mr Falkenberg, whom Myriam said was going through a terrible attack of rheumatism, was weighing on him.

Myriam no longer received him in the parlour, but in a room next to her bedroom, which she had arranged to his liking. Gilles, who knew nothing of elegant interiors, but whose eye was honed by painting and who went to all the decorators to satisfy a hunger he could yet only serve with tailors and shirtmakers, looked with a stern eye at this bric-a-brac where two or three things of Modern intent squabbled with the fake Renaissance with which Mrs Falkenberg had once cluttered the whole house.

Once again, Myriam followed Gilles’ gaze with fear as he surveyed the place with horror, but her concern was heightened by the fact that she was wearing a new dress which she feared Gilles would not like. She didn’t think she had bad taste, she wasn’t sure Gilles had good taste; but the idea of his displeasure was unbearable and gave her over to him. Her air of fear made Gilles realise that he had hated the dress before even seeing it: he was ashamed of his prejudice. He took a more indulgent look at the dress.

“Don’t you like it?” said Myriam in a tone that already showed her resignation that she would never completely please him.

“Of course I do, of course I do. I think that line around her neck is very pretty.”

He praised the line around the neck, but didn’t mention the colour, which he found very annoying: that sad grey.

“And the colour?”

“It’s very difficult to dress in half-mourning.”

The sudden thought that, on the contrary, half-mourning could be exquisite surprised him and made him frown. Damn, why was she so clumsy? But he evaded the question.

“You’ll get there.”

Why shouldn’t she, after all? He was there to help her, to make the best of everything.

A knock sounded. The maid entered, looking serious.

“Monsieur…

“Oh yes, yes, thank you…”

The chambermaid disappeared.

“He’s well disposed at the moment, you must make the most of it.”

What had she said to him? What exactly had happened between the father and daughter concerning him? Myriam had said only one thing to her father, the thing that had touched her the most and could touch him the most in Gilles: his intelligence. Unfortunately, although Mr Falkenberg himself had a scientific mind, he had not been at all delighted to find it in his daughter. In her lack of femininity he seemed to find not his own heritage at all, but the dryness of his wife. He thought that, like her mother, Myriam had no sense of human beings; the good things she had said about Gilles had upset him.

Gilles was frightened by the prospect of this meeting; he had no doubt that he would be found out in an instant by this superior man who surely had a sense of character. However, he had forgotten the one circumstance that could have blurred Mr Falkenberg’s vision: he wept when he saw his sons’ companion. This man, who showed the remains of great bodily vigour and who had on his face all the signs still alive of intelligence and energy, was moaning at the back of his armchair in that childish tone which, at the front, coming from the wounded, had always retained the power to terrify Gilles. Dismay gripped the young man. His two old comrades, Jacques and Daniel Falkenberg, stood on either side of the old man’s chair and said:

“What are you doing here? You’re taking advantage of our disappearance. If we’d been there, you’d never have dared. You left the front to come to the rear and loot our house.”

Gilles realized that the remorse of having left the front had not ceased to live inside him. What was he doing here? His whole life was nothing but weakness and cowardice, an inept frivolity. He only ever felt alive on the front; or rather, he was made to die there. He was not made to live. Life such as it appeared to him was unexpectedly, unbelievably disappointing. He was capable of only one good deed: destroying himself. This destruction would be his tribute to life, the only one he was capable of. He wanted to flee from Mr Falkenberg, and his flight had the semi-heroic aspect of nostalgia for the front. He promised himself: “I’ll leave tomorrow, without any fanfare. And Myriam will never see me again.”

Gilles stood mute for a long time in front of M. Falkenberg. Other harsh thoughts came to him. In a flash, he saw the depths of life, where a marriage has infinite consequences: souls knotted together, children, the indelible stain, the perpetuated crime. Mrs Falkenberg had wanted to marry Mr Falkenberg as Giles wanted to marry Myriam. Hard-working people are the prey of frivolous ones; he felt himself floating like a perniciously light, deceptively transparent ghost around Myriam and her father, whom virtue made opaque.

Myriam was standing next to her father, looking at him. Her selfishness as a lover prevented her now, as much as resentment had done in the past, from helping this shipwrecked old man, her father, with her arm and her cheek, in other words a man who was suffering with a heart not unlike her own.

At last, Mr Falkenberg returned to the world of the living, where he now took his place only with weariness and repugnance. He looked and saw before him an elegant young man, a little frail, who was observing him with a sullen and curious air. He was surprised and in a bad mood. With a sarcastic smile, wanting to cut to the chase, he said to himself: “He’s a dowry runner. Silly girl.” However, he grumbled aloud:

“No, I don’t want you to talk to me about them. Everyone’s forgotten them except me, who’s about to be forgotten.”

“Papa!”

This cry escaped Myriam’s lips quickly enough for Gilles to believe that she was more attached to her family than he thought. It made him fearful and rekindled his desire to captivate her. Mr Falkenberg turned for a second to his daughter.

“You…” he began angrily.

But he continued, after taking a long breath:

“Yes, I know, you told me about Mr… You’d been injured…”

Always the cry of the stricken parents. “Why you, why did you survive?”

Suddenly something inside Gilles reacted. This father passionately regretted that his sons were not there in his place; this father would easily have given his unknown skin for theirs, because someone had to be killed. And yet, it was unfair. Mr Falkenberg was obviously a very good man, but his sons? No. The two brothers ceased to be imposing symbols; in Gilles’ eyes, they were once again what they had been: mediocre. “Mediocre. And I’m a good person. There’s something in me that deserves to live. Why shouldn’t I be entitled to life and your money instead of them? I deserve them more than they do. Can’t you understand that? Never mind, I’ll trick you into it. I want to live. And for me, life isn’t about struggling for years in the slums and exhausting my strength to get out. I want to blossom right now. I need your money to save my youth. I don’t want to go back to my little student restaurants where I toiled to deny my overwhelming ugliness. I want to be on the same level as the liberated people I waited on. And I want to think in peace. Oh, to think in peace, in a pure, noble, isolated place like this library. Give me your books; your books, that is your wealth. And your daughter, you know that…”

“Are you feeling better, sir? Have you had an operation?”

Mr Falkenberg spoke in a polite, monotonous, broken voice, striving to carry on in a depopulated world. For a few moments he pretended to be talking to a wounded soldier whom his daughter was looking after out of a kind of charity.

Then suddenly, he seemed to remember something.

“My daughter finds great pleasure… great interest in your company… What have you studied?”

Brusquely, he was at the heart of the matter. Admitting this fact was but the smallest hint of his pessimism..

Myriam looked at Gilles anxiously. For a moment, he had been withdrawing, no doubt offended.

In fact, he was still thinking wildly.

“Your daughter. Yes, I’ll take your daughter. You didn’t love her, you despise her. And yet she is better than your sons were. Why do you despise her? You despise everything. And your sons are a pretext for despising and hating the life that is withdrawing from you. The life that withdraws from you, but that flows back into me. I am full of life. You who were full of life, why don’t you approve of this flow of life in me? You are intelligent, I am intelligent. Why won’t you favour me? I would make you favour me if I wanted to. I can do anything.”

Myriam saw Gilles’ face gradually brighten. He answered with quiet eagerness.

“I’ve tried various studies to find out the possibilities of… of my thoughts.”

This word contrasted so sharply with the appearance of a barroom soldier that Mr Falkenberg stared at him scandalously. You can’t be serious with that suit and that girlish figure. And yet he had fought, he had citations.

“Your thoughts… What studies?”

“History, philosophy, philology.”

“So what’s next?”

“I’m hesitating between archaeology and sociology.”

At this point, Gilles lost all composure, much to Myriam’s dismay. Those ridiculous words were more than he could manage. He had thrown them out, thinking that Mr Falkenberg, who took a long time to understand him, deserved no more than a pedant for a son-in-law.

“Perhaps, if you will,” he continued, not without some effort, “I would like to understand my epoque. I want to get away from the problems of my time to come back to them, to explain them by very broad comparisons… so that others can benefit from them… those men of action.”

“…Yes,” growled Mr Falkenberg, puckering up his lips. “That is, you want to write.”

Myriam flinched and looked at Gilles: now he seemed to readily accept the soundness of this conclusion.

“Of course,” he agreed, in that new calm voice she didn’t know and which disconcerted her.

“It’s not a profession,” cut in Mr Falkenberg, who sank back into his rheumatism, “unless…”

Just when Myriam thought Gilles was losing his nerve through shyness, the young man, with a sudden and bizarre ease, took three steps, grabbed a book from the small table next to the armchair and said:

“You’re reading this.”

It was a history book on the revolution of ‘89.

“It’s excellent,” he continued. “It’s a pity that today’s historians are nothing more than professors without art, style or poetic invention.”

Mr Falkenberg seemed touched for a moment, his eyes sparkled, he was about to reply; but as Gilles only seemed to be animated by his own thoughts and did not ask for his opinion, he stuck to sulking.

Gilles suddenly bowed to him.

“Allow me to leave you.”

Back in her room, Myriam, who had been so taken aback, was anxious to know what Gilles was feeling. He had come in looking very glum. Under her questioning gaze, he suddenly changed and seemed transported.

“How well he looks,” he exclaimed.

She was happy; having an interesting father made her feel attractive.

Then he asked:

“How was I?”

Myriam shivered; Gilles’ coldness had been such that for a moment she had wondered if he was anything but cold.

A knock sounded. The chambermaid entered.

“Monsieur would like a word with Mademoiselle.”

They were both startled.

Gilles found himself alone, stripped bare by Mr Falkenberg’s gaze. It was the first time a serious gaze had been cast on him since he’d been in Paris. He looked at himself in Myriam’s mirror: the soldier’s features had fallen away like a mask; underneath he could not find the austere student he had been. Doubt extended to his entire past. He tried in vain to remember how he had been a student passionately absorbed in the discoveries of the mind. In those days, repressed passions formed a mass of storm clouds over his head, unleashing ideas as swift as lightning.

Myriam returned. Gilles wished for the worst, to have been hated and driven away.

But Myriam said:

“No, it’s the doctor who’s just arrived.”

Gilles jumped at the pretext to leave. He had an appointment at Maxim’s with Benedict.

The situation had changed between them. It was now Benedict who was watching Gilles like a hawk; he envied him, especially for his dazzling transformation; not without pleasure, he suspected something fishy. But he didn’t ask him any questions, because he was sure Gilles would tell him everything. Indeed, he was dying of envy. Suddenly, in front of Benedict, with a cocktail in his fist, he felt that he had done very well in what he had done, that he had bravely entered into life, that he had stirred up rich and curious things; he had completely forgotten his confusion and doubt of earlier in front of M. Falkenberg. He had become cynical again, and enjoying his adventure in words seemed to him an indispensable part of his coarse luxury.

Yet he pulled himself together. He sensed that anything he said to Benedict would come back to haunt him. It was only at the end of the evening that he half-surrendered.

“Do you see many people?” asked Benedict.

“God no!”

“But what do you do all day, apart from the whores?”

“I don’t really know.”

“At the hospital, it was frightening what you read and wrote. What are you going to do when this bitch of a war is over?”

Gilles burst out.

“Buddy, I hate people. And to earn a living, you have to be under people’s thumb. I don’t want to do that.”

“So?”

“I’m going to marry for money.”

Benedict smiled appreciatively, and slightly disparagingly.

“The ‘people’ will be reduced to one, and that one person won’t be much trouble. What’s she like? An idiot, I’m sure.”

“And why is that?”

“It takes a fool to marry a good-for-nothing like you. A fool, or…”

Benedict paused, fearing that the word would come back to bite him later, when he frequented the household.

“Get on with it.”

“Er… an ugly girl, too happy to…”

Gilles knew Myriam was pretty, but the word touched him, because little by little he was beginning to see her as a monster. Unwanted, she was nothing but a shapeless mass. Benedict smiled more disparagingly as he watched Gilles turn down his nose.

Gilles shook himself and thought of chastising Benedict.

“You don’t think a beautiful, intelligent girl can be blind to my faults? Perhaps women don’t dislike me as much as you think.”

Benedict changed his tone.

“She must be lovely, and much better than you say.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Exactly.”

When Gilles left Benedict, he thought with horror in his taxi that, for the first time, he had betrayed Myriam. Everything he had said to Benedict about her had degraded him forever. The words had come out of him like worms from a rotting corpse. He put his hand over his mouth, crushing his lips. He groaned:

“Myriam.”

He was surprised to have uttered that word for the first time, when he was alone. Oh, what a cry of love! Alas, his cry was nothing more than the sight of a motor accident before the eyes of an egotistical and uncaring passer-by. “I don’t even have a friendship with her. If she had a friend, he would open her eyes to me. She is blind, but her blindness is made up of her love.” He couldn’t stand it much longer that she was standing there tenderly trusting him, unaware of everything that was being plotted against her.

This dangerous thought didn’t stop him, however, from following his pleasure. The taxi stopped. He rang a bell at a porte-cochère, took an elevator and rung the doorbell. A woman came to open the door. In the half-light of the antechamber, she was a beautiful, opulent, half-naked figure who pressed a little towards him but then gently stepped aside as he responded without gesture.

He entered a flat of the utmost calm, dignity and taste. Antique furniture in a fresh setting, all blended into English comfort. What part did the housekeeper play in this temperate luxury? He looked at the woman. She was magnificent material. White skin blooming with blue, fine and abundant blond hair, eyes of a clear water, teeth of the surest quality.

The Austrian was a pre-war whore. A magnificent slut, as they were in those days. They had a taste for luxury, they saw themselves as society’s ornaments. They believed in the prestige of the aristocracy, which had not yet completely given up, and of the rich bourgeoisie, which imitated the aristocracy. They cared about looking good, and understood seduction. They had learned to spend the money they received well, and they had to have received a lot of it to agree to put some aside. Now, war more than age was forcing them to settle down.

The Austrian woman—who had escaped the concentration camp, thanks to her lover, a man of the world in finance and politics—had become, better than any other, a woman of the interior. Wise, she welcomed the trouble Gilles brought her without fear, because she knew he was just passing by and wouldn’t give her time to lose her head.

“I’m late,” he assured her.

“I never expected you to come sooner.”

He preferred her, even though he was constantly prevented from getting to her house by all the others he met on the way. When she had first met him, she had looked at him out of the corner of her eye with embarrassment. Loners are scary. She wondered who this strange boy was who phoned, then didn’t come; or a long time later, phoned a second time out of scruples about arriving late. When he came in, he would say hello in the most distant way, talk about the rain and the fine weather while looking at an engraving, and suddenly embrace her. He hardly spoke for as long as he stayed. When he did open his mouth, he told obvious lies about what he did and didn’t do. He would suddenly stop, burst out laughing gently and leave without looking back. She had got used to not understanding him, which was part of her character as well as her job. He was absent-minded, moody. He wasn’t the least bit sentimental. Sensual? Well, a little. He could have been more, if he had paid attention. In bed, at times, this sudden tenderness was no longer just that of a child in his mother’s arms, but something acute that wanted to reach her, a concern for what she felt about what she was—something rare in boys of that age. But it didn’t last, and he grew distant, mute or a liar. Yet he was never snippy, contemptuous or hurtful with her, as his friends who had also seen her claimed.

For some time, he had been chasing another kind of girl, Benedict had pushed him into this gang of kept women. He liked their knowledge of bodies and hearts. Most of them, however, were talkative and boastful; only the Austrian was peaceful and silent like the common girls, and more beautiful, more refined. That great flow of white flesh. He still had no idea that there was anything other than girls. He didn’t know anyone in Paris and he didn’t need to know anyone. Loving both solitude and women, he seemed devoted to girls who did not disturb his solitude. Even though, after long wanderings in which he had become too bloated, he threw himself like a starving man at the first man who came along who was capable of sustaining a conversation, and even though he had a latent curiosity about the virile world of ambition, he lived as if it had never happened. He wanted women to be naked, stripped of their social shells, simple and strong expressions of their sex, ready to accept from him an equally naked presence. He liked women who belonged to everyone, and therefore not at all to him. He had no desire to have a wife of his own. He didn’t even believe that Myriam was his, he always thought that she would open her eyes to him and close her door. Then he would really be alone.

But, deep down, wasn’t this silent nakedness of their relationship gradually giving way to something fairly intimate, with abrupt but unforgettable modulations? Little by little his relationship with the girls was changing, without him suspecting it. Weren’t there clashes between him and them? Little by little, he was learning about love. They sensed that he had the instinct. They were moved by his sudden outpourings of love out of the silence, and they thought about teaching him, if not to tie him down, at least to keep him with them for a while. In this way, a kind of communication was established between him and this adored, unknown and overstepped sex, which was constantly interrupted and constantly resumed. A kind of connivance was established between him and the women, apart from Myriam. But before her, even though he was the coldest of all with her, there remained a latent power from all this commerce that she bathed in.