Gilles, chapter VI

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 VI

Myriam could no longer ignore the growing distance Gilles was putting between her and himself. Under her father’s gaze, this distance had become apparent to her. She gave him a justification for this: regret from the war. When she saw him come into her house, always later and for less time, gloomy or absent-mindedly humorous, impatient with little things, talking with sudden ardour or disgust about anything, then silent and leafing through a book, looking at his watch, she thought she understood his gloominess.

Gilles told himself that his injury would soon no longer be reason enough to stay in Paris. Although his arm remained in poor condition, he knew that he could be accepted by various forces with just one arm. He had forgotten somewhat his sensations at the front; those he would find there would therefore be like new; he had no doubt that they would be stronger than those he had known in Paris the last several months. “Now that I have known Paris, I can die happy.”

But would it not also be showing some freedom of spirit to break his vows? By deliberately putting an end to his “military exercises,” as he called them, he was depriving them of the character of a duty that never ends, and attributing to them in retrospect a purely personal experience. And France? This dark pursuer allowed herself to be thrown off. Furies sometimes give you respite, if you want it.

In any case, Gilles saw how vulnerable Myriam was in this respect and saw the advantage to be gained. And there were other reasons by which he could dissuade the young girl from the cruel idea that he did not love her: his thirst for solitude, his fear of money. But, for the moment, he let his reverie about returning to the war mask his discomfort, his growing discomfort.

Two or three times, he made threatening remarks. Myriam, who had always been used to containing herself in her family, did not show face at first; then, having summoned up her strength, she retaliated.

“Naturally, you’ll never find the life you’ve made large enough.”

“You can’t stop your fate, you can’t quibble.”

“Of course you can’t.”

She thought of her brothers; she was avariciously competing with them for a companion in hell. She could feel her father’s sardonic gaze on her as she entered his library, having just escorted the injured gentleman to the door. She came up with a convenient theory about respecting the independence of the heart to justify her lack of power over him. Gilles was a man devoted to strange meditations on death as others around her were devoted to the madness of science. He could only pay her distracted attention. And that was still a lot.

One day she got scared; she came to wonder that, if he wanted to go back to the front, it was because he didn’t care about anything or anyone at the back; she felt very cold. She waited anxiously for him to come the next day, and it seemed to her that at first sight she would see clearly.

That day, Gilles arrived at her house in a dangerous mood. The night before, he had gotten horribly drunk, hanging around until daylight with two girls whose laughter ruined everything. He promised himself: “I’m going to tell her everything. And right away.”

However, when he found himself in the small sitting room, he saw a very pretty blue armchair that was, well, in charming taste. This disconcerted him somewhat.

“Myriam, what a lovely armchair. My word, where on earth did you find it?”

She looked at the armchair, as surprised as he was; she’d forgotten all about it. She had ordered it before Gilles met his father. Immediately, her heart melted and Gilles’ too.

However, when he had gone round the armchair, he shook himself and looked for some harsh words.

The difficulties became apparent. “I’m going to tell her everything. But what am I going to tell her? I’m going to tell her that I don’t love her. But… I don’t love anyone else.” Immediately a line of escape appeared: “I can’t tell her that I don’t love her, at most I can tell her about the emptiness of my heart. It seems to me that I will never love, so this tender respect I have for her is perhaps all I can give to a woman. The desire I give to others? You might as well say that I’m in love with bottles of whiskey or statues in squares… Statues in squares. In any case, she needs to know this, what a taste I have for girls. I can’t hide such an enormous peculiarity from her, which will seem incomprehensible, horrible, unforgivable. So she will be free of me.”

He stopped, breathed, escaped this new extremity: “Tell her I’m filthy, that I like all this junk, how I’m going to hurt her.” He was horrified by the wound he was about to inflict. He glimpsed the terrible power to make her suffer that was building up in his hands.

So he prefaced it with a very vague statement.

“I am a strange being.”

Myriam’s sharp eyes softened: he had anticipated her concern; Myriam needed no more than this small token of sympathy.

“I have a terrible taste for depriving myself of everything, for leaving everything behind. That’s what I like about war. I was never so happy—while being terribly miserable— than in those winters when all I had in the world was a fifty-cent Pascal, a knife, a watch, two or three handkerchiefs, and I received no letters.”

He was frightened of himself and looked down at her. Hope flooded back into her along with pity. An idea sustained her, that perhaps the war would end in time; she counted the days. She didn’t talk about marriage any more, she thought they had talked about it too soon and that it had given Gilles a fright that was quite understandable in a young man of twenty-three, but she thought about it all the time. In this, she was a woman; despite serious moments of discouragement, she always went back to her calculations. For example, she took advantage of the success of the armchair to return to a conversation that had enchanted them earlier: they were imagining an interior together. Gilles, forgetting his manoeuvres, suddenly thought only of visiting the decorator who had supplied the armchair; he spoke of his passion for blue. She listened to him and watched him rekindle his enthusiasm. She was beginning to realise that these chains were not the ones she had thought they were the first few days. They weren’t the chains of passion, but rather the chains of growing habit. But everything was good for her, she felt the power of her patience. Gilles’ presence seemed to her a sufficient goal.

“I can’t understand two people living in the same room,” she insinuated in the middle of Gilles’ dissertation.

Neither of them felt the likely horror of such a statement. He nodded, delighted.

If he went away again, she would ask him to marry her first. “If you don’t marry me, people might think I was afraid of having a husband killed in the war.” She could not accept Gilles’ scruples.

She needed her father’s permission. She wanted to avoid marrying against his will; she needed him to befriend Gilles; she was testing the waters tirelessly and with more caution and skill than his character seemed to require. Once the savage grievance he harboured against the fact that Gilles was alive had subsided, Mr Falkenberg, who saw Gilles from time to time, took an increasingly hostile view of his character:

“He’s not a serious man,” he repeated one day, in a harsher tone than usual.

He wanted to say: “A man does not marry a girl who has money. At least not until he has earned some himself.” But he didn’t love her enough, he was too tired of life to hope to open her eyes.

“For one thing, a man doesn’t get married during the war. It’s true that…”

“What? You don’t think Gilles is injured enough?”

Mr Falkenberg looked at his daughter with remorse: she was defending his property as he should have defended his own. One of his sons at least was not healthy enough to be a soldier; he should have had him discharged. It was in a more subdued voice that he resumed after a moment:

“Why won’t he tell you about his family?”

“It’s him that I’m interested in.”

“It’s a way of enlightening someone about yourself to talk to them about the family you came from. It’s strange that he hasn’t done that.”

Myriam said nothing. She had anticipated this remark and, in the spirit of contradiction, was determined not to question Gilles. What little she knew, she didn’t want to repeat. He had once said to her, with an air:

“My parents, I can imagine them any way I want.”

Another time:

I’m lucky enough not to have a family, not to know anything about my family. That makes me a virgin. No, I’m just bragging because my guardian took better care of me than a father could.

From time to time, he would allude to his tutor and describe a character who charmed Myriam. He was an old bachelor who lived half the year in the Latin Quarter and the other half in Normandy in a fisherman’s cottage on a wild stretch of the Cotentin coast. This old man had travelled the world in his youth, doing all sorts of jobs and amassing a fortune. He was passionate about the history of religions. He had spent most of his time in India, when he had enough money, studying religious sects. He had published one or two books on these abstruse subjects.

“He has a magnificent face. A true Norman, tall, blue-eyed, strong-boned, with a nose of considerable bone and flesh. He dresses in velvet like a bricklayer and wears clogs. He is an exquisite person, very sad, very content and very kind.”

“I’d like to see him,” cried Myriam.

“Yes,” Gilles had murmured evasively.

Finally, one beautiful day, he said to her:

“You must think I’m hiding things from you about my family. In fact, there’s nothing. I was entrusted to him because he had a sister who was supposed to take care of me. But she died very young. He had received me from a friend to whom he had sworn never to ask questions. At the same time, he had been given a sum of money to be used for my education, which was used up long before I finished my studies. And that was that. I was curious for a while, but since then my curiosity has waned. I’ve overcome the vanity that wanted to make me believe I was the son of some great personage, and I think I’m the bastard son of some notary who hurt some farm girl.”

“After the war, can we go and see him?”

Gilles realized that he had no desire to introduce Myriam to the old man.

“Do you love him?” she asked

“I adore him,” said Gilles with an emotion that warmed Myriam’s heart.

“He’s tender, deep down,” he told her, “He hides his tenderness from me out of modesty, humour and melancholy.”

“I love him, because he’s clever, even more original, and above all very kind. Having said that, here’s what you need to tell your father: I’m the son of a farm girl and it doesn’t matter who else.” Myriam looked at him quizzically and Gilles laughed.

“Is it true? Or isn’t it?” he scoffed. “Since it’s the most likely and your father needs certainty, please say that.”

“But why a farm girl?”

Gilles interrupted the joke and talked about his adolescence. He had been a boarder for ten years at a religious college on the outskirts of Paris; he came to Paris once a month. The old man would take him to museums and theatres or keep him locked up in his garret, filling him with theories on the occult, magic, freemasonry and primitive religions. He spent his holidays in his Norman farmhouse.

“You’ve never had a woman around.”

“I wonder if a mother could have been as tender as the old man.”

“Let me write to him to thank him.”

That day, Myriam was happy, because Gilles, moved by the memory, suddenly hugged her with a strength she had only known in the early days.