Gilles travels to Trianon with Mabel
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.” Released in serialized chapters, the first English translation of Gilles was published in 2024 by Tikhanov Library. You can read it here.
One day, Gilles went with a friend to a tea dance he sometimes attended. After a while, he noticed that his former nurse, Miss Highland, was at a table with friends and officers.
It was the first time he’d seen her in ordinary clothes. She was deprived of something, which made her less imposing and more human. Without her uniform, the shifting of the lines made her more precise, showing her to be a deceptively thin, disquieting. Morally, she was also very different from what she had seemed in hospital, no longer closed-minded, but dissipated, switched on, laughing loudly. Gilles watched her for a moment before she noticed him. Unaware of his presence, she was free. He admitted to himself that he’d always found her desirable and that he had avoided her.
She saw him and showed great surprise. She leaned towards a friend who, looking at Gilles in turn, seemed to be contemplating an object of important confidences. Gilles was stunned, but at the same time had to admit to himself that it wasn’t so surprising after all, that she had given him more than one discreet sign of interest.
He smiled and waved. She seemed to be waiting for him to come to her, but he didn’t move. He didn’t think about it; he was the man in the street who ignored the existence of young girls like Miss Highland. And he didn’t want to take advantage of a chance encounter.
She was disappointed and unhappy. Gilles thought she had earned her disdain, after a moment’s surprise. However, as she resumed her laughter and conversation with the others, she kept turning her gaze back to him. Her gaze became at once so severe and so tender that at last he stood up and came over to say hello. Intimidated, he appeared very arrogant to Miss Highland’s companions.
For Gilles, increasingly astonished, she showed herself flattered, also intimidated, and violently eager to hold him back. Her blond skin blushed excessively. Gilles could not even conceive that a relationship could be established between him and this girl.
She had asked him to sit down, he had refused, and now found himself sitting next to his friend. The latter paid him no mind, being busy with a neighbor. Gilles felt his heart clench as he realized that he’d let the opportunity pass and that he wouldn’t see her again, since he didn’t know where she lived. The idea of using a phone book didn’t occur to him. He felt terribly frustrated and measured his inertia. Motionless amid the general hubbub, he thought of Myriam. She was made for him, who was as unsuited as she was to the easy, amiable life. Women and men are made to laugh, to dance, to give themselves over to the days. You have to be a cripple to refuse the ease of life. People are learned in many wonderful ways. For example, dancing is beautiful. They were dancing at this tea party. Miss Highland had stood up and was dancing with a boy who didn’t arouse any jealousy in Gilles, who seemed a very different type from her. A young aviator, not very handsome, not very elegant, not very distinguished, but very comfortable.
Miss Highland, impatient, detached herself from her dancer as she passed and approached him:
“Why don’t you invite me? Are you ashamed of dancing with your nurse?”
Gilles, completely disconcerted, babbled:
“I don’t dance.”
She looked at him with more regret than surprise and replied:
“Call me.”
Gilles was scandalized. None of this fitted in with his furtive, slightly sulky idea of himself. He wanted to enjoy forever sliding invisibly among men and women. How could he be disturbed? Suddenly, he stepped outside. The friend was still in conversation he waited for him at the door. Then Miss Highland appeared and, rushing towards him, almost shouted into his mouth:
“Would you take me to dinner with one of my friends? My parents are out of town.”
Gilles, who was due to visit Myriam, answered yes, without a moment’s hesitation.
“Wait for me a moment, I’ll be back, I’m delighted.”
Gilles smiled with a fiery cheerfulness, at the opening of an unknown horizon.
The young girl returned.
“My friend bailed, she doesn’t dare phone her parents. But I know a guy who’s really nice… as a chaperone.”
Gilles, who had lofty ideas about the virtue of young girls, nodded gravely. The chaperone was a hussar with a low limp, who regarded Gilles with resignation.
They went to dinner at an American bistro on Rue Duphot. Miss Highland breathed in the pleasure-saturated atmosphere and gazed into Gilles’ eyes with an abandon and certainty that still bewildered him.
“You don’t even know my name. Mabel. Call me Mabel, ingrate. Drink up.”
Mabel’s feelings were irresistible. And suddenly Gilles changed; he became, in one fell swoop, the man Mabel’s eyes reflected, a wild boy, and perhaps not just a friend to the girls in the street.
Mabel didn’t need to drink to be drunk, but she drank, and so did he. The “chaperon” who answered to the very pleasant name of Horace de Saint-Prenant also drank to console himself for his role. Before dinner was over, the three of them were in the most tender of relationships: Mabel was engaged to Gilles, who had never met a Myriam. As for Horace, he would say:
“Gilles, you are my comrade in arms. Your glory has surpassed mine in battle. It’s only fair that you should receive the highest award, and I give it to you…”
“He’s my darling prince,” exclaimed Mabel. “He gives what he doesn’t have.”
“Mabel, I’ve loved you, I love you. The fact that you’ve never loved me doesn’t destroy the rights given to me by a great love, a medieval love.”
That Mabel was engaged to Gilles hadn’t been said at all, but it was understood by all three. And this explained why Mabel, having decided to drink more freely in Horace’s bachelor apartment, locked herself in the bathroom with Gilles as soon as they arrived and eagerly offered him her mouth.
Gilles took it, in a confused but enormous emotion. It was for him: baptism, first communion as much as marriage. He remembered that he had dreamed of young girls, and admitted that this dream, which had slept under the asceticism of war, had never ceased to occupy the very depths of his being. Hadn’t he already woken it with Myriam? But she wasn’t a real girl, that laboratory novice.
Gilles, holding Mabel, made no use of his hands at first. He made no acquaintance with her body, took no hold of her breasts or hips, dreaming of her from a distance. Mabel’s body was nothing but a long, slender stem with no thickness, ending in a face. But inside that face was a moving mouth. The suppleness of this mouth eventually won out, for at last Gilles’ hands began to move. Immediately Mabel moaned.
When they returned to the room where Horace was moping, not without romantic majesty, overturned on his unemployed bed, Gilles wondered for a second what Mabel was triumphing over. Was it just their kissing? Or Horace’s debasement? But the alcohol detached him from the details.
In the morning, Gilles thought back to Myriam. He hadn’t phoned her, she had waited for him. Mabel was the first young girl he’d ever known. He realized the abyss that had always separated him from Myriam. A shiver ran through him. It was too much, he had to break away.
Relieved, he thought only of Mabel. The life he’d thought was fixed wasn’t fixed at all. He had constrained himself in recent times, but now he would no longer constrain himself; he was not made to constrain himself. Something unsuspected was opening up to him; he was discovering happiness.
He had never desired, nor would he ever desire, a frail, awkward girl like Myriam, however lovely she was. Mabel’s waist twisting under his hand had suddenly generated surprising volumes.
He was to see Mabel again that evening when she got out of hospital, just when he was supposed to see Myriam. He would have to phone her to explain his absence the day before and his absence today. He didn’t even have time to see her to break up with her. Break up with her: break her?
He called Myriam.
“What is it?” she asked with an anguished voice.
The lie came to him with an ignoble easiness. Instead of saying an impediment, he muttered:
“I wanted to be alone.”
“You should have called me,” dared the voice in a tone of gentle and timid reproach.
“She must have suffered to give me the shadow of a reproach,” he mused. She had suffered, she would suffer, suffering would enter through him into her destiny. He who knew only death glimpsed the cruelty of life.
“I can’t see you at six.”
“But why not?”
“I’ll tell you later… can I have dinner with you?”
“Of course” she blurted out.
He now sometimes dined with her in her room. He would leave after dinner very early, on the pretext of not frightening Mr Falkenberg.
Mabel, at the exit of the hospital, was in a fury of impatience, of joy. In this hospital, he had taken morose delight in pretending such an adventure was impossible. How unambitious he was, and especially unambitious of happiness. To win Myriam was only to live, to be out of the war, to have a roof over one’s head, meals, clothes, a semblance of a social bond, a friendship. There was much more to it than that, but he didn’t think about it. Before Mabel’s admiring eyes, he reverted to the drunken, swaggering figure of the evening before.
Mabel lived on rue Copernic, and he was now starting to walk in that direction. She was prodigiously tall, slim and undulating. She had teeth, bright hair and a crazy laugh. She kept looking at his mouth. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand it any longer and said:
“Let’s take a cab. Come to my place.”
“But…”
“My parents are gone, I already told you…”
In the taxi, she immediately reached for his mouth. Her ample lean body undulated, filling the whole space. Her mouth burned. Her long, strong hands pressed against Gilles’ waist, making him feel invaded, violated.
He was shocked at the impropriety that Mabel was taking, shocked too at her shamelessness. He was used to confining desire to the ascetic anonymity of prostitution, on the fringes of society and families.
Yet he entered her home with less fear than he had entered Mr Falkenberg’s. The greatest calm… Suddenly, for a second, he had the feeling that a sensation was reaching somewhere far away in his unconscious, that it was seeping in and might later discolour his intoxication: the flat was less big and less beautiful than he had expected.
She took him straight into her bedroom, which was so filled with dirty clothes and trinkets that she seemed embarrassed. She went into the hallway, closed some doors, turned the key, and then threw herself into her bed. The intoxication returned to Gilles in its entirety. They embraced. She kissed him with even greater enthusiasm, a fury to surrender herself. He saw that she wanted to give herself to him. His desire rose and fell into this knot of movements, moans and sighs.
He was surprised for a second to have shattered the solemnity of their rendezvous, for he believed that she was still a virgin, after all, he was, in spite of all the girls. She was his first woman, he was her first man. Just as life suddenly rushes past, skipping transitions that one would have thought must be spelled out with slow gestures.
Mabel was almost naked under her dress, but the most ready woman is still bound in such a way that she needs two or three gestures to make her consent clear. Gilles, despite his drunkenness, noticed the sure swiftness of Mabel’s hands.
A little later, he knew what he should have known from the first day he saw her in hospital. The exactness of her gestures were proof of her experience.
Myriam. She was his possession, his only possession. He had almost lost her. Mabel, bewildered, saw a contemptuous boy stand up, whistling.
“How many?”
“What?”
“How many men?”
Immediately the young woman, half undressed, let out a cry, hesitated for a second, then, in front of that terrible face, declared:
“I love you.”
This cry touched the debauchee, the friend of girls, but like a stain. Standing before Mabel, completely motionless, he looked at her in her disorder and remained in it. His persistent immobility made the whole thing odiously ridiculous. Mabel must have been frightened, she who had been so sure of her sincerity, and whose strength of impulse had left far behind a past in which many thoughtless gestures had sunk into oblivion.
Gilles grew increasingly silent and motionless. He could see the cloth moving, wrinkling and crumpling ten times over, in her hands. The same flower cannot wither and be reborn.
“You’ve already slept with a lot of guys,” he insisted with burning contempt.
This contempt, by demeaning the young woman, demeaned him. He wanted to say: “You are mediocre. But you haven’t the slightest idea of what’s inside me. You don’t know what depths I reached in myself during the war.” He could have said many things quietly. But that would have given too much weight to his silence. He growled aloud:
“I should have known.”
Mabel stammered:
“But look, Gilles, how can you believe…? No…”
“Enough, you’ve already slept…”
“But no… Yes… But what does it matter? I love you. You are the first who… You don’t understand, you don’t understand anything…”
It was the first time Gilles had been in front of a woman at one of those moments when she is never so sincere as when she lies. A woman’s sincerity in denying past events is incomprehensible to the man who benefits from it. The woman is a great, powerful realist; she believes in facts, she is entirely in the facts, in the present facts. For her, the past can be strong, imperious, crushing, but only until the present demands greater love; then the past is suddenly abolished.
Gilles repeated his stupid indictment:
“You’ve already slept with men, you’ve already said: I love you.”
“Never,” cried Mabel desperately.
“You lie.”
She was lying and she wasn’t.
“I love you,” she repeated tirelessly, with a hope that still impressed him.
He wanted her to be a whore because he wanted to get rid of her. He wanted to get rid of her because she wasn’t rich enough. That was the feeling he had felt on entering and which was finally working its way through his subconscious: he had been disappointed on entering the apartment, he had sensed a lower state of fortune than the one he had imagined, admired and, moreover, not coveted at the hospital nor at the tea dance, as if it were mixed with too much frivolity. He was terribly angry with her for not being able to use her extraordinary qualities to make up for the mediocrity of the material fate she had opened up for him.
All the while, Mabel continued to protest.
“Gilles, you don’t love me any more. You think I’m a slut. But if you knew… I was waiting for you.”
She was writhing, unable to express herself; she was breaking against a ferocious condemnation.
Gilles reveled in his stern expression.
“How many were there? Were they idiots, gigolos? Were they at least good-looking? But you’re not even sure? You wanted to have fun.”
Mabel grabbed onto that.
“Yes, you understand… But I didn’t love them. They disappointed me terribly. I left them, I couldn’t go on.”
“You left them. So there were a lot of them.”
“No!”
Mabel was hurt more at ever turn by a cruel trap. She groaned.
“If you only knew how unhappy I was.”
“No, you weren’t. You were cheerful and full of zest. I saw it.”
Yes, she was. But Mabel, now, was unhappy. And her present unhappiness erased all those light, playful, bouncy disappointments.
“You didn’t like them and you slept with them.”
She was so disoriented that she could not help but to fall into all the clumsiness Gilles dictated and imposed on her.
“I liked them a little,” she stammered. Gilles chuckled with delight.
“Ah, all the same. The truth is, you liked them, you loved them… Which didn’t stop you from leaving them.”
Gilles had not lost his senses to such an extent that he didn’t see the contradictions in his rage. In a man who reasons against a woman at such a time, there always appears a pedant, a monstrously fastidious prosecutor. He embodied the dilemma he railed against.
“Let’s see. Did you love them or not? If you didn’t, you were a whore; if you did, you were an even more of a dumb slut.”
“I don’t know,” Mabel sobbed, her spasms the same as those of vomiting.
The next day, Gilles thought he was still in the same frame of mind he’d left Mabel. How could he have spent twenty-four hours dreaming all those dreams about that vulgar, empty girl? In any case, it was over. And Myriam wasn’t lost. Oh, no, Myriam wasn’t lost. She was precious, and unique.
After all, Mabel should have been played with, just like the girls. He laughed at himself for stirring up this thunder and lightning. Do you also have the idea of worshipping as your future wife the first girl you meet who wants to sleep with you? You sleep with her, and that’s that. You don’t make an ideal virgin out of her and then overwhelm her with the most bombastic sarcasm. The memory of Mabel’s sobs came back to him with a sensual taste. He remembered that body among the ransacked clothes. A charming body whose hemmed and shifting thinness offered itself so well to images of pillage and defeat. The memory of contempt returned, mixed with desire.
Why not start again? He wanted her again, and more. What he had barely glimpsed, hastily traversed, he wanted to know better.
He phoned her. On the other end of the line, she was dying of relief and hope.
He returned to her home, where there was still that silence, that emptiness that now made for a disturbing complacency. He wandered through all the rooms. Still no servants. In the kitchen, he evoked with suspicious pleasure the shadow of the maids, as well as that of the mother in front of the large conjugal bed. Mabel was now, like a daughter, only an element in his innermost imagination. He didn’t care much about giving her the impression that he was her daughter; suddenly, he drew her into his bedroom. She saw it was only a whim, hated it and gave in to it all the more intoxicatingly.
Her body expressed the fury of sacrifice he had demanded of his own body in the war, as circumstances dictated, and whose counterpart he obscurely sought in love. Perhaps the soldier, who is not very strong, needs to see a woman’s body as humiliated and sore as his own.
How could she resist this hidden sadness? With delight, Mabel saw that Gilles was no longer casting indifferent glances at her; she heard vague but promising words. With the immense desire for happiness, she only reluctantly lodged sorrow; so in an instant when she thought all shadows had been erased. She cried out:
“Do you love me?”
Gilles would have liked to answer yes, but the memory of his disgust of the previous day made him scrupulous.
“Humph!”
“You don’t love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
It was only as he was leaving her that he thought of Myriam again: she was waiting for him. He looked at his watch: it was nearly nine o’clock. He had left Mabel on the pretext of having dinner with some people. Was he going to run to Myriam? There was still time.
No! He was hungry for the streets. And the bars and restaurants were deserts, populated by shining shadows. He could feel the grief in Myriam’s heart growing by the minute. It was becoming an unbearable weight, and yet every now and then his solitude was relieved, and he found a minute of irreplaceable oblivion. He didn’t even phone.
Thereafter, a sort of habit was established in Gilles’ life. He would spend two hours with Mabel, then dine with Myriam, to whom he had led to believe that he had to work at the times he had seen her before, and that he could only do so by walking and taking notes in the streets. The crudeness of the lie was unforgivable, and he promised himself all the more that he would soon tell her the whole truth.
He asked Mabel about herself and her family; and quickly acquiesced the certitude that he had not been mistaken. Mr Highland was half ruined by the confiscation of his property in Turkey, where he had owned a bank. She had two sisters married in England who, because of their husbands’ mobilisation, were in difficult situations and needed help. Finally, Mr Highland was a drunkard and a gambler; he was up to some villainy in Monte Carlo.
Gilles conducted his interrogation with a frankness that would have seemed indecent to a girl less enslaved by love. It was still nice, but: “He’ll soon be completely broke and we’ll be penniless.” He could think of no way of earning money; the certainty Myriam had given him had diverted his mind from this worry which, in other circumstances, would hardly have spurred him on.
From time to time he still indulged the idea that he might abandon his destiny to Mabel, because this idea merged in his sensual imagination with that of the young woman sprawled on the beds of an abandoned flat, never quite fully naked and overwhelmed by pleasure. The dream of shared social decline embellished her and made her more desirable.
The brevity of their meetings allowed for such ambiguity, but he had eight days leave. He told Myriam that he was going to spend three days alone in the country to meditate. For her part, Mabel had her parents, who had returned from the South and with whom she had tried in vain to introduce to him, to spend three days at the house of a friend.
They went to the Trianon, in Versailles. Although it was such a short journey, the departure made an impression on Gilles; it foreshadowed a more decisive one. In the taxi carrying them and their thin suitcases, he kept looking at Mabel. She no longer resembled the girl who entered his room, each morning, at the hospital and whom he had wanted to believe was haughty. She was now just a silly, superficially elegant girl, all too easily shattered by the wrath of an excitable lover, holding up a face that was made stupid by the feeling of disaster. Gilles had instilled discouragement and despair into Mabel’s veins. She, who before had been laughing, innocent, kindly given over to her light appetites, was now like a ruined girl, with no future, who would never find a husband, doomed no doubt to gallantry. Gilles had ruined and disgraced her and it seemed to her that Gilles was her only salvation. She told herself that if she didn’t marry him, she would never marry anyone else. The terror of losing him made her loss a sure fact.
Gilles couldn’t wait to lock himself in a room with her and make love. Since it was physical desire that kept him alone with her, he had to pull on that bond until it broke. She sensed this and gave in to it, as the dark cloud over their embrace took on fantastic proportions.
At Trianon, Mabel’s last prestige soon vanished. She had never been naked; he had always coveted her in the disarray of her clothes. Suddenly, her nakedness became confused in his eyes with the thinness of her destiny. From one minute to the next, he no longer desired her. No sooner had he been lying next to her, naked like her, than he began to talk about how tired he was. This tiredness was real, because his life was exhausting: he got up very early to go to his treatment, having gone to bed only a few hours before.
Disappointed, she respected his sleep; she watched him and enjoyed this simulacrum of life together. When he woke up, he regretted sleeping and tried to sink back into it. He succeeded for a while, then woke up completely. Mabel, now, was asleep. It was a spring afternoon and the curtains were not closed. A soft light came in with a slight wet smell. He looked at her hungrily. His curiosity was acute for this charming body that no longer spoke to him. He was no longer speaking. All his lines, which had been eloquent for a moment, had fallen silent.
It was so abrupt, so clear-cut that he wanted to try everything to see if it was definitive. He strained to contemplate what was most pleasing about this naked body. She was skinny, but her muscles, though extraordinarily thin, were well developed, and over this firm texture, her delicate flesh softened the long angles everywhere. Gilles contemplated, admired, even savoured her, but only with his eyes, and he was frightened by her coldness. He suddenly had the impression that an old man’s blood was filling his heart. All his youth rebelled against this impression and roused itself to chase it away. He stirred, woke her up and hugged her. He kissed her, caressed her, he wanted to arouse desire in her so that at least this desire would be communicated to him. Things went as easily as he wanted. For a moment, the warmth returned to his heart and he drank in the illusion, but without hope.
Indeed, a moment later, he had only one idea: to flee. The idea of spending three days in this empty room, next to this empty being, filled him with an irresistible panic. He dressed abruptly and went out on some pretext. When he got downstairs, he asked for the bill, paid and handed over a brief note: “I’m off. We’ll never see each other again.” And he went for a walk in the park, which taught him a lesson about beauty combined with pride and cruelty. He was drunk with selfishness. Suddenly, he felt like going to the Austrian girl’s house and ran to the station.
After the Austrian, who was always there when he needed her, he hurried to Myriam’s house. When he saw Myriam, Gilles felt a new pleasure, but it was an anxious one, to erase the suffering he found written on her face, deeper than he had imagined. He looked at this young mark with fear, certain that it would reappear and that, through his fault, it would sink deeper. Of course, he enjoyed it as a sign of the only power he knew in life, the power over women that had been offered and imposed on his nonchalance. But the fact that this power manifested itself under such easy conditions disgusted him. He would have liked to stop the test now that it was sufficient, not to go so far as abuse.
“What’s going on?” she murmured, without looking at him.
She was buried, prostrate, in an armchair. He had never seen her so abandoned, and as luck would have it, so feminine.
Gilles listened to himself lie and saw the sure effect of his lie on Myriam’s face. So she could know nothing of Mabel’s story. He would never see that vulgar girl again and Myriam would not be so badly hurt. But wasn’t she irreparably wounded in his heart by the lie he was telling her? Why hide this from her? To hide it from her, to lie to her, was a far more serious betrayal than this affair where, all in all, she had scored points without knowing it.
He talked to her. He also wanted to talk to her about his girls. She didn’t know, she hadn’t guessed. But didn’t she have enough male classmates at the Sorbonne to know how men live? Yes, but they were numb with work and poverty. No doubt she thought he was chaste because she thought he was exceptional in everything.
It was a great relief to be with her again. He’d had a narrow escape. A terrible mediocrity had brushed past him, had threatened to devour him, the mediocrity he had known before the war, which he had accepted with such submission. He had forgotten the beautiful, studious mysticism of that time.
In contrast, Myriam shone with a renewed and magnificent brilliance. He listened to her talk with great delight. She was full of intelligence. However stiff that intelligence was, it was something. The light from her face spread throughout her body. He noticed again that she had a ravishing bosom.
But instead of taking hold of her, he only rejoiced at the idea that these two round, delicate breasts would be the foundation of their union when they were married. He did not touch her. Myriam, who could feel her fortunes returning, rejoiced shyly. She was taken back by this delicious numbness that she thought was enough for her. What a terrible silence of the flesh there was between them. Was she suffering from it? He looked at her with a little more curiosity and concern than before. Who was she? What was she feeling?
