Debrye
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.
“The Revolution in Europe would be easier if the proletariat had before them only one bourgeoisie, only one militarism, only one oppression.”
Having said that, Debrye laughed. He had sharp little teeth that Gilles didn’t like. Gilles preferred the square jaw, which, in passing, showed teeth modelled by a skillful and tormented hand.
He had met his old classmate from Sorbonne in the street. They hadn’t seen each other since July 1914. So, for the last two hours, they had been talking with abandon, all the while winding randomly through the cobblestone streets and alleys.
Gilles asked him abruptly:
“Have you ever wondered whether this ideology is born of fear?”
He stopped and looked at Debrye with anxiety. He didn’t want to insult him, much less make an error of judgment. This man had undoubtedly been as frightened as Gilles himself had been; but his defeatist activity, more and more pronounced, was creating for him another risk. So he hastily added:
“Let me explain… What I want to say is…”
“Why shouldn’t I take fear into account?”
“I wouldn’t like it if you didn’t realise that fear is a definite element in your feelings about war. I abhor ideologies that start from an unknown fact of sensibility.”
Debrye looked at Gilles with the sympathetic, amused curiosity, containing a slight hint of regret, that he had occasionally shown him at the Sorbonne. He considered Gilles Gambier to be a fine mind, but too seduced by ideas and whimsy.
“But you, Sir, build your whole system against fear. I say to myself: fear is a natural instinct that reveals evil. Evil. I’m afraid of war because war is an evil for mankind.”
Gilles stopped, amazed. He had never considered Courage as anything but positive. He continued:
“Have you ever wondered whether your ideology legitimizes, not fear, but… how shall I put it?… laziness, incapacity…? Yes, there you have it, quite an incapacity. You’re not athletic, you don’t know how to do anything with your body.”
“Sorry, I…”
“You have to admit, it doesn’t go very far. Modern man is an awful decadent. He can no longer make war, but there are many other things he can no longer do. Yet, with his infatuation, his ignorant arrogance, he condemns what he can no longer do, what he can no longer bear. It’s like art. He became a scientist because he can no longer be an artist.”
“Fine art, this war.”
“Ah, there you go,” exclaimed Gilles with a sigh, “We can very well say that war has become so ugly that man has the right to reject it. And yet…”
He stopped. The other gestured for him to finish. He noticed that the delicate crease in Gilles’ mouth had became a contemptuous scowl.
“And yet war, however disfigured, remains a necessity. You are a revolutionary. Revolution is still war.”
Gilles scowl had faded; his eyes were shining. Debrye gave him another amused look. Then an image, a memory passed before the defeatist’s eyes. His jaw twitched uneasily:
“I’m scared. I’ve been crushed by fear since August 1914.”
Gilles looked at his friend. Because this man who was saying these miserable things was his friend. And a man worthy of friendship. At the Sorbonne, a brilliant student, he fascinated his teachers and fellow students with his hunger for authority, a hunger that was immediately satisfied, because men give themselves to whoever wants to take them. In this case, their easy gift took on greatness, because Debrye gave them so much in return. He had quick, even hasty views which became incisive thanks to the strength of resolve with which he confirmed them. On top of that, he had irony, sarcasm and a lightning awareness of all that is unspeakable, false and unforgivable in even the most generous relationships. Gilles also loved him for his gifts and for the irony that seemed to guarantee his humanity. He had prepared to lose him the day Debrye embarked on political action. That time was approaching.
Gilles returned to the first point of their debate:
“You will turn Europe, through Germany’s victory, into a huge Ireland where nationalist feelings will be strengthened, exasperated and consecrated by persecution.”
He thought that if you refuse one fight, you can only start another. There is no escaping the law of combat, which is the law of life. In war, he had found an unforgettable revelation that set down in a luminous tableau the first articles of his faith: man exists only in combat, man lives only if he risks death. No thought or feeling has any reality unless it is experienced through the risk of death.
He said again:
“You’re against war, but you’re for revolution. But revolution is war.”
To Gilles’ astonishment, now Debrye nodded in acquiescence.
“Yes, but another kind of war. Civil war.”
Civil war, tell me about that. There you know your enemies.”
“Oh, there are distinctions to be made between the bourgeoisie and the Germans.”
“They’re not as tough.”
“Do you think so? Do you believe the distinction was made in 1793, or during the Commune?”
Gilles expressed amused outrage.
“The goal of war is always peace… through the extinction of the enemy. It is this peace that lies at the end of your revolution just as well as my war.”
Debrye, annoyed, broke off and fell back:
“You’re too scared to be scared. It so happens that, for our generation, war is our first experience of life. You’re afraid of not responding generously. So here you are, building a philosophy of life on resistance to colic.”
Gilles remained silent. He was definitely interested in this analysis of himself that he had been unable to carry out. Contemplative as he was, Gilles always, at a given moment, thought of giving up the fight to consider the new element of knowledge it brought him. However, his hostility to the other’s sensibility remained undiminished.
Debrye was not in good health, this was the essential source of Gilles’ resentment against him. He had been in the rear for a long time, then he had been a stretcher-bearer somewhere. Now he was discharged: Gilles was suffering from not being at the front, from not being dead. Only death could separate him from this race of revolting, grimacing slaves. He looked at Debrye, at the place where they were, with a look that separated him completely from it, like a knife blade. Debrye was slightly stooped. He was in civilian clothes, dressed in an industrious negligee where a few remnants of the ultra-intellectual but stuffy bourgeois he had been before mobilisation, when he wore gaiters and a monocle, still came through in his new assignment. For some time, his pacifism had brought him into line with the socialists; then, under his fairly well-cut jacket, there was a square, black knitted waistcoat with two rows of buttons, like those worn by laundress boys or milkmen at the time. This rue Raynouard, which they walked endlessly in both directions, this narrow, tortuous rue Raynouard, seemed to Gilles to be slyly slipping away into the horizon. They passed Balzac’s little house. He and Stendhal and a few others had accepted, if not praised, violence without ignoring its horrific aspects, difficult for a civilised neurotic to bear. They had written lucid pages on war.
Gilles wanted to leave Debrye. “I want to leave Debrye just as I want to leave Myriam. I refuse this whole world. War is my homeland.” It was his sure solitude. But he lingered. It had been months since he had spoken with an intelligent man, with a mind whose refinement flattered his own. Finally, he said goodbye, thinking to himself: no, this is adieu.
As their hands untied, Gilles felt a scruple of retrospection.
“What if we’d been at each other’s sides on the front?”
Debrye looked at Gilles, without seeming to understand.
“If I had seen you put your defeatism into practice?”
“If they hadn’t made me a stretcher-bearer, I’d have refused to fire a gun.”
“And me, what would I have done?”
Debrye watched Gilles with his amused, slightly mocking expression.
“My dear, don’t make yourself out to be meaner than you are.”
“I’d have shot you”, declared Gilles with effort, turning red in the face.
Debrye burst out laughing.
“No, you are far too gentle.”
And he left.
Gilles remained disconcerted. Then he became indignant.
When he arrived at Myriam’s house for dinner that evening, something new happened: she had a friend who had stayed, it seemed, to make his acquaintance. Myriam had told Gilles about her several times.
Ruth was not beautiful, which disappointed Gilles. He could not yet hear talk of a woman without hope. But he was flattered by Ruth’s curiosity. Gilles was sure that Myriam had not spoken openly about their marriage plans to her friend. But she had allowed her plans to be deduced.
The presence of a witness brought a warmth to the room that they had never felt before. Gilles was more cheerful and brilliant than he had ever been. It was thanks to these two young Jewish girls who caressed his spirit.
He was full of Debrye and talked about him the entire time. To Myriam’s great surprise, who had expected him to scorn her friend, he wanted Ruth to have dinner so that he could talk to her again. Herself excited, Myriam was not disappointed to see the walls where their affair had been so terribly claustrated torn down.
He drew a long and detailed portrait of Debrye.
“Why didn’t you bring him to dinner?” asked Ruth.
Gilles was taken aback by this simple, guileless question. He blushed, feeling guilty; he hadn’t wanted to show Myriam to Debrye and reveal to him the criminal secret of his life. “And yet I’ll have to reveal this secret to the world.”
Ruth sensed something of all this, but like Myriam she interpreted it with a taste for secrecy. She couldn’t imagine anyone being ashamed of a girl whose intelligence, wealth and luminous figure she herself admired in equal measure.
“How you admire that Debrye!” exclaimed Ruth again.
“Yes, it’s scary,” added Myriam.
It was a day of many surprises for Gilles.
“How can you admire him so much?” she continued. “He said he’d never touch a gun. And he’s been able to do so because he’s protected by people he’s impressed.”
“Yes…” Gills murmured.
Ruth exclaimed:
“How right he is, that Debrye.”
She stopped dead in her tracks, thinking of Myriam’s brothers and seeing Gilles frown.
“He would certainly find the occasion to be killed on another battleground.”
“But the unprotected workers are being killed in that battle, in the meantime.”
“The peasants more like.” corrected Gilles, looking at Myriam with pride
She knew and loved his innermost thoughts, bringing them back to him, clarifying them for him when he forgot. Perhaps there was a little malice in this vigilance.
She sensed this and added:
“You’re afraid to throw your books in his face, I understand that. I’d be ashamed to throw my brothers at him.”
Ruth admired their entente.
She spoke of her brother, who was a doctor at the front, and of his great friend, a certain Clérences, Gilbert de Clérences, who was an interpreter in the English army and would soon be visiting on leave.
“You must meet him, he’s a brilliant man.”
The three of them chatted late into the night.
Myriam and Gilles were very animated. But Gilles kept thinking about Debrye, and when he was alone with Myriam, everything that had been brewing inside him exploded.
“I needed a conversation like the one I had with Debrye,” he began, “I haven’t had one in a long time.”
“Yes,” replied Myriam unsuspectingly, still revelling in the pleasure of having shown Gilles to Ruth.
This spurred Gilles on:
“Yes, a frank and brutal conversation.”
Cheerful, she still felt the desire to be spiteful.
“But…”
“What?”
“In what way were you brutal? You still haven’t told him, from what you’ve recounted, what you think of him…”
“How so?”
“You didn’t tell him he was a cheat.”
Gilles shrugged.
“That’s true, I didn’t. But I told him that, given the occasion, at the front, I would have shot him.”
“Yes, that’s true. It’s more or less the same.”
“Just about. But you’re right, I should have told him.”
Gilles was easily thrown off balance in a discussion; that day Myriam had noticed this clearly.
“But that’s not the point…” he continued.
He looked at her with a hardened face.
“Tell me…”
“I felt I was mistaken to come to Paris.”
Myriam flinched and looked at Gilles with a timid reproach. She was shocked that this comment should have come back to her, as the aftermath of a discussion, through the accident of an encounter.
“Is that so! Really, Debrye is the last person you…”
She stopped herself.
If she had suspected the miserable pretexts Gilles sometimes made for himself: a view of the newsreel at the cinema, the emphatic article of a patriotic journalist, a phrase from a book, all this as well as the modest sight of a soldier stealing away to again join the front lines…
“I am not who you think I am,” he murmured.
For some time, he had been behaving more or less conventionally, he had wanted to be faithful to his decision to rest at the rear, and had resisted the complaints, the velléités, the nostalgic indulgences. “As long as I want Myriam more than the War, I might as well spare her my regret.” But tonight he was bursting, he wanted to cede to that which was stirring inside him, under the pretext of war, to give into it unhesitatingly, voluptuously.
Myriam, feeling the approach of danger, mused. “Men are much more concerned about other men than they are about women. All it took was for him to see one of his friends and… It’s true, he’s the only one left, the others have been killed: that also explains his emotion. I love him so much. He’s right to give more importance to men. But women… oh, how I wish I could earn his interest. I need to work, to think. I’m so confused, so clumsy… but what is he saying? He wants to hurt me, he’s hurting me.”
Gilles spoke:
“I’m not who you think I am; I’m a liar. My first instinct is always to lie. I resist it sometimes, but not always…”
Suddenly he remembered Mabel.
“You lied to me? When?”
“Yes… Recently, I had a woman, a young girl, oh… well, a woman.”
“And?”
Myriam was still hoping that Gilles was exaggerating a scruple, as he had sometimes pretended to do.
“I slept with her.”
The contours of her clear, beautiful face contracted. Everything that youth and purity had masked appeared; something fragile, her strong mouth held too weakly, her face too large. Great tears flowed from her wide dark eyes, making them appear even bigger. She was helpless, infinitely at his mercy. The coward, he was more brutal with her than he had been with Debrye. He threw himself on top of her, taking her in his arms.
This immediately brought Myriam perfect consolation. Not thinking for a second of pushing him away, she clung to him. Crying, instinctively taking advantage of the situation, however abominable it was, she sought his mouth. He eagerly gave it to her.
“Oh, to make her happy. I’m bound to her forever. The first soul to fall under the hand. And one is bound. You can’t wound a soul to death.”
But the carnal voice, which doesn’t deceive itself, which doesn’t put up with any pretence, which sticks inexorably to its decisions fixed from all eternity, shouted inside him: “What is this clumsy, stupid mouth to me? She has big lips like I like them, and yet they seem thin compared to mine.”
But she was babbling:
“Why? How? Who?”
Every detail of the confession seemed particularly cruel and impossible. If he told her she was his nurse, all the good times she’d had in hospital would be tarnished.
“A girl, a young girl.”
“Who was it?” insisted the plaintive voice.
“I met her on Avenue du Bois, and some people introduced me to her.”
The lie comes back to you, with the tempting face of pity.
“But why? What does she have?”
And brusquely, violently:
“Are you still seeing her? Did you see her today?”
Gilles was pleased with his response:
“No, I don’t see her anymore, it didn’t last more than… two or three days.”
“But why?”
“No reason.”
“What? Did you love her? Explain to me…”
“No, I never liked her. I loathed her. She’s an idiot; she’s pretty, but…”
“Ah!…”
She continued to cry.
“Her stupidity made her ugly.”
“But…”
“I wanted to do something that would separate us.”
“What?”
“Yes, I’m not who you think I am. I’m afraid I don’t love you… enough. I’m afraid of… of loving you for your money.”
Suddenly, Myriam’s face lit up. Gilles bit his lip. Once again, his attempt at sincerity had turned into skill. Everything would always work to his advantage, he was playing on the velvet with this little girl.
After crying for a while, she hugged him and whispered something:
“Why don’t you have sex with me?”
What? Have sex? She wanted to sleep with him. He grabbed her mouth to stop her from speaking any further. Then, in a panic, he blurted out:
“We have to get married.”
“Oh! Yes.”
He left much more the cynic than he had arrived. He paid a visit to the Austrian, his favourite whore. Her skin was as brilliant as satin. Her curved breasts were set very low. Her loins sinuously curved, so long that you thought she should have had very short legs. But not at all: her legs were never-ending. This woman was never-ending. With her, there was total silence, and he returned to his deepest thoughts. He seized her with an authority he had never shown before. As he caressed her slowly, he concealed his melancholy with the tender smile of the friend who knows her every preference.
Later, however, the Austrian dreamt aloud.
“You know why I like you? Because you don’t talk. The others, the idiots, have nothing to say, so they talk. You think. That scares the hell out of me. It’s like making love to a cat. And you’re a man, my pussy… You’re so sad. No. Ah, stay, stay.”
But he went away, smiling absent-mindedly.
