LOUIS GUILLOUX (1899–1980) was born in Brittany, where he would spend most of his life. His father was a shoemaker and a socialist. At the local high school, he was taught by the controversial philosopher Georges Palante, who would serve as inspiration for the character of Cripure in Blood Dark. Guilloux worked briefly as a journalist in Paris, but soon began writing short stories for newspapers and magazines, and then published his debut novel, La Maison du peuple, in 1927. During World War II, his house was a meeting place for the French Resistance; on one occasion it was searched by the Vichy police and Guilloux was taken in for questioning. Following the war, he was an interpreter at American military tribunals in Brittany, and the incidents of racial injustice that he witnessed in the American army would form the basis of his 1976 book OK, Joe. In addition to his many novels—including Le Pain des rêves (1942) and Jeu de patience (1949)—Guilloux also translated the work of Claude McKay, John Steinbeck, and several of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories.

LAURA MARRIS’s recent translations include Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House and, with Rosmarie Waldrop, Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan and Other Poems. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.

ALICE KAPLAN is the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University. She is the author of Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, The Collaborator, Dreaming in French, and French Lessons: A Memoir. Kaplan’s book The Interpreter explores Guilloux’s experience as an interpreter for the U.S. Army courts-martial in Brittany in the summer of 1944. She is also the translator of Guilloux’s novella OK, Joe, which inspired her research for The Interpreter.

BLOOD DARK

LOUIS GUILLOUX

Translated from the French by

LAURA MARRIS

Introduction by

ALICE KAPLAN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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Copyright © 1935 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris

Translation and note on the translation copyright © 2017 by Laura Marris

Introduction copyright © 2017 by Alice Kaplan

All rights reserved.

Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français.

This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.

This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

Cover image: Leon Golub, Blue Sphinx, 1988; © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Guilloux, Louis, 1899–1980, author. | Marris, Laura, 1987– translator.

Title: Blood dark / by Louis Guilloux ; translated by Laura Marris.

Other titles: Sang noir. English

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2017008649 (print) | LCCN 2017026714 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371467 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371450 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. | France—History—1914–1940—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / War & Military. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

Classification: LCC PQ2613.U495 (ebook) | LCC PQ2613.U495 S313 2017 (print) | DDC 843/.912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008649

ISBN 978-1-68137-146-7

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

CONTENTS

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

A Note on the Translation

BLOOD DARK

Notes

INTRODUCTION

THERE are no trenches, no German submarines, no gas attacks in Blood Dark, yet Louis Guilloux’s epic novel ranks among the most powerful French depictions of the First World War. By 1935, when it was published, suffering on the front line had already produced a series of classics: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire and Maurice Genevoix’s ’Neath Verdun (1916); Blaise Cendrars’s I’ve Killed (1918); Roland Dorgelès’s Wooden Crosses (1919). Guilloux’s contribution was different. As an adolescent in provincial Brittany, he had seen war reach behind the front and penetrate civilian populations and institutions; in Blood Dark he set out to create a war literature of the home front, a toxic zone where rumors do battle with the truth and witch hunts are carried out in the name of patriotism.

Blood Dark takes place on a single day in 1917, in a town recognizable as Guilloux’s native Saint-Brieuc, population twenty-four thousand, perched on the north coast of Brittany. The war has reached a low point after the debacle at the Chemin des Dames, and the American doughboys are still nowhere in sight. Patriotism has grown hollow; for some young people, revolutionary Russia is becoming a source of hope. Into a classical frame—unity of time and of place—Guilloux sets a riotous cast of some twenty main characters whose destinies combine and reverberate in a series of short episodes. He finds a way, through this form, to explore the effects of the war on an entire community and to delve deeply into the consciousness of one flawed individual who is both a spiritual guide and a living symptom of the society in disarray.

This guiding light or rather guiding shadow of the novel is an unhinged teacher of high-school philosophy named Charles Merlin, nicknamed Cripure by his students—a play on Kant’s CRItique of PURE Reason. He is in charge of teaching ethics to the draft-aged boys, young men condemned to spin the wheel of fortune on the front. Guilloux’s portrait of Cripure was inspired by a teacher and mentor of his own, the eccentric philosopher Georges Palante (1862– 1925), though Guilloux once said that Cripure was derived from Palante—a starting point for his fiction, rather than a model. Like Palante, Cripure is a renegade from the Sorbonne, a man of broken friendships and a failed marriage, sharing his bed with an uneducated housekeeper, the affectionate, saintly Maïa, who dispenses level-headed wisdom inflected with Gallo, the local dialect of eastern Brittany. And like Palante, Cripure is disabled in the cruelest way, with huge, deformed feet that make it difficult for him to walk. At one point, the town boot-maker shows off Cripure’s shoes to a visiting circus director, who wants to hire him: But when the circus manager had learned that the owner of those astonishing boots was a professor, and of philosophy! He’d simply shrugged and changed the subject.

The action of the novel revolves around a few signal events: a schoolboys’ plot to unbolt the front wheel of Cripure’s bicycle; a Legion of Honor ceremony at the local school, now partly transformed into a military hospital; rioting soldiers at the train station who don’t want to return to the front; Cripure’s aborted duel with his colleague Nabucet; and the adventures of an even larger cast of characters that includes draftees, antiwar students, amorous spinsters, hypocritical school officials, and pedophiles; slick politicians and young men on the make; a revolutionary leaving for Russia, an amputee, and a couple learning of their son’s execution for mutiny at the front.

Guilloux’s fiction touches on issues that are still matters of great contention among French historians of the Great War: To what extent was there a consensus about the fighting? What was the nature of the mutinies that broke out as the war dragged on? Did they occur at random or were they part of a deep current of antiwar sentiment? Soldiers in transit demonstrating at train stations, individual deserters, fomenters of revolt on the front were all in some sense mutineers, and their numbers add up to a few thousand or to tens of thousands—depending on your definition of mutiny. What is clear is that antiwar sentiment, moral exhaustion, and episodes of disobedience flourished in the summer of 1917, the summer of Blood Dark.

The best-known scene in the novel is certainly the riot at the Saint-Brieuc train station. Guilloux has a genius for portraying chaos and for letting us see the drama of the individuals inside a crowd. He doesn’t spare his readers a close-up of one of the men disfigured by trench warfare—a gueule cassée, or broken face. For his novel to begin in a carnival of cruelty and end in tenderness is one of its great achievements. Cripure, impossible to categorize by any of our literary labels—hero, victim, genius, idiot, madman, muse—is another.

•

Albert Camus considered Blood Dark one of the few French novels to rival the great Russian epics. "I know of no one today who can make characters come alive the way you do," he wrote to Guilloux in 1946. Guilloux, Camus said later, was uniquely attuned to the sorrow of others, but he was never a novelist of despair.

Camus was only one of many French writers at the forefront of literary life in the 1930s and ’40s who considered Blood Dark a masterpiece. Louis Aragon said that Cripure was the Don Quixote of bourgeois ruin; André Gide said that the novel had made him lose his footing. On the left, Guilloux’s contemporaries understood Blood Dark as an important political response to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s nihilistic Journey to the End of the Night, published three years earlier. The truth of this life is death, Céline wrote in Journey, and Guilloux responded: It’s not that we die, it’s that we die cheated. The publisher used that line on a paper band around the book cover. For French intellectuals in the 1930s, there was a crucial difference between Céline and Guilloux: Both writers denounced the patriotic lies that lead men to their deaths, but for Céline the violence of man to man was inevitable, biological. Guilloux, by contrast, held out hope for fraternity and for collective struggle. In his world, and in his fiction, there were always causes worth fighting for, always zones of tenderness.

When Blood Dark missed winning France’s biggest literary prize, the Goncourt (just as Journey to the End of the Night had missed it in 1932), Guilloux’s fellow writers, among them Gide, Dorgelès, and Aragon, as well as Paul Nizan and André Malraux, protested by organizing a public meeting to laud his vision and underline his blazing critique of war and human hypocrisy.

Literary historians of existentialism have argued that Blood Dark launched the notion of the absurd well in advance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, and Camus’s The Stranger. Yet Guilloux is often dismissed as a regionalist. In fact he was a transnational writer at a time when many of his contemporaries were taken up with ingrown literary rivalries. Just before beginning to work in earnest on Blood Dark, he translated Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, rendering black American English in vibrant Caribbean slang—a Creole of his own making, adapted for French readers. Guilloux’s notebooks make clear that more than a realist, he was a voice writer, testing dialogues and send-ups of bourgeois language, recording conversations, and compiling lists of idioms and ridiculous expressions. The black English in Home to Harlem surely inspired Maïa’s Gallo-speak. Guilloux read well beyond the French canon, translating Steinbeck and McKay, on the one hand, and drawing inspiration from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on the other.

Blood Dark is still considered a masterpiece in France, but in English the book remains little known. Part of the problem is its first translation. Samuel Putnam’s version, titled Bitter Victory, appeared in simultaneous American and British editions shortly after the original French publication. A former expatriate, a columnist for The Daily Worker, and a translator of Rabelais and Cervantes, Putnam saw in Guilloux’s novel a condemnation of the bourgeois culture that had made the war. Was it he or his editors who chose Bitter Victory, a misleading title for a book set a good year before the war’s end, when no victory was in sight? Putnam translated in the mid-Atlantic style then in vogue, neither American nor English, supposedly pleasing to readers in both countries but actually quite lost at sea. As a result of this linguistic compromise, Guilloux’s most remarkable quality as a writer, his sense of each character’s unique voice, is muffled.

Part of what makes this new translation so riveting is the attention that Laura Marris has given to the novel’s distinct voices and places. As a poet, and the translator of the contemporary Breton poet Paol Keineg, Marris has immersed herself in local Saint-Brieuc culture and has studied Guilloux’s papers, attending to the voices and sense of place he captured. From its new haunting title on, she has brought Blood Dark to life for the American reader. In this centenary of the darkest year of the Great War, what truer novel to read? In one respect, Guilloux’s story could not be more contemporary: as violence and terror seep into every aspect of his characters’ lives, they try to hold the chaos of the world at bay.

—ALICE KAPLAN

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

EVEN BEFORE I began to translate Le Sang noir, I thought of Louis Guilloux as a master listener—someone with an ear for dialogue, but also for the voice of thoughts. With linguistic ability and empathy, Guilloux was capable of capturing each character’s private language of symbols and associations.

As is so often the case, what makes a book great is also what raises questions for a translator. I have done my best to preserve the contrasts between characters—Maïa’s matter-of-fact speech and Cripure’s introspective madness, Simone’s teenage wisdom and her father’s complacency, Kaminsky’s sick wonder and Madame de Villaplane’s desperation. Since so much of this novel takes place in the minds of its characters, my challenge was to render the wild mania of Guilloux’s close third-person perspective in English syntax. The beauty of certain passages creates a romantic lyricism that becomes absurd in context and generates a cyclical pattern of rising emotion undercut by reality. In the sentences themselves, the characters try to climb out of their lives and fall back against the (sometimes self-created) limitations of their situations. The more their society enforces self-consciousness and militant patriotism, the louder these thought voices become.

Because the specific place and time are so important to Guilloux’s feelings of disgusted claustrophobia—in a society Cripure calls a menagerie, while a horrific war is going on outside—the language of the translation can’t lose too much of its sense of place by sounding like it belongs in any particular English-speaking culture. The previous translation by Samuel Putnam, published in 1936, uses quite a few British English expressions (old boy and old chap or By Jove!) that now seem odd in a French setting.

This realization left me with a difficult task—creating a voice for Maïa without removing her character from its local context. In the original, she sometimes uses phrasing from Gallo, a dialect primarily from Brittany and neighboring parts of France. Unlike Breton, it is Latinate, so French speakers can understand it. Though there are very few Gallo speakers today, the dialect is older than French and mixes medieval words with more modern usage. Guilloux studied Gallo with respect, but he also knew that the average French reader would interpret this nonstandard speech as provincialism and lack of education. Perhaps this disjunction is why the author made Maïa’s character—sharp-witted, sensible, and sane—a bastion of reason in contrast to literary, tortured Cripure. Class takes place in language, but Guilloux does not privilege one voice over another. I’ve chosen to use small grammatical changes and colloquialisms to demonstrate Maïa’s background, rather than relying on any particular British or American dialect. In a few places this strategy required me to tweak a spoken idiom (keep the pig and eat the bacon, for example) when a literal translation would have been too distracting and an English equivalent too culturally marked.

These conditions also posed a problem in translating the book’s title. Le Sang noir literally means black or dark blood, an English phrase with a history of race and racism that is not intended in the French original. At first, I thought le sang noir might be an idiom related to se faire du sang noir or se faire du sang de l’encre, both meaning something like to get upset, and derived from the medieval idea of bile, one of the humors that determined angst in human character. But when I visited Saint-Brieuc and asked about the title, scholars of Guilloux’s work told me that le sang noir was an unidiomatic phrase and that sang noir was the blood of dead and wounded soldiers. Bitter Victory, the title of Putnam’s translation, was probably good marketing in 1936, but it now seems tacked on to the book, since in 1917 the characters have experienced neither the victory nor the full brunt of its bitterness. And the phrase le sang noir appears nowhere in the body of the novel.

Searching through Guilloux’s papers in the archives of the Saint-Brieuc library uncovered a slew of earlier titles Guilloux (or his publisher Gallimard) had rejected—and a literary mystery. He had considered L’indesirable (the unwanted) as a working title. Then L’education révolutionaire (a revolutionary education)—to which Louis Chevasson at Gallimard had replied, "I don’t think A Revolutionary Education is a good title, but it would be a great cartoon." Other choices were Cripure, Les chevaliers de la lune (knights of the moon), La mort dans l’ âme (death in the soul), La clé des songes (the key to dreams), Le cloporte-roi (the clopper king), La vie perdue (life lost), Ame morte (dead soul), Le secret de polichinelle (Punchinello’s secret), and Les feuilles sèches (dry leaves). But the genesis of Le Sang noir is nowhere to be found in Guilloux’s correspondence, except in a very last-minute note stating the date of the novel’s completion. This gap left me to assume that the title had come from a conversation with someone, most likely his friend Pascal Pia, a well-known editor and man of letters who had connections to Gallimard. But it didn’t get me closer to an English version.

Like Le Sang noir, Blood Dark came from a conversation with a friend—Breton poet and playwright Paol Keineg. I liked both its weirdness and the way it makes dark less adjectival and more symbolic, representing both the middle of the war and the ignorance of the town’s inhabitants who are blind when it comes to the consequences of their patriotism. Last, for a novel with a wine-soaked protagonist who embarks on many asides and long journeys through the labyrinthine town of Saint-Brieuc, I liked the echo of wine-dark. This title hints at an Odyssean allusion that is not in the original. But it is consistent with Guilloux’s ambitions, which are more modern than they first appear. It would be like him to subvert the old myth of homecoming while placing his masterpiece among the classics—a context this book deserves.

—LAURA MARRIS

BLOOD DARK

To Renée

MAÏA ENTERED with a racket of clogs. Not the slightest care for the sleeper stretched out, fully clothed on the couch, his little dogs around him—she knew that he wasn’t asleep.

What did she come in here for? Stopping in the middle of the room, she reached to open the shutters, then hesitated.

On a little side table, near an open book and a pile of grading scribbled with red ink: her workbasket. She bent down, rummaging. What was she missing? A needle? A spool of blue thread?

She didn’t know how to read, but it still bothered him to think she could see his papers. Pimply dunces! They’d found yet another way to mock him. One of them had traced across the page, in big letters: CRIPURE! My name is Merlin! Hadn’t he shouted My name is Merlin! countless times, banging his fist on the lectern? Yes. And so what? It had only made them snicker. If anything, they’d become even more determined to call him Creep . . . Creep . . . Cripure behind his back, to write his nickname on the blackboard. Filthy rabble. And it had gone on for so many years—

Maïa was still rummaging.

It was taking a while.

He didn’t want her right then, of course. But even so his hand clutched at the slut’s hip, slipped down, reached the threshold of the skirt, disappeared. He chased off the little dogs, pulled Maïa closer. The workbasket tipped, buttons rolling. Maïa put down the newspaper—which she folded into a policeman’s hat and wore for doing the housework—and climbed onto the couch without a word.

He threw himself at her as though scaling a high wall, with a hoarse but affected shout, his eyes still closed, thinking, Why? Why? Why?

Mireille, the pretty spaniel, tugged on a panel of upholstery, growling. Turlupin, with plaintive howls, bounced around the room. Petit-Crû yapped, in his shrill, panicked voice; fat Judas wandered, a blind black ball.

That do it? said Maïa.

He sat up. She slid to the floor. Cripure kneeled on the couch, thighs naked, fists pressed into a cushion, and began to insult her, scarlet-faced. He couldn’t stop himself.

You’ve tumbled in every haystack in the country . . .

Why bring it up? Case closed, finished. That had only lasted for a little while anyway—she’d gotten married, been widowed. Since then she had only been with him and Basquin. But Basquin—she’d met him first. And so what, hadn’t he told her a hundred times that it was precisely because she’d done it for money—not worth busting your skull to figure that out!

Want some more, kitty cat?

You’re disgusting.

She didn’t insist.

It was strange that he hadn’t yet told her to go find forty sous in his waistcoat pocket, since that was usually his first insult—her price, forty sous—

She helped him readjust his clothes. Passive as a child, he let her do it.

Filth—

She didn’t flinch.

Hadn’t she heard all about that night, at the brothel, when he insulted a girl who was coming back from her room, client in tow? He’d rushed at her. He wanted her right then and there. It excited him, he said, to think she’d just done it. They had a hell of a time calming him down, but in the end, he hadn’t wanted the girl anymore, and he’d left. There are men like that, thought Maïa. It meant little to her that in leaving the brothel, Cripure had muttered strange threats about the officers, leading those who witnessed the scene to think he was drunk or maybe crazy.

He finally quieted, stretched out. Maïa picked up her hat, righted the workbasket. One by one, the little beasts jumped on the couch and settled around him again. He reached out a hand to pet them.

Maïa returned to her housework. Cripure could hear her coming and going, pushing the broom, clomping in front of the sink. Upstairs, Amédée was getting dressed. He kept walking back and forth across the attic where they had made him a bedroom. The loud steps right over his head exasperated Cripure.

He consoled himself that this was the last day. Tomorrow this penance would be over. But right away he was guilty of an inhuman thought: Wasn’t it actually today that Amédée was returning to the front? If he had coped for five long days, he could certainly put up with him for another few hours . . .

Of course, in that house (which, with a bourgeois affectation, he called rustic, though in this case, the word was apt) it was pretty hard to put a guest anywhere but the attic. This little house, which Maïa had inherited when her husband died, consisted of only two rooms—the study where Cripure was sprawled at that moment and, beside it, the kitchen, which also served as a bedroom. And above, the attic (half storage, half garret) where Amédée continued to make so much noise with his foot soldier’s boots. But he would go out soon, probably to meet up with some barmaid.

Thank God Cripure could go late to school this morning. An hour of class—ethics, for third years (those urchins!). And then this afternoon, that party . . . What a bore.

He sighed, opened his eyes, confirmed with pleasure that the shutters were closed. Somewhere in the neighborhood a military unit was training, endlessly repeating the same formation. Fine! Fine! All that was their business. Love for one and all! They needed a God to come and teach them to love, but they learned to hate all by them-selves . . . Fine!

Cripure sat himself back down on his couch and the little beasts stirred, wagging their tails, but as he stopped moving and closed his eyes, they became still again.

Not much would change the day he stretched out, just like this, in his coffin. What difference would it make? Nothing missing but the little voice in his head, so vain, so obsessive, that he pompously called his thoughts, nothing missing but the coward’s angst that clutched his heart—

He had undoubtedly drunk and eaten a little more than was sensible on the way home from his cottage last night. He had gone straight to bed, but sleep had been slow in coming. Recently, the nights he’d once loved for their silence and their peace had nothing to offer him except lingering anxiety. When he couldn’t sleep, he was afraid. The slightest creak of a floorboard—he would jump out of bed, his heart pounding. Maïa lay next to him sleeping, alas dreamless, leaden.

Last night, he had barely closed his eyes, hearing, until late, the chorus of Russian soldiers billeted close by.[1] Then, as so often happened, he heard the Clopper.[2]

At night, the Clopper, who hid by day—nobody knew what he did with his time—would make the incredible effort to don his frock coat, to climb down his stairs or rise out of his cave. He would appear in the streets, sidling along the edges of the walls like a marauder. Clop! Clop! Clop! The Clopper announced himself, dragging his paw, and with every step the iron tip of his cane slammed the stones of the sidewalk, echoing like a cracked bell. He paused, sometimes for a while, leaning on his cane, chin in hand, for such a long time that Cripure thought he was gone. But—clop! clop! clop! And once again the night resounded with the solemn beat of his steps.

Why did he come back so often? Why to my street? That night, Cripure had gotten up cautiously, had opened the window a crack: gaslights in the silence. It wasn’t easy to spot that silhouette in the shadows, and it was even harder to stop searching for it. He’d waited a long time to see that morsel of night sliding along the walls—he’d sometimes watched until dawn. Clop! Clop! Clop! Still nothing but steps, nothing but a ubiquitous presence ready to spring from the walls. The iron tip of the cane had rung out against the stones, triumphal, like the halberds of Swiss Guards on holy days. Then nothing.

Cripure had stuck his head out: standing under the lamp, the Clopper was still as a saint in his niche. Around his bowler hat, the gaslight blazed like a stained-glass halo. Chin in the palm of his left hand, the other hand resting on his cane—what a perfect target. The day—the night—would come when Cripure would fire his revolver and—tac! tac! would settle his score. It would make so little noise, maybe just a little clicking of the hammer or the trigger. It would be more like crunching a flea under his fingernail. Just like that, the earth would be cleansed of the Clopper forever.

After the Clopper left, Cripure had gone back to bed, then slept—how?—but his sleep was laced with nightmares. Then came a furtive presence—a woman murmured in his ear: What is there to cry about? Who? Who was she? An instant after waking, he’d understood that his nocturnal visitor was Toinette, whose arrival he continued to hope for, even in the abyss of dreams, as he had hoped these twenty years. Toinette whom he had never heard from again, what had become of her, out there? Maybe she was a female clopper, like the woman who had wandered the streets of the town for years, humming airs from operettas, a horrible hunchback always leading a little dog, yellow and haggard, on a leash.

He had been tempted to pick up the book at his bedside, but thought better of it—the Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, no less!

He stretched out a hand to stroke the head of one of the little dogs, Mireille, his favorite.

Sweet little creatures!

But it wasn’t wise to trust them too much, either, even the little dogs. They could also betray! Stories for kids often had those faithful dogs who followed the fortunes of their masters to the point of starvation. Yes. But he had read in the police log about a man who killed himself and was immediately gobbled up by his faithful companion.

The attic door slammed and Amédée’s huge treads battered the staircase, heavy, like those of a man who finishes getting dressed while walking, buttoning his belt or his jacket. What farm-boy steps! The whole house shook.

His son went into the kitchen; Cripure peeked through the glass door. Amédée was joyfully giving orders to Maïa, who got to work serving his breakfast. Good. No danger Amédée would come to greet him. That would be after, on his way out. Amédée would open the door a crack after knocking softly. I’m going out . . . see you later . . . They would shake hands without looking at each other.

Cripure closed his eyes, feigning sleep. He was sure that no one would disturb him. Maïa would send any visitors away. But who would visit him? In the kitchen, Amédée was chatting with Maïa while he ate breakfast. He heard their laughter and the fanfare of Maïa’s wooden clogs on the cement. Here, no one. He murmured, No one!

Surprised, irritated by his own voice, he raised his eyelids. And as though he had sought a desired, maybe dreaded presence, he cast a long uneasy glance over the room.

No one . . .

Unless some half-crazy person appeared, like the other day . . .

He’d been nice, that young lieutenant, but naive. Ultimately, that would do him in. If he wanted to believe that humanity could be . . . bettered, well, that was his business. He’d get his comeuppance, one of these days, and break his neck. Poor kid! A waste! He was gifted, of course. His best student back then. What’s more, he had a noble character. A born victim. But this victim was no lamb to the slaughter. The lieutenant had revolted; that deserved some admiration, no matter what else you might think. Cripure could understand why officials and the elderly might be conventional—but the young! The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that one young person in a thousand was incredibly blind, and the rest were consciously abetting. This one had spoken of sweeping it all away. Sweeping! Well sure . . . Cripure would love to see that. If it were only about cleansing the earth of the whole mess of swindlers and imbeciles, to empty the world of its riffraff, he would lend a helping hand. But if they would only stop coming to him, like that lieutenant, to talk about man’s triumphs over himself. Humphgarumph as Father Ubu says, that’s too ridiculous! Outrageous lies. My argument is negative. I destroy all idols, and I have no God to put over the altar. It takes a pretty substandard experience of life to believe in such nonsense. Humanitarian paradise, sociological Edens, humpf! Just wait till he’s forty and his beloved wife has cheated on him. Then we’ll talk. Tsk, tsk. In this world, it was every man for himself, to save his own skin. And triumphs? Those of one’s own making. Yes: to be the wolf.[3]

He stayed motionless, applied himself to performing sleep. But that mouth, tightened as though in anger, the chest which rose in spite of itself, the hands upturned on the goatskin like those of a corpse—this was less the posture of a sleeper than of a conscious man suffocated by sorrow. It had returned all of a sudden, as always, like an incurable disease you’re tired of monitoring, which comes back to seize you when, almost at the peak of happiness, you hoped the truce would stretch out a while longer. So it would always go! He had counted on wisdom to come with age, like a benefit or recompense, like the spiritual equivalent of the pension that the state, in the name of retirement, would furnish him for good and steadfast service. Would the sorrow that had desolated his life never take a day’s rest? Would there be time, before death, for him to take a clear look at himself and the world? This hope, once realized, would enable him to accept a death that otherwise would be no more than a theft, a shameful fraud. But the older he got, the more he told himself that he would have to renounce this hope as well, since sorrow would not relent and since, in this moment, he was gritting his teeth against the pain, which, despite all these years, was as strong as the day after the catastrophe.

It was Toinette he had loved—he could say loved!—But he’d gotten this son of his, this Amédée, from a horrible rag of a woman, a hotel slattern who wouldn’t have been worth shaking a stick at. It happened in the same year as the catastrophe, a few months after the break with Toinette, in Paris where, under the pretext of finishing his thesis on Turnier, he had taken refuge. A memorable year in every way. He had partied endlessly: drinking like a fish, spending without counting, keeping women, losing a large part of his savings at poker, and crying under the covers in sorrow and rage when he was alone at night and thinking of Toinette. And it had to be precisely that year, when he’d had his fill of so many lovely women (by paying them of course), that he’d gotten that faded little blond pregnant.

She had come in and out of his room, dusting the furniture, re-making the bed, not speaking, just barely smiling. No one knew where she came from, if she had a life, and he had been absolutely fine with knowing nothing: a slattern. Why did that day have to be so hot, why did she come to clean the room barely clothed, a thin shirt over her camisole? And the shirt itself half unbuttoned. She did it on purpose, the slut. In any case, she hadn’t resisted. She let herself be quietly taken and pushed away.

After that, he would fuck her and reject her on a whim, a cruel game in which he was, for once, doing business with a weaker party. But he had always treated her kindly, even the day she had come to announce that she was pregnant. He had given her some money, to at least get herself a decent place to sleep, and later, he had acknowledged the child. Amédée bore his last name.

She hadn’t asked for anything. Afterwards, as before, she was always unresisting and resigned to her fate, as if nothing that happened to her, not even motherhood, could rip her from a languid dream. And spontaneously, just as he was leaving Paris, he had promised to send her a monthly check.

He had kept it up for the first four years, not otherwise caring for news of his son. But towards the end of that period, he got it in his head that maybe the boy wasn’t his, that he’d been fooled again, taken like an imbecile, and that this slattern he thought was so stupid had at least had the sense to choose, from the mob of her lovers, the most idiotic—meaning him. Me! Having acquired the moral conviction that during the last four years he’d been the victim of a swindle (a point of view that also satisfied his greed), he’d stopped sending money. No complaints. The slattern didn’t even seem to perceive that the money had stopped, though she could have easily made a fuss since he had already committed the unpardonable idiocy of legitimizing this child with thirty-six fathers. With that in mind, a long silence stretched. But not forgetting.

Once the war broke out, Cripure had calculated that the slattern’s child must be old enough to get himself killed. And he had wanted to find him.

Letters sent to the old addresses had come back to him. He wrote to the mayor of the little village where the child had grown up: Amédée had already been deployed to the front for a year. A correspondence started, and it was arranged that Amédée would come see his father during his next leave. They would say he was a nephew.

Maïa had agreed.

What a ridiculous scene at his arrival! That anxious sob which had gripped his throat at the sight of the young man, and that extravagant way he’d opened his arms, shouting, Embrace me, I am your father! Would the parting scene be equally grotesque? He feared so, all the more because Amédée’s stay with him, all things considered, had been a mistake, a bitter pill. He didn’t feel so much responsibility for Amédée and the slattern. This situation was probably due in some part to indifference, and because he had not let himself forget that Amédée might not be his son.

Whether he was or not, Amédée remained a stranger. There was a reason for his rough manners, his loud feet every morning, that pipe Cripure didn’t dare forbid, even though it gave him exasperating migraines, his evident lack of education which Cripure never would have wished to criticize in someone else and which was his own fault. In Cripure’s eyes, this boy, nice but ordinary, was the living illustration of a ridiculous fate. Amédée’s presence reminded him more cruelly than ever of a time when everything had broken once and for all, when he had needed to tie himself to Toinette forever. He had lost Toinette, and today, after all these years, this unfamiliar and vulgar son sprang from another corner of the world, fell from a star, like a fragment of someone else’s destiny mixed with his own by mistake.

Someone tapped softly: Cripure barely moved, bristling nonetheless, like an animal in a trap. He raised one eyelid, an imperceptible movement, but just enough to allow him to glimpse Amédée looking like an extra who might be fired from the farce.

Are you asleep, Father?

No response. Things would go more quickly that way. The door closed as softly as it had opened.

An instant later, Amédée was outside and passing, like a shadow puppet, in front of Cripure’s blinds. So much the better. An hour of peace on the couch. Wasn’t this where he suffered best?

•

He’d thought he would get over it—that this was only an attack like all the others. But no, on the contrary, the farther along he got, the more he struggled with this sorrow he thought he had exhausted, a pain which still had so many revelations for him.

Words people said, or songs, came like arrows to target places he’d thought were forgotten in the vastness of memory. That time had stayed in him like an era all its own. Memory had its own, proliferating life. There had been many Toinettes, all passionately loved across unpredictable cascades of memories, and memories of memories. All with the same silent smile. Love was the fatal consequence of that smile, which he hoped would accompany him till the end, even though he wasn’t exempt from the anguished thought that one day everything would become not only indifferent but empty to him, that there would be nothing left of his love but the shame of no longer loving.

He foresaw it as he had always foreseen everything. Because he had predicted everything that happened to him from the moment he’d started to think seriously about marriage, which is to say he had determined it, not of course, intentionally—could someone premeditate his own ruin? But, he thought, in the sense that destinies require our stubborn collaboration to accomplish themselves, that characters play out their fates, he had determined it from the first moment Toinette deceived him; and he had set it all in motion, though he pretended otherwise. At least, he had done everything to make it believable.

But about Toinette—silence! Not a word about Toinette to anyone! Even to the point of trying to make Maïa believe that the large portrait of Toinette hanging in his study was of an aunt, and he had taken the trouble to invent a whole story about her—a total waste of course—Maïa knew perfectly well what he was doing.

That sole image on the walls of the house (except for a colored portrait of President Fallières that Maïa had cut out of the Petit Journal illustré and hung in the kitchen) was an enlargement Cripure had commissioned after, from an amateur photo he had found in his briefcase, the only one of Toinette he possessed. The others, the ones from the wedding, all the many photos from the first year, he had abandoned with the papers, the books, the memories, and the rest. Following a habit he had taken up since the engagement (like a schoolboy) of never being without a photo of her, he couldn’t help but save at least this little image of a smile from disaster. Toinette was represented from the shoulders up, hatless, her hair a little bit messy. He had taken the photo himself, just a few days before the marriage, in the course of a walk in the woods. He could tell the day, even the hour, the photo itself took hold. Hanging from the lace of her neckline was a little gold watch he had given her that very morning.

Maybe this watch was the reason he so rarely dared to raise his eyes to the portrait. The presence of the watch had eventually become intolerable to him—heavy symbol, extravagant rhetorical flourish, as if man’s destiny never expressed itself but through heavy symbolism and clumsy rhetorical flourishes! Whatever it was, he had no way to say or to will the contrary, the watch was there, black and white, nestled against the fabric with its face fixed, sealed like a tomb, the face like one of those famous watches that stop forever at the moment of accident or death.

Three twenty. At that moment, that day, he had been busy taking pictures like a lucky hairdresser’s boy with his shopgirl, like the lowest of the petty bourgeois he was, low in every sense of the word. Idiot! He had lost the prey by grabbing the shadow. And that watch face, with the two unseeing features of its hands, reminded him of what was without a doubt the most banal hour, instant of his life—the one where a man busies himself around a Kodak and gravely pronounces the order to keep still.

Toinette’s smile seemed oblivious to the presence of that watch, the way a person is blind to the presence of death once it’s upon him, alone and ignorant, in front of all the others who stand by, who see and can do nothing. Everything’s been played out. And what name do you give Chance after your chance?

Maïa reappeared. Did he want her to prepare his dressy clothes?

You’re going out to their party later?

He replied with a large, irritated frown, but his voice was astonishingly soft after the insults of a moment ago.

Their party?

She thought he was asking her. He was the one who should know . . .

That ceremony for Deputy Faurel’s wife. You still going?

She waited, standing in the doorway.

I know!

He added, in a murmur to himself, Buffoonery! The general, the bishop, the prefect, the mayor, so what, the whole menagerie would be there.

You going?

He made a face, rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers, and pushed his spectacles back in place: a tic.

What does it look like, Maïa? Of course I have to.

Then you should’ve said so. If you’re going to be all fancy, don’t it make sense to get dressed this morning? So it’ll be out the way?

Whatever you say.

And then you’ll make sure to not be late for taking Amédée to the train?

Fine.

Fine what? Fine no or fine yes?

Fine yes.

So now you’re telling me—

There’s no rush Maïa—what time is it?

Nine.

No rush—meaning I have class at eleven.

So, what’d you say? Do I fix up your dressy clothes?

Well yes, Maïa.

He would go out on the early side anyway. He would stop by the bank. Maybe see Monsieur Point, his notary. But that was none of her business. He didn’t mention it.

She opened her chest (where his scholar’s gown and hood, which she called his jack-in-the-pulpit outfit, were sealed in a hatbox) and pulled out her man’s dressy clothes: his jacket, his pants, and his waistcoat. All were carefully folded, preserved in mothballs. The smell rose, a smell he hated, which reminded him of all things familial and sad.

What a bore!

Nobody’s making you.

Poor Maïa! She didn’t understand! Of course, no one was going to come take him to this party by force. They weren’t going to send the police. But those scumbags! He knew them by heart. Dangerous rabble! Always ready to get even. And not just getting even, always ready to do harm, for the pleasure of it. She would catch on the day those asses—all Freemasons, naturally—made him leave his job, marched him out, sent him to the other side of France with a kick in the pants . . . Weren’t his assets here? The houses, the little cottage . . .

You don’t know anything about them!

Oh, I’m not scared of them. Cause if it was me instead of you, they’d be under my thumb . . .

What was the point of arguing? She didn’t know anything about anything.

She was brushing his dressy clothes. An iron was warming on the fire. Soon, she would go over the shirt, the tie. But as for the creases in the pants, there was no point in trying. With those shanks . . .

THERE were days like this when he lost his taste for vengeance. A scattering of notes in his books, material to serve his life’s work: The Chrestomathy of Despair—such was the pedantic title he thought of giving it, unless he called it Sad-Sackery or even Death to the Rats—he put it out of his mind. All of this belonged to someone else, a stranger, and the ambition to justify himself through a book? Absurd. And yet, if I had enough talent! Another question entirely. But why wouldn’t I? Talent, that means having courage, courage enough to kill yourself. By that reckoning, I’d write it—my Chrestomathy, my Apocalypse, yes, my Stuck Pig . . .

He got up, and crossed over to his desk. A note? He wrote: "If I so often cite Hoffmann, Edgar Allen Poe, Gogol, it’s not that I think the petty bourgeois life of provincials—and why not Parisians?—recalls in any way the environment of these great geniuses, unless you think about it after the fact. The thought that a thousand quotidian examples could grasp absolute reality. From that perspective, I could call my book: The Sufferings of a Petty Bourgeois, or Hoffmann Resurrected."

He thought for a moment then wrote again:

They express, in this world, the fantastical within the non-fantastic. The inverse, the reverse, the soul in turmoil. If I also often cite Flaubert with these others, it’s because that dear Gustave, who was one of them—a bourgeois—was also the first to attempt and even to achieve this portrait of the NO.

He threw down his pen. Enough work for the morning. Enough ruminating. Literature makes me shudder . . .

The doorbell: who, who could it be? At that hour of the morning, Basquin, the old couple’s only visitor, had guard duty at the camp for civilian prisoners.[4] And if it wasn’t Basquin, who could it be? A mistake maybe.

Maïa’s clogs clattered down the hallway.

Cripure came forward. I’m not home—

A sigh. He waggled his finger twice in front of his nose. Then—since he certainly couldn’t tiptoe, but with a bizarre mincing that was its equivalent—he returned to the couch and sat down, ears pricked.

Maïa was speaking. But again, with whom?

He’s sleeping, sir.

I can wait, the visitor replied.

But that’s a bother . . . and plus, he’ll maybe sleep like that till noon . . .

Too bad. I’ll wait anyway.

Where? Maïa was insolent.

Outside.

Cripure got up and took a step toward the hall, his hand cupped behind his ear. There was something familiar about that voice . . .

And who are you anyway? Maïa wanted to know.

One of his former students.

Oh you think he cares about chasing after his old students! Old or new, it’s the same difference to him, you know . . .what are you called?

Étienne Couturier.

Oh yeah? So your papa works with Master Point, the notary?

Yes, the young man quickly replied, but that’s neither here nor there. I have a note to give him . . .

For my man?

Yes.

Ok . . . give it here.

No, Madame—excuse me—I need to deliver it with my own hands.

It’s from the notary?

No Madame.

Well, that’s not unheard of, you know. So who’s it from?

A friend of mine—a monitor at the school.

Give it here.

I cannot, Madame.

Putting on airs! Maïa was angry. What did he take her for, this little sniveller? Did he think she was nobody? Good for nothing? You’ve got some nerve, she said. If that’s the way it is, you’d better clear out and come back later. And that’s that.

I promise you, Madame, this is quite necessary . . .

Quite necessary! Maïa simpered. You can’t talk like everybody else? What a little fancy-pants, ‘quite necessary!’ 

She moved to slam the door in his face, it served him right, that idiot, to teach him she wasn’t just some cleaning lady, but Cripure’s sudden voice in her ear made her whirl, furious.

Well, look who’s here!

Come now, Maïa, my little chickadee, come come . . . He had