And so I discovered within me that ‘new Weltschmerɀ denounced by Marcel Arland in an article in the Nouvelle Revue Française which had made a great stir. Our generation, as he saw it, could find no consolation for the absence of God; it was discovering, to its great distress, that apart from Him life was nothing but a series of occupations. I had read this essay a few months earlier with interest but without any particular concern; at that time I was quite happy to do without God and if I made use of His name it was only in order to designate a void which to me had all the splendour of the plenitude of grace. I still had absolutely no desire to know of His existence, and it even seemed to me that if I had believed in Him I should have detested Him. Groping my way along paths whose every twist and turn He knew, buffeted by the chance winds of His grace, petrified by His infallible judgement, my existence could only have been a stupid and pointless ordeal. No amount of sophistry could have convinced me that the Omnipotent had any need of my miserable life: or if He did, it would only be to play a joke on me. In earlier days, when the grown-ups’ amused condescension used to transform my life into a puerile piece of play-acting, I would be convulsed with rage: and today, too, I would have refused no less violently to let myself become the ape of God. If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation. His eyes gleaming with a malicious benevolence, God would have stolen everything from me – the earth, my life, other people, and my own self. I thought it great good luck that I had been able to get away from Him.
But then why was I always repeating in a desolate voice that ‘all is vanity’? In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of men. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness all around me. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plough. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and, misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite.
My poverty and my helplessness would have worried me less if I had had the least suspicion of how ignorant and narrow-minded I still was; a job of work would have made the necessary demands upon me: I could have made inquiries about one; and others would no doubt have come along. But the worst of living in a prison without bars is that you aren’t even aware of the screens that shut out the horizon; I was wandering through a thick fog, believing it to be transparent. I didn’t even know that the things I was missing were there.
I wasn’t interested in history. Apart from Vaulabelle’s book on the two Restorations, the memoirs, stories and chronicles which I had been made to read all seemed to me, like Mademoiselle Gontran’s history lessons, a jumble of meaningless anecdotes. What was happening at the present day hardly merited my attention either. My father and his friends used to talk politics without stopping and I knew that everything was in a bad way; I had no wish to poke my nose into such a gloomy mess. The problems that were bothering them – the recovery of the franc, the evacuation of the Rhineland, the airy utopias of the League of Nations – seemed to me to be of the same order as family quarrels and money troubles; they were no concern of mine. Jacques and Zaza didn’t care twopence about them; Mademoiselle Lambert never mentioned them; the NRF writers – I hardly ever read any others – never touched on them, excepting sometimes Drieu la Rochelle, though he wrote in such hermetic terms I couldn’t understand him. In Russia, perhaps, things were going on: but it was very far away. The Groups had muddled my ideas about social questions, and philosophy wouldn’t have anything to do with them. At the Sorbonne, my professors systematically ignored Hegel and Marx; in a big book on the progress of conscience in the western world, Brunschvig had devoted a bare three pages to Marx, whom he placed on the same level as one of the obscurest reactionary thinkers. He was teaching us about the history of scientific thought, but no one was teaching us about the adventure of humanity. The incomprehensible uproar going on in the world might be of interest to specialists; it was not worthy of the philosopher’s attention, for, when he had got to the point where he knew that he knew nothing and that there was nothing worth knowing, he knew everything. That is why I was able to write in January: ‘I know everything; I’ve gone all the rounds.’ The subjective idealism to which I was now giving my allegiance deprived the world of its solidity and originality: it is hardly surprising that even in my imagination I could find nothing to hold on to.
So everything was conspiring to convince me of the inadequacy of human affairs: my own position, the influence of Jacques, the ideologies I was being taught, and the literature of the period. The majority of writers kept harping on ‘our disquiet’ and offered me a despairing lucidity. I took this nihilism to its logical conclusion. All religions, all morals were shams; so was the worship of oneself. I considered – not without reason – that the fevers I had formerly so complacently whipped up were artificial, and I threw Gide and Barrès overboard. In every plan I made I suspected an escape; work became a distraction just as futile as any other. One of Mauriac’s young heroes looked upon his pleasures and his friendships as ‘branches’ supporting him precariously above the void: I borrowed this word from him. One had the right to clutch at branches, but on condition that one didn’t confuse the relative with the absolute, defeat with victory. I judged others by these standards; the only people who existed for me were those who, without cheating, looked this all-consuming nothingness in the face. All ministers, Academicians, much-decorated gentlemen, and all big-wigs I considered a priori to be barbarians. A writer ought to feel he was damned; any kind of success was suspect, and I used to wonder if the very fact of writing something didn’t imply a failure: only the silence of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste seemed to me to express with dignity humanity’s absolute despair. And so, in the name of the absence of God, I resurrected the ideal of a withdrawal from the world – a withdrawal that His existence had first inspired me to choose. But this asceticism led nowhere, gave no hope of salvation. The most honest attitude to take, after all, was to do away with oneself; I had to admit this, and I admired those who committed suicide for metaphysical reasons; yet I had no intention of resorting to suicide myself: I was far too afraid of death. When I was alone in the house, I would sometimes have to fight against my fear as I had done at the age of fifteen; trembling, with clammy hands, and feeling utterly distraught, I would cry: ‘I don’t want to die! ‘
And already death was slowly eating my life away. As I was not engaged on any sort of work, time became decomposed into instants that cancelled each other out indefinitely; I could not resign myself to this ‘multiple and fragmentary death’. I would copy out whole pages of Schopenhauer and Barrès, and the verses of Madame de Noailles. I found death all the more frightful because I could see no point in living.
And yet I loved life passionately. It needed very little to restore my confidence in it, and in myself: a letter from one of my pupils at Berck, the smile of a Belleville working girl, the confidence of a fellow-student at Neuilly, a look from Zaza, a thank-you, a kind word. As soon as I felt I was useful and loved, the horizon brightened and again I would begin to make fresh resolutions: ‘Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.’ I was more and more certain that I had ‘masses of things to say’: and I would say them. On my nineteenth birthday, I wrote in the library at the Sorbonne a long dialogue between two voices, both of which were mine: one spoke of the vanity of all things, of disgust and weariness; the other affirmed t
hat life, even a sterile existence, was beautiful. From day to day, from one hour to the next I would pass from depression to exaltation. But all through that autumn and winter the dominating thing in me was an anguished fear that one day I would again find myself ‘broken by life’.
These oscillations of mood and all these doubts filled me with terror; I was bored to suffocation and my heart was sore. Whenever I cast myself into despair, it was with all the violence of my youth and strength, and moral pain could rack my body with as much savagery as physical suffering. I wandered around Paris, mile after mile after mile, staring at unknown vistas through eyes swimming in tears. Made hungry by my long tramp, I would go into a cake shop, eat a bun, and recite in an ironic tone Heine’s famous line: ‘Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one’s nose.’ On the quais of the Seine I would try to rock away my misery by sobbing out the lines by Laforgue:
‘O, well-belovèd, it’s too late now, my heart is breaking,
A break too deep for bitterness, and I have wept so long . . .’
I liked to feel the tears singeing my eyes. But at certain moments, with all my defences down, I would seek refuge in the side-aisles of a church in order to be able to weep in peace; there I would prostrate myself with my head in my hands, suffocated by the bitter-smelling dark.
*
Jacques returned to Paris at the end of January. The day after his return he came to see us. My parents had had photographs taken of me for my nineteenth birthday, and he asked me for one; never had I heard such tender inflexions in his voice. I was trembling when, a week later, I rang at his door, for I was dreading some brutal relapse into indifference. I was enchanted by our meeting. He had started a novel, which he was calling Les Jeunes Bourgeois, and he told me: ‘It’s because of you I’m writing it.’ He also told me that he would dedicate it to me: ‘I feel I owe it to you.’ For the next few days, I was walking on air. The week after, I talked to him about myself; I described my boredom, and told him how I could no longer see any meaning in life. ‘There’s no need to look so hard,’ he told me gravely. ‘One must simply live from day to day.’ A little later, he added: ‘One must have the humility to recognize that one can’t face life alone; it’s easier to have someone else to live for.’ He smiled at me: ‘The solution would be to cultivate our egos together.’
I kept dwelling on that phrase, that smile; I was no longer in any doubt: Jacques loved me; we would be married. But there was something very wrong: my happiness didn’t last any longer than three days. Jacques came back to see us; I spent a very happy evening with him, and after he had left I broke down: ‘I’ve got everything a girl could want to make her happy, yet I feel I want to die! Life is here, waiting for me, waiting for us to seize it with both hands. I’m frightened: I am alone, I shall always be alone. . . . If only I could run away – where to? Anywhere. It would be like a terrible cataclysm, sweeping us away.’ For Jacques, marriage was obviously an end in itself, and I didn’t want to put an end to anything, at least not so soon. For another month I tussled with my feelings. At moments I was able to persuade myself that I could live alongside Jacques without mutilating myself; and then terror would seize me again: ‘What? Imprison myself in the limitations of another human being? I would feel only horror for a love that held me prisoner, and would not let me go. I have a longing to snap this link between us, to forget it all, to start a fresh life all over again. . . . Not yet; I’m not ready: I don’t want to sacrifice myself, the whole of myself.’ Yet I kept feeling great surges of love for Jacques, and it was only occasionally and briefly that I admitted to myself: ‘He’s not the one for me.’ I preferred to protest that I was not made for love or for happiness. I wrote about it in my journal, in a queer way, as if the facts were inescapable and unalterable, as if I were at liberty to reject or accept them, but incapable of modifying their application. Instead of telling myself: ‘Every day I feel less certain of being able to find happiness with Jacques,’ I wrote: ‘I dread happiness more and more,’ and ‘The prospect of saying yes or no to happiness causes me equal distress.’ Again: ‘It’s when I feel I love him most that I hate all the more the love I have for him.’ I was afraid that my affection for him would trap me into becoming his wife, and I savagely rejected the sort of life that awaited the future Madame Laiguillon.
Jacques for his part was often capricious. He would turn on ingratiating smiles for me; he would tell me: ‘There are some people who are quite irreplaceable,’ looking at me with eyes full of meaning; he would ask me to come back and see him soon: then he would receive me very coldly. At the beginning of March he fell ill. I paid him several visits: there were always uncles, aunts, and grandmothers round his bed. ‘Come back tomorrow and we’ll be able to talk in peace,’ he told me once. I felt even more worked-up than usual that afternoon as I made my way towards the boulevard Montparnasse. I bought a bunch of violets which I pinned on the collar of my dress; I had some difficulty in getting them fixed, and in my distraction I lost my purse. There was nothing much in it, but it was enough to make me arrive at Jacques’ in a very nervous state. I had been thinking all day of the heart-to-heart talk we would have in his shaded room. But when I got there he was not alone: Lucien Riaucourt was sitting at his bedside. I had already met him. he was an elegant casual young man, a good talker. They went on chatting together about the bars they frequented and the people they met there; they arranged to go out together during the coming week. I felt I was completely superfluous and unwelcome: I didn’t have money, I didn’t go out in the evenings; I was only a poor little student, quite incapable of taking any part in Jacques real existence. Besides, he was not in the best of humours; he was sarcastic towards me, almost aggressive; I made my escape as soon as possible and he was obviously relieved to see me go. I was shaking with fury; I hated him. What was there so very special about him after all? There were hosts of other men who were just as good as he. I had been badly mistaken in thinking he was a sort of Grand Meaulnes. He was fickle, egotistical, and only out for his own enjoyment. I stormed along the boulevards, telling myself I would cut myself off from his life completely. The next day I relented: but I had made up my mind not to set foot in his house for a good long time. I kept my word, and six weeks went by before I saw him again.
*
Philosophy had neither opened up the heavens to me nor anchored me to earth; all the same, in January, when I had mastered the first difficulties, I began to take a serious interest in it. I read Bergson, Plato, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Hamelin, and, with passionate enthusiasm, Nietzsche. I was excited by a host of problems: the values of science; life, matter, time, art. I had no fixed ideas of my own, but at least I knew that I rejected Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas, Maritain, and also all empirical and materialist doctrines. In the main, I favoured critical idealism of the kind expounded to us by Brunschvig, although on certain points he left me far from satisfied. I acquired a taste for reading again. In the boulevard Saint-Michel, students found a happy hunting-ground in the Librairie Picard: I would stand there looking through the avant-garde magazines which in those days came and went like the flowers that bloom in the spring. I spent hours there reading Aragon and Breton; surrealism bowled me over. All this ‘disquiet’ had got a little stale in the end; I preferred the outrageous jokes of pure negation. The destruction of art, morals, language; the systematic derangement of the senses, suicidal despair – I was delighted by all these excesses.