The Girls by Henri de Montherlant

Author:Henri de Montherlant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-07-20T22:00:00+00:00

to Pierre Costals

Paris

Andrée Hacquebaut

Saint-Léonard

15 March 1927

Not a day has passed since my return without the tears springing to my eyes under the impact of a painful memory. But it only lasts a few seconds. The rest of the time I live, I laugh, I talk, I write. Apparently unscathed. What brings my wound home to me is the fact that I can no longer sing. Before, I used to sing all the time, even in my worst moments. Now it not only won't 'come' to me, but if I make an effort it won't 'come out'. Oh Costals, what makes men suffer? There is only one suffering: loneliness of heart. I have made a list of my blessings: freedom, health, leisure, my daily bread (dry bread, but still), comparative youth, and so on. And yet, telling myself that other human beings might passionately envy all this does not make me any happier. Even if the list could be extended ad infinitum, I would only have to put down the absence of love on the debit side for the whole of the credit column to be reduced to zero. The truth is that I no longer enjoy anything. Only on Saturday did I find a little peace, when I went to Confession in order not to break completely with the practice of religion. With God and yourself together forbidding me to love you, I ought to be convinced!

I had a dream the other night. Its origin is easy to guess. We were walking through Paris in the rain. And I kept forgetting things - once it was a fur - and I would climb back up interminable staircases while you waited for me below at the corner of the street. I would rejoin you, we would set off again, once again I would find I had forgotten something, I would go back, climb the stairs again, search again.... And, as usual in dreams, the search involved unbelievable trouble, I had to rummage through a mass of things, there was no end to it, and I was obsessed all the time with the fear that you would have got tired of waiting. But I always found you on the pavement waiting for me, your face contorted with impatience, like an angry little cat. This dream consoled me a little, as a sign that you were not lost to me.

And yet, if I were to judge by your silence....

Oh, no reproach intended, no sulking (I know what sulking costs me). I cannot conceive of there ever being the slightest shadow of reproach between us. Whatever you do, whatever happens, nothing will ever weaken my admiration for you, my devotion and gratitude. But my affection is beginning to succumb, from anaemia, because it feels wasted. It cannot go on living off itself for ever. That would be a superhuman task, like having to go on filling the Danaids' bottomless barrel, until one collapses. It might be possible for a girl of twenty. At thirty (minus thirty-nine days! ) one no longer has the energy.

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