half-timbers of our villa – the largest and most handsome along this stretch of the Seine – might provoke some sort of crisis in Marguerite, or an overwhelming desire for home. But nothing of the sort occurred. I pushed the wheelchair slowly along to the very last pontoon, then turned round. On a Belgian barge that was passing by, a young blonde, her checked dress flapping around her bare legs, was hanging the washing out to dry. Although I was hardly able to distinguish her features at that distance, she, too, somehow reminded me of Ilse, whom I saw everywhere, here or on the streets of the capital, and whose image I was unable to shake from my thoughts.
After a political meeting with men who shared my convictions (our campaign for the return to leadership of Maréchal Pétain, who was Ambassador to Madrid at that time, was in full swing), and a reception at Academy headquarters in late November, I invited Jacqueline Delubac to dinner at the Ritz. I craved, body and soul, the distraction of a woman of quality, as I felt that I would go out of my mind if I allowed my obsession to torment me a moment longer. The maître d’hôtel at the Ritz – an old beanpole who somehow managed to be obsequious and imperious at the same time, who bore the same Christian name as my son, and who was able at a glance to tell a real duke from an impostor, a millionaire from a swindler – sat us at the most fashionable and sought-after table in the place, to the left of the wide hallway that leads to the main dining room. Our neighbours were Noël Coward, dining with a group of RAF officers; Paul-Louis Weiller in dress uniform; Jean Cocteau a little further off, looking sadly hang-dog and ignored by the waiter; and Léon-Paul Fargue, who gave us a cordial wave. I made my guest laugh by telling her how, a week earlier as I lunched with the Goncourt jury members at Drouant, her former ‘magnificent, noble lion’ Sacha had greeted Lucien Descaves with an ironic ‘Look who it is!’ Decidedly, the war could not be so terrible if even the cowards were back in town, and if we, naïve as we were, still believed (or rather, had decided to believe) in the myth of the blockade and the state of siege that would put an end to Hitler.
I accompanied my exquisite companion to her home and then, on an irresistible impulse, headed for Rue Richer. I parked the car on a dark corner and turned off all the lights. I sat for hours, staring into the night and fighting off sleep. A taxi pulled up towards 1 a.m., and out stepped a nurse in a dark veil and cape. I watched in rigid silence as my daughter-in-law paid the driver and vanished into the courtyard.
I drove straight through the night to Andigny without stopping.
With its soldiers left waiting behind the Maginot Line, my country was waging a pathetic, timorous war, and I couldn’t have cared less. Women, too, had become a matter of indifference to me – all but one.
I was madly in love with a Jewess, and this horrendous love was untenable.
I decided to cut myself off from the world and to throw myself wholeheartedly, drawing on every last intellectual resource, into the new book that Bernard Grasset had been pressing me for.
This was
La Grappe mystique
.
I continue to believe that this book, which enjoyed enormous popularity, is the successful synthesis not only of the vagaries of History, but also of the vagaries of my soul and my thought. It ends in a somehow triumphant quietude that is also a sacrifice, though one that can be seen as glorious and selfless. In its prophetic message, it hints ata world neither you nor I will live to see.
On the December morning when I finished it, after a sleepless night spent chained to my desk, the telephone rang. It was the Saint-Jacques hospice.
My wife had just died.
10.
If you remain in the area much longer, Monsieur le Commandant, as I hope you will – where, for a start, will I find a better chess partner? – and your superiors do not send you
After a political meeting with men who shared my convictions (our campaign for the return to leadership of Maréchal Pétain, who was Ambassador to Madrid at that time, was in full swing), and a reception at Academy headquarters in late November, I invited Jacqueline Delubac to dinner at the Ritz. I craved, body and soul, the distraction of a woman of quality, as I felt that I would go out of my mind if I allowed my obsession to torment me a moment longer. The maître d’hôtel at the Ritz – an old beanpole who somehow managed to be obsequious and imperious at the same time, who bore the same Christian name as my son, and who was able at a glance to tell a real duke from an impostor, a millionaire from a swindler – sat us at the most fashionable and sought-after table in the place, to the left of the wide hallway that leads to the main dining room. Our neighbours were Noël Coward, dining with a group of RAF officers; Paul-Louis Weiller in dress uniform; Jean Cocteau a little further off, looking sadly hang-dog and ignored by the waiter; and Léon-Paul Fargue, who gave us a cordial wave. I made my guest laugh by telling her how, a week earlier as I lunched with the Goncourt jury members at Drouant, her former ‘magnificent, noble lion’ Sacha had greeted Lucien Descaves with an ironic ‘Look who it is!’ Decidedly, the war could not be so terrible if even the cowards were back in town, and if we, naïve as we were, still believed (or rather, had decided to believe) in the myth of the blockade and the state of siege that would put an end to Hitler.
I accompanied my exquisite companion to her home and then, on an irresistible impulse, headed for Rue Richer. I parked the car on a dark corner and turned off all the lights. I sat for hours, staring into the night and fighting off sleep. A taxi pulled up towards 1 a.m., and out stepped a nurse in a dark veil and cape. I watched in rigid silence as my daughter-in-law paid the driver and vanished into the courtyard.
I drove straight through the night to Andigny without stopping.
With its soldiers left waiting behind the Maginot Line, my country was waging a pathetic, timorous war, and I couldn’t have cared less. Women, too, had become a matter of indifference to me – all but one.
I was madly in love with a Jewess, and this horrendous love was untenable.
I decided to cut myself off from the world and to throw myself wholeheartedly, drawing on every last intellectual resource, into the new book that Bernard Grasset had been pressing me for.
This was
La Grappe mystique
.
I continue to believe that this book, which enjoyed enormous popularity, is the successful synthesis not only of the vagaries of History, but also of the vagaries of my soul and my thought. It ends in a somehow triumphant quietude that is also a sacrifice, though one that can be seen as glorious and selfless. In its prophetic message, it hints ata world neither you nor I will live to see.
On the December morning when I finished it, after a sleepless night spent chained to my desk, the telephone rang. It was the Saint-Jacques hospice.
My wife had just died.
10.
If you remain in the area much longer, Monsieur le Commandant, as I hope you will – where, for a start, will I find a better chess partner? – and your superiors do not send you
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