house.’
But we never go to anyone’s house unless we have to. She named two names. They were hardly what one would call friends.
And, for the first time, she said what I knew, or rather what I suspected:
‘I need to talk to someone besides you.’
She explained:
‘You know everything I have to say before I can get my second sentence out. And you don’t talk to me about things that …’
She needed to be with other people in order to reassure herself.
With me, no matter what I do, she somehow has the impression of inferiority.
Fifteen years of inferiority … She needs to be heard by others …
She telephoned to the two families in question; both were out, as I had foreseen, on a Saturday evening.
We stayed home.
It was the children, finally, who made her relax, and we had an agreeable hour or two of talk together (at least from my point of view).
I love her. D., you are touching. But happy is what I want you to be.
Afternoon
Last evening my wife told me something I didn’t know. My eldest son, Marc, was married last April, on his twenty-first birthday (with my consent). Johnny, who was then ten and a half years old, said to his mother:
‘I don’t understand why Marc is getting married and going to live in Paris when he still has the chance to live X years with Daddy …’
I don’t know if he gave a number. If he did, D. didn’t tell me. In Johnny’s mind, it wasn’t so much the pleasure of living with me as the opportunity of knowing me and learning something from me.
This explains to me why he dogs my footsteps, continually asks permission to come into my study, follows me to town when I do errands, finally, an almost sacred moment, sits beside me in the evening in front of the television. It has become an obsession and he is unhappy when, for one reason or another, one of these tête-à-têtes he has promised himself does not take place.
He asks me questions about everything and I feel that he takes in the answers, that he attaches a great deal of importance to them. He has become a sort of disciple, which is disturbing. It’s a relation I’m not used to, and when I’m conscious of it it bothers me.
Another X years …
He brings to this a kind of eagerness to build my image little by little in his mind, against the time when I shall no longer be here.
No doubt this image which is forming now will be more living in the end. It is through it that I shall live on. In turn, he will try to communicate it to his children.
I didn’t think that a boy of less than eleven years could have this kind of idea. This explains to me certain secret glances, certain sudden outbursts. He sees me living, and he sees me already dead.
I don’t like drinking – or the mornings after – because it makes me either sentimental or aggressive, two attitudes I hate. It humiliates me to an incredible degree.
Saturday, 30 July
I had to look at the date in a newspaper. We’re on vacation at the Lido, long familiar to me, but I feel more off the beaten track than I did in a hut in the Congo on my first trip to Africa.
It’s not Venice that makes me feel so, nor even the tourists. It’s living the holiday life, everybody’s holiday. When I wrote stories for the bi-weeklies, shortly after my arrival in Paris (1924–1925), two or three months ahead we had to write on ‘seasonal’ subjects. In October, it was Christmas and New Year. Then winter sports, spring, Easter, summer vacation …
Papers continue to do it and it always seems to consist of the same caricatures of households or families at the beach or in the mountains.
But now, here, I feel like one of those ridiculous characters. I go through the same acts, at the same hours, with the same impatience and the same bad temper.
In short, it’s the first time in fifty-seven years that I’ve taken the holiday train, that I’ve stayed, with my wife and two of my children, in a hotel catering to the holiday crowd.
As a child I used to go to Embourg in
But we never go to anyone’s house unless we have to. She named two names. They were hardly what one would call friends.
And, for the first time, she said what I knew, or rather what I suspected:
‘I need to talk to someone besides you.’
She explained:
‘You know everything I have to say before I can get my second sentence out. And you don’t talk to me about things that …’
She needed to be with other people in order to reassure herself.
With me, no matter what I do, she somehow has the impression of inferiority.
Fifteen years of inferiority … She needs to be heard by others …
She telephoned to the two families in question; both were out, as I had foreseen, on a Saturday evening.
We stayed home.
It was the children, finally, who made her relax, and we had an agreeable hour or two of talk together (at least from my point of view).
I love her. D., you are touching. But happy is what I want you to be.
Afternoon
Last evening my wife told me something I didn’t know. My eldest son, Marc, was married last April, on his twenty-first birthday (with my consent). Johnny, who was then ten and a half years old, said to his mother:
‘I don’t understand why Marc is getting married and going to live in Paris when he still has the chance to live X years with Daddy …’
I don’t know if he gave a number. If he did, D. didn’t tell me. In Johnny’s mind, it wasn’t so much the pleasure of living with me as the opportunity of knowing me and learning something from me.
This explains to me why he dogs my footsteps, continually asks permission to come into my study, follows me to town when I do errands, finally, an almost sacred moment, sits beside me in the evening in front of the television. It has become an obsession and he is unhappy when, for one reason or another, one of these tête-à-têtes he has promised himself does not take place.
He asks me questions about everything and I feel that he takes in the answers, that he attaches a great deal of importance to them. He has become a sort of disciple, which is disturbing. It’s a relation I’m not used to, and when I’m conscious of it it bothers me.
Another X years …
He brings to this a kind of eagerness to build my image little by little in his mind, against the time when I shall no longer be here.
No doubt this image which is forming now will be more living in the end. It is through it that I shall live on. In turn, he will try to communicate it to his children.
I didn’t think that a boy of less than eleven years could have this kind of idea. This explains to me certain secret glances, certain sudden outbursts. He sees me living, and he sees me already dead.
I don’t like drinking – or the mornings after – because it makes me either sentimental or aggressive, two attitudes I hate. It humiliates me to an incredible degree.
Saturday, 30 July
I had to look at the date in a newspaper. We’re on vacation at the Lido, long familiar to me, but I feel more off the beaten track than I did in a hut in the Congo on my first trip to Africa.
It’s not Venice that makes me feel so, nor even the tourists. It’s living the holiday life, everybody’s holiday. When I wrote stories for the bi-weeklies, shortly after my arrival in Paris (1924–1925), two or three months ahead we had to write on ‘seasonal’ subjects. In October, it was Christmas and New Year. Then winter sports, spring, Easter, summer vacation …
Papers continue to do it and it always seems to consist of the same caricatures of households or families at the beach or in the mountains.
But now, here, I feel like one of those ridiculous characters. I go through the same acts, at the same hours, with the same impatience and the same bad temper.
In short, it’s the first time in fifty-seven years that I’ve taken the holiday train, that I’ve stayed, with my wife and two of my children, in a hotel catering to the holiday crowd.
As a child I used to go to Embourg in
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