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Title: The Fall
Author: Albert Camus
Date: 1957
Language: en
Topics: fiction, philosophy, absurdism
Source: http://miltonthed.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/1/6/14162844/__camus_albert_-_the_fall.pdf
Notes: Translated by Justin O'Brien

Albert Camus

The Fall

Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a

model such an immoral character as A Hero of Our Time ; others shrewdly

noticed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances. … A

Hero of Our Time , gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of an

individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in

their fullest expression.

—LERMONTOV

I

MAY I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of

intruding? I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the

worthy ape who presides over the fate of this establishment. In fact, he

speaks nothing but Dutch. Unless you authorize me to plead your case, he

will not guess that you want gin. There, I dare hope he understood me;

that nod must mean that he yields to my arguments. He is taking steps;

indeed, he is making haste with prudent deliberation.

You are lucky; he didn’t grunt. When he refuses to serve someone, he

merely grunts. No one insists.

Being master of one’s moods is the privilege of the larger animals. Now

I shall withdraw, monsieur, happy to have been of help to you. Thank

you; I’d accept if I were sure of not being a nuisance. You are too

kind. Then I shall bring my glass over beside yours.

You are right. His silence is deafening. It’s the silence of the

primeval forest, heavy with threats.

At times I am amazed by his obstinacy in snubbing civilized languages.

His business consists in entertaining sailors of all nationalities in

this Amsterdam bar, which for that matter he named—no one knows

why—Mexico City. With such duties wouldn’t you think there might be some

fear that his ignorance would be awkward? Fancy the Cro-Magnon man

lodged in the Tower of Babel! He would certainly feel out of his

element. Yet this one is not aware of his exile; he goes his own sweet

way and nothing touches him. One of the rare sentences I have ever heard

from his mouth proclaimed that you could take it or leave it. What did

one have to take or leave? Doubtless our friend himself. I confess I am

drawn by such creatures who are all of a piece. Anyone who has

considerably meditated on man, by profession or vocation, is led to feel

nostalgia for the primates. They at least don’t have any ulterior

motives.

Our host, to tell the truth, has some, although he harbors them deep

within him. As a result of not understanding what is said in his

presence, he has adopted a distrustful disposition. Whence that look of

touchy dignity as if he at least suspected that all is not perfect among

men. That disposition makes it less easy to discuss anything with him

that does not concern his business. Notice, for instance, on the back

wall above his head that empty rectangle marking the place where a

picture has been taken down. Indeed, there was a picture there, and a

particularly interesting one, a real masterpiece. Well, I was present

when the master of the house received it and when he gave it up. In both

cases he did so with the same distrust, after weeks of rumination. In

that regard you must admit that society has somewhat spoiled the frank

simplicity of his nature.

Mind you, I am not judging him. I consider his distrust justified and

should be inclined to share it if, as you see, my communicative nature

were not opposed to this. I am talkative, alas, and make friends easily.

Although I know how to keep my distance, I seize any and every

opportunity. When I used to live in France, were I to meet an

intelligent man I immediately sought his company. If that be foolish ...

Ah, I see you smile at that use of the subjunctive. I confess my

weakness for that mood and for fine speech in general. A weakness that I

criticize in myself, believe me. I am well aware that an addiction to

silk underwear does not necessarily imply that one’s feet are dirty.

Nonetheless, style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema. My

consolation is to tell myself that, after all, those who murder the

language are not pure either. Why yes, let’s have another gin.

Are you staying long in Amsterdam? A beautiful city, isn’t it?

Fascinating? There’s an adjective I haven’t heard in some time. Not

since leaving Paris, in fact, years ago. But the heart has its own

memory and I have forgotten nothing of our beautiful capital, nor of its

quays. Paris is a real trompel’œil, a magnificent stage-setting

inhabited by four million silhouettes. Nearly five million at the last

census? Why, they must have multiplied. And that wouldn’t surprise me.

It always seemed to me that our fellow citizens had two passions: ideas

and fornication. Without rhyme or reason, so to speak. Still, let us

take care not to condemn them; they are not the only ones, for all

Europe is in the same boat. I sometimes think of what future historians

will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he

fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the

subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

Oh, not the Dutch; they are much less modern! They have time—just look

at them. What do they do? Well, these gentlemen over here live off the

labors of those ladies over there. All of them, moreover, both male and

female, are very middle-class creatures who have come here, as usual,

out of mythomania or stupidity. Through too much or too little

imagination, in short. From time to time, these gentlemen indulge in a

little knife or revolver play, but don’t get the idea that they’re keen

on it. Their role calls for it, that’s all, and they are dying of fright

as they shoot it out.

Nevertheless, I find them more moral than the others, those who kill in

the bosom of the family by attrition. Haven’t you noticed that our

society is organized for this kind of liquidation? You have heard, of

course, of those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil that attack the

unwary swimmer by thousands and with swift little nibbles clean him up

in a few minutes, leaving only an immaculate skeleton? Well, that’s what

their organization is. “Do you want a good clean life? Like everybody

else?” You say yes, of course. How can one say no? “O.K. You’ll be

cleaned up. Here’s a job, a family, and organized leisure activities.”

And the little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone.

But I am unjust. I shouldn’t say their organization. It is ours, after

all: it’s a question of which will clean up the other.

Here is our gin at last. To your prosperity. Yes, the ape opened his

mouth to call me doctor. In these countries everyone is a doctor, or a

professor. They like showing respect, out of kindness and out of

modesty. Among them, at least, spitefulness is not a national

institution. Besides, I am not a doctor. If you want to know, I was a

lawyer before coming here. Now, I am a judge-penitent.

But allow me to introduce myself: Jean-Baptiste Clamence, at your

service. Pleased to know you.

You are in business, no doubt? In a way? Excellent reply! Judicious too:

in all things we are merely “in a way.” Now, allow me to play the

detective. You are my age in a way, with the sophisticated eye of the

man in his forties who has seen everything, in a way; you are well

dressed in a way, that is as people are in our country; and your hands

are smooth. Hence a bourgeois, in a way! But a cultured bourgeois!

Smiling at the use of the subjunctive, in fact, proves your culture

twice over because you recognize it to begin with and then because you

feel superior to it. Lastly, I amuse you.

And be it said without vanity, this implies in you a certain

open-mindedness. Consequently you are in a way ... But no matter.

Professions interest me less than sects. Allow me to ask you two

questions and don’t answer if you consider them indiscreet. Do you have

any possessions? Some? Good. Have you shared them with the poor? No?

Then you are what I call a Sadducee. If you are not familiar with the

Scriptures, I admit that this won’t help you. But it does help you? So

you know the Scriptures? Decidedly, you interest me.

As for me ... Well, judge for yourself. By my stature, my shoulders, and

this face that I have often been told was shy, I rather look like a

rugby player, don’t I? But if I am judged by my conversation I have to

be granted a little subtlety. The camel that provided the hair for my

overcoat was probably mangy; yet my nails are manicured. I, too, am

sophisticated, and yet I confide in you without caution on the sole

basis of your looks. Finally, despite my good manners and my fine

speech, I frequent sailors’ bars in the Zeedijk. Come on, give up. My

profession is double, that’s all, like the human being. I have already

told you, I am a judge-penitent. Only one thing is simple in my case: I

possess nothing. Yes, I was rich. No, I shared nothing with the poor.

What does that prove? That I, too, was a Sadducee ... Oh, do you hear

the foghorns in the harbor? There’ll be fog tonight on the Zuider Zee.

You’re leaving already? Forgive me for having perhaps detained you. No,

I beg you; I won’t let you pay. I am at home at Mexico City and have

been particularly pleased to receive you here. I shall certainly be here

tomorrow, as I am every evening, and I shall be pleased to accept your

invitation.

Your way back? ... Well ... But if you don’t have any objection, the

easiest thing would be for me to accompany you as far as the harbor.

Thence, by going around the Jewish quarter you’ll find those fine

avenues with their parade of streetcars full of flowers and thundering

sounds. Your hotel is on one of them, the Damrak. You first, please. I

live in the Jewish quarter or what was called so until our Hitlerian

brethren made room. What a cleanup! Seventy-five thousand Jews deported

or assassinated; that’s real vacuum-cleaning. I admire that diligence,

that methodical patience! When one has no character one has to apply a

method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the

site of one of the greatest crimes in history. Perhaps that’s what helps

me to understand the ape and his distrust. Thus I can struggle against

my natural inclination carrying me toward fraternizing. When I see a new

face, something in me sounds the alarm. “Slow! Danger!” Even when the

attraction is strongest, I am on my guard.

Do you know that in my little village, during a punitive operation, a

German officer courteously asked an old woman to please choose which of

her two sons would be shot as a hostage? Choose!— can you imagine that?

That one? No, this one. And see him go. Let’s not dwell on it, but

believe me, monsieur, any surprise is possible. I knew a pure heart who

rejected distrust. He was a pacifist and libertarian and loved all

humanity and the animals with an equal love. An exceptional soul, that’s

certain. Well, during the last wars of religion in Europe he had retired

to the country. He had written on his threshold: “Wherever you come

from, come in and be welcome.” Who do you think answered that noble

invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and disemboweled

him.

Oh pardon, madame! But she didn’t understand a word of it anyway. All

these people, eh? out so late despite this rain which hasn’t let up for

days. Fortunately there is gin, the sole glimmer of light in this

darkness. Do you feel the golden, copper-colored light it kindles in

you? I like walking through the city of an evening in the warmth of gin.

I walk for nights on end, I dream or talk to myself interminably. Yes,

like this evening—and I fear making your head swim somewhat. Thank you,

you are most courteous. But it’s the overflow; as soon as I open my

mouth, sentences start to flow.

Besides, this country inspires me. I like these people swarming on the

sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by

fogs, cold lands, and the sea steaming like a wet wash. I like them, for

they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

Yes, indeed! From hearing their heavy tread on the damp pavement, from

seeing them move heavily between their shops full of gilded herrings and

jewels the color of dead leaves, you probably think they are here this

evening? You are like everybody else; you take these good people for a

tribe of syndics and merchants counting their gold crowns with their

chances of eternal life, whose only lyricism consists in occasionally,

without doffing their broad-brimmed hats, taking anatomy lessons?

You are wrong. They walk along with us, to be sure, and yet see where

their heads are: in that fog compounded of neon, gin, and mint emanating

from the shop signs above them. Holland is a dream, monsieur, a dream of

gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day

that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their

black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting

throughout the whole land, around the seas, along the canals. Their

heads in their copper-colored clouds, they dream; they cycle in circles;

they pray, somnambulists in the fog’s gilded incense; they have ceased

to be here. They have gone thousands of miles away, toward Java, the

distant isle. They pray to those grimacing gods of Indonesia with which

they have decorated all their shop-windows and which at this moment are

floating aimlessly above us before alighting, like sumptuous monkeys, on

the signs and stepped roofs to remind these homesick colonials that

Holland is not only the Europe of merchants but also the sea, the sea

that leads to Cipango and to those islands where men die mad and happy.

But I am letting myself go! I am pleading a case! Forgive me. Habit,

monsieur, vocation, also the desire to make you fully understand this

city, and the heart of things! For we are at the heart of things here.

Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles

of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When

one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles,

life—and hence its crimes—becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the

last circle. The circle of the ... Ah, you know that? By heaven, you

become harder to classify. But you understand then why I can say that

the center of things is here, although we stand at the tip of the

continent. A sensitive man grasps such oddities. In any case, the

newspaper readers and the fornicators can go no further. They come from

the four corners of Europe and stop facing the inner sea, on the drab

strand. They listen to the foghorns, vainly try to make out the

silhouettes of boats in the fog, then turn back over the canals and go

home through the rain. Chilled to the bone, they come and ask in all

languages for gin at Mexico City. There I wait for them.

Till tomorrow, then, monsieur et cher compatriote. No, you will easily

find your way now: I’ll leave you near this bridge. I never cross a

bridge at night. It’s the result of a vow. Suppose, after all, that

someone should jump in the water. One of two things—either you do

likewise to fish him out and, in cold weather, you run a great risk! Or

you forsake him there and suppressed dives sometimes leave one strangely

aching. Good night. What? Those ladies behind those windows? Dream,

monsieur, cheap dream, a trip to the Indies! Those persons perfume

themselves with spices. You go in, they draw the curtains, and the

navigation begins. The gods come down onto the naked bodies and the

islands are set adrift, lost souls crowned with the tousled hair of palm

trees in the wind. Try it.

II

WHAT is a judge-penitent? Ah, I intrigued you with that business. I

meant no harm by it, believe me, and I can explain myself more clearly.

In a way, that even belongs to my official duties.

But first I must set forth a certain number of facts that will help you

to understand my story.

A few years ago I was a lawyer in Paris and, indeed, a rather well-known

lawyer. Of course, I didn’t tell you my real name. I had a specialty:

noble cases. Widows and orphans, as the saying goes—I don’t know why,

because there are improper widows and ferocious orphans. Yet it was

enough for me to sniff the slightest scent of victim on a defendant for

me to swing into action. And what action! A real tornado! My heart was

on my sleeve. You would really have thought that justice slept with me

every night. I am sure you would have admired the rightness of my tone,

the appropriateness of my emotion, the persuasion and warmth, the

restrained indignation of my speeches before the court. Nature favored

me as to my physique, and the noble attitude comes effortlessly.

Furthermore, I was buoyed up by two sincere feelings: the satisfaction

of being on the right side of the bar and an instinctive scorn for

judges in general. That scorn, after all, wasn’t perhaps so instinctive.

I know now that it had its reasons. But, seen from the outside, it

looked rather like a passion. It can’t be denied that, for the moment at

least, we have to have judges, don’t we? However, I could not understand

how a man could offer himself to perform such a surprising function. I

accepted the fact because I saw it, but rather as I accepted locusts.

With this difference:

that the invasions of those Orthoptera never brought me a son whereas I

earned my living by carrying on a dialogue with people I scorned.

But, after all, I was on the right side; that was enough to satisfy my

conscience. The feeling of the law, the satisfaction of being right, the

joy of self-esteem, cher monsieur, are powerful incentives for keeping

us upright or keeping us moving forward. On the other hand, if you

deprive men of them, you transform them into dogs frothing with rage.

How many crimes committed merely because their authors could not endure

being wrong! I once knew a manufacturer who had a perfect wife, admired

by all, and yet he deceived her. That man was literally furious to be in

the wrong, to be blocked from receiving, or granting himself, a

certificate of virtue. The more virtues his wife manifested, the more

vexed he became. Eventually, living in the wrong became unbearable to

him.

What do you think he did then? He gave up deceiving her? Not at all. He

killed her. That is how I entered into relations with him.

My situation was more enviable. Not only did I run no risk of joining

the criminal camp (in particular I had no chance of killing my wife,

being a bachelor), but I even took up their defense, on the sole

condition that they should be noble murderers, as others are noble

savages. The very manner in which I conducted that defense gave me great

satisfactions. I was truly above reproach in my professional life. I

never accepted a bribe, it goes without saying, and I never stooped

either to any shady proceedings. And—this is even rarer—I never deigned

to flatter any journalist to get him on my side, nor any civil servant

whose friendship might be useful to me. I even had the luck of seeing

the Legion of Honor offered to me two or three times and of being able

to refuse it with a discreet dignity in which I found my true reward.

Finally, I never charged the poor a fee and never boasted of it. Don’t

think for a moment, cher monsieur, that I am bragging. I take no credit

for this.

The avidity which in our society substitutes for ambition has always

made me laugh. I was aiming higher; you will see that the expression is

exact in my case.

But you can already imagine my satisfaction. I enjoyed my own nature to

the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to

soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such

joys as selfishness. At least I enjoyed that part of my nature which

reacted so appropriately to the widow and orphan that eventually,

through exercise, it came to dominate my whole life. For instance, I

loved to help blind people cross streets. From as far away as I could

see a cane hesitating on the edge of a sidewalk, I would rush forward,

sometimes only a second ahead of another charitable hand already

outstretched, snatch the blind person from any solicitude but mine, and

lead him gently but firmly along the crosswalk among the traffic

obstacles toward the refuge of the other sidewalk, where we would

separate with a mutual emotion. In the same way, I always enjoyed giving

directions in the street, obliging with a light, lending a hand to heavy

pushcarts, pushing a stranded car, buying a paper from the Salvation

Army lass or flowers from the old peddler, though I knew she stole them

from the Montparnasse cemetery. I also liked—and this is harder to say—I

liked to give alms. A very Christian friend of mine admitted that one’s

initial feeling on seeing a beggar approach one’s house is unpleasant.

Well, with me it was worse: I used to exult.

But let’s not dwell on this.

Let us speak rather of my courtesy. It was famous and unquestionable.

Indeed, good manners provided me with great delights. If I had the luck,

certain mornings, to give up my seat in the bus or subway to someone who

obviously deserved it, to pick up some object an old lady had dropped

and return it to her with a smile I knew well, or merely to forfeit my

taxi to someone in a greater hurry than I, it was a red-letter day. I

even rejoiced, I must admit, those days when the transport system being

on strike I had a chance to load into my car at the bus stops some of my

unfortunate fellow citizens unable to get home. Giving up my seat in the

theater to allow a couple to sit together, hoisting a girl’s suitcases

onto the rack in a train—these were all deeds I performed more often

than others because I paid more attention to the opportunities and was

better able to relish the pleasure they give.

Consequently I was considered generous, and so I was. I gave a great

deal in public and in private. But far from suffering when I had to give

up an object or a sum of money, I derived constant pleasures from

this—among them a sort of melancholy which occasionally rose within me

at the thought of the sterility of those gifts and the probable

ingratitude that would follow. I even took such pleasure in giving that

I hated to be obliged to do so. Exactitude in money matters bored me to

death and I conformed ungraciously. I had to be the master of my

liberalities.

These are just little touches but they will help you grasp the constant

delights I experienced in my life, and especially in my profession.

Being stopped in the corridor of the law courts by the wife of a

defendant you represented out of justice or pity alone—I mean without

charge—hearing that woman whisper that nothing, no, nothing could ever

repay what you had done for them, replying that it was quite natural,

that anyone would have done as much, even offering some financial help

to tide over the bad days ahead, then—in order to cut the effusions

short and preserve their proper resonance—kissing the hand of a poor

woman and breaking away—believe me, cher monsieur, this is achieving

more than the vulgar ambitious man and rising to that supreme summit

where virtue is its own reward.

Let’s pause on these heights. Now you understand what I meant when I

spoke of aiming higher. I was talking, it so happens, of those supreme

summits, the only places I can really live. Yes, I have never felt

comfortable except in lofty places. Even in the details of daily life, I

needed to feel above. I preferred the bus to the subway, open carriages

to taxis, terraces to closed-in places. An enthusiast for sport planes

in which one’s head is in the open, on boats I was the eternal pacer of

the top deck.

In the mountains I used to flee the deep valleys for the passes and

plateaus; I was the man of the mesas at least. If fate had forced me to

choose between work at a lathe or as a roofer, don’t worry, I’d have

chosen the roofs and become acquainted with dizziness. Coalbins, ships’

holds, undergrounds, grottoes, pits were repulsive to me. I had even

developed a special loathing for speleologists, who had the nerve to

fill the front page of our newspapers, and whose records nauseated me.

Striving to reach elevation minus eight hundred at the risk of getting

one’s head caught in a rocky funnel (a siphon, as those fools say!)

seemed to me the exploit of perverted or traumatized characters. There

was something criminal underlying it.

A natural balcony fifteen hundred feet above a sea still visible bathed

in sunlight, on the other hand, was the place where I could breathe most

freely, especially if I were alone, well above the human ants. I could

readily understand why sermons, decisive preachings, and fire miracles

took place on accessible heights. In my opinion no one meditated in

cellars or prison cells (unless they were situated in a tower with a

broad view); one just became moldy. And I could understand that man who,

having entered holy orders, gave up the frock because his cell, instead

of overlooking a vast landscape as he expected, looked out on a wall.

Rest assured that as far as I was concerned I did not grow moldy. At

every hour of the day, within myself and among others, I would scale the

heights and light conspicuous fires, and a joyful greeting would rise

toward me. Thus at least I took pleasure in life and in my own

excellence.

My profession satisfied most happily that vocation for summits. It

cleansed me of all bitterness toward my neighbor, whom I always

obligated without ever owing him anything. It set me above the judge

whom I judged in turn, above the defendant whom I forced to gratitude.

Just weigh this, cher monsieur, I lived with impunity. I was concerned

in no judgment; I was not on the floor of the courtroom, but somewhere

in the flies like those gods that are brought down by machinery from

time to time to transfigure the action and give it its meaning. After

all, living aloft is still the only way of being seen and hailed by the

largest number.

Besides, some of my good criminals had killed in obedience to the same

feeling. Reading the newspapers afterward, in the sorry condition in

which they then were, doubtless brought them a sort of unhappy

compensation. Like many men, they had no longer been able to endure

anonymity, and that impatience had contributed to leading them to

unfortunate extremities. To achieve notoriety it is enough, after all,

to kill one’s concierge. Unhappily, this is usually an ephemeral

reputation, so many concierges are there who deserve and receive the

knife. Crime constantly monopolizes the headlines, but the criminal

appears there only fugitively, to be replaced at once. In short, such

brief triumphs cost too dear. Defending our unfortunate aspirants after

a reputation amounted, on the other hand, to becoming really well known,

at the same time and in the same places, but by more economical means.

Consequently this encouraged me to making more meritorious efforts so

that they would pay as little as possible. What they were paying they

were doing so to some extent in my place. The indignation, talent, and

emotion I expended on them washed away, in return, any debt I might feel

toward them. The judges punished and the defendants expiated, while I,

free of any duty, shielded from judgment as from penalty, I freely held

sway bathed in a light as of Eden.

Indeed, wasn’t that Eden, cher monsieur: no intermediary between life

and me? Such was my life. I never had to learn how to live. In that

regard, I already knew everything at birth. Some people’s problem is to

protect themselves from men or at least to come to terms with them. In

my case, the understanding was already established. Familiar when it was

appropriate, silent when necessary, capable of a free and easy manner as

readily as of dignity, I was always in harmony. Hence my popularity was

great and my successes in society innumerable. I was acceptable in

appearance; I revealed myself to be both a tireless dancer and an

unobtrusively learned man; I managed to love simultaneously—and this is

not easy—women and justice; I indulged in sports and the fine arts—in

short, I’ll not go on for fear you might suspect me of self-flattery.

But just imagine, I beg you, a man at the height of his powers, in

perfect health, generously gifted, skilled in bodily exercises as in

those of the mind, neither rich nor poor, sleeping well, and

fundamentally pleased with himself without showing this otherwise than

by a felicitous sociability. You will readily see how I can speak,

without immodesty, of a successful life.

Yes, few creatures were more natural than I. I was altogether in harmony

with life, fitting into it from top to bottom without rejecting any of

its ironies, its grandeur, or its servitude. In particular the flesh,

matter, the physical in short, which disconcerts or discourages so many

men in love or in solitude, without enslaving me, brought me steady

joys. I was made to have a body. Whence that harmony in me, that relaxed

mastery that people felt, even to telling me sometimes that it helped

them in life. Hence my company was in demand. Often, for instance,

people thought they had met me before. Life, its creatures and its

gifts, offered themselves to me, and I accepted such marks of homage

with a kindly pride. To tell the truth, just from being so fully and

simply a man, I looked upon myself as something of a superman.

I was of respectable but humble birth (my father was an officer), and

yet, certain mornings, let me confess it humbly, I felt like a king’s

son, or a burning bush. It was not a matter, mind you, of the certainty

I had of being more intelligent than everyone else. Besides, such

certainty is of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it. No,

as a result of being showered with blessings, I felt, I hesitate to

admit, marked out. Personally marked out, among all, for that long and

uninterrupted success. This, after all, was a result of my modesty. I

refused to attribute that success to my own merits and could not believe

that the conjunction in a single person of such different and such

extreme virtues was the result of chance alone. This is why in my happy

life I felt somehow that that happiness was authorized by some higher

decree. When I add that I had no religion you can see even better how

extraordinary that conviction was. Whether ordinary or not, it served

for some time to raise me above the daily routine and I literally soared

for a period of years, for which, to tell the truth, I still long in my

heart of hearts. I soared until the evening when ... But no, that’s

another matter and it must be forgotten. Anyway, I am perhaps

exaggerating. I was at ease in everything, to be sure, but at the same

time satisfied with nothing. Each joy made me desire another. I went

from festivity to festivity. On occasion I danced for nights on end,

ever madder about people and life. At times, late on those nights when

the dancing, the slight intoxication, my wild enthusiasm, everyone’s

violent unrestraint would fill me with a tired and overwhelmed rapture,

it would seem to me—at the breaking point of fatigue and for a second’s

flash—that at last I understood the secret of creatures and of the

world. But my fatigue would disappear the next day, and with it the

secret; I would rush forth anew. I ran on like that, always heaped with

favors, never satiated, without knowing where to stop, until the

day—until the evening rather when the music stopped and the lights went

out. The gay party at which I had been so happy ... But allow me to call

on our friend the primate. Nod your head to thank him and, above all,

drink up with me, I need your understanding.

I see that that declaration amazes you. Have you never suddenly needed

understanding, help, friendship? Yes, of course. I have learned to be

satisfied with understanding. It is found more readily and, besides,

it’s not binding. “I beg you to believe in my sympathetic understanding”

in the inner discourse always precedes immediately “and now, let’s turn

to other matters.” It’s a board chairman’s emotion; it comes cheap,

after catastrophes. Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to

obtain, but when one has it there’s no getting rid of it; one simply has

to cope with it. Don’t think for a minute that your friends will

telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if

this doesn’t happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit

suicide, or simply whether you don’t need company, whether you are not

in a mood to go out. No, don’t worry, they’ll ring up the evening you

are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be

more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself,

according to them. May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set

on a pedestal by our friends! Those whose duty is to love us—I mean

relatives and connections (what an expression!)—are another matter. They

find the right word, all right, and it hits the bull’s-eye; they

telephone as if shooting a rifle. And they know how to aim. Oh, the

Bazaines!

What? What evening? I’ll get to it, be patient with me. In a certain way

I am sticking to my subject with all that about friends and connections.

You see, I’ve heard of a man whose friend had been imprisoned and who

slept on the floor of his room every night in order not to enjoy a

comfort of which his friend had been deprived. Who, cher monsieur, will

sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I’d

like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day,

and that will be salvation. But it’s not easy, for friendship is

absent-minded or at least unavailing. It is incapable of achieving what

it wants. Maybe, after all, it doesn’t want it enough? Maybe we don’t

love life enough? Have you noticed that death alone awakens our

feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire

those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with

earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that

admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives. But do

you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead?

The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us

free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail

party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. If they

forced us to anything, it would be to remembering, and we have a short

memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the

painful dead, our emotion, ourselves after all!

For instance, I had a friend I generally avoided. He rather bored me,

and, besides, he was something of a moralist. But when he was on his

death bed, I was there—don’t worry. I never missed a day. He died

satisfied with me, holding both my hands. A woman who used to chase

after me, and in vain, had the good sense to die young. What room in my

heart at once! And when, in addition, it’s a suicide! Lord, what a

delightful commotion! One’s telephone rings, one’s heart overflows, and

the intentionally short sentences yet heavy with implications, one’s

restrained suffering and even, yes, a bit of self-accusation!

That’s the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can’t love

without self-love. Notice your neighbors if perchance a death takes

place in the building. They were asleep in their little routine and

suddenly, for example, the concierge dies. At once they awake, bestir

themselves, get the details, commiserate. A newly dead man and the show

begins at last. They need tragedy, don’t you know; it’s their little

transcendence, their apéritif. Moreover, is it mere chance that I should

speak of a concierge? I had one, really ill favored, malice incarnate, a

monster of insignificance and rancor, who would have discouraged a

Franciscan. I had even given up speaking to him, but by his mere

existence he compromised my customary contentedness. He died and I went

to his funeral. Can you tell me why?

Anyway, the two days preceding the ceremony were full of interest. The

concierge’s wife was ill, lying in the single room, and near her the

coffin had been set on sawhorses. Everyone had to get his mail himself.

You opened the door, said “Bonjour, madame,” listened to her praise of

the dear departed as she pointed to him, and took your mail. Nothing

very amusing about that. And yet the whole building passed through her

room, which stank of carbolic acid. And the tenants didn’t send their

servants either; they came themselves to take advantage of the

unexpected attraction. The servants did too, of course, but on the sly.

The day of the funeral, the coffin was too big for the door. “Oh my

dearie,” the wife said from her bed with a surprise at once delighted

and grieved, “how big he was!” “Don’t worry, madame,” replied the

funeral director, “we’ll get him through edgewise, and upright.” He was

got through upright and then laid down again, and I was the only one

(with a former cabaret doorman who, I gathered, used to drink his Pernod

every evening with the doparted) to go as far as the cemetery and strew

flowers on a coffin of astounding luxury. Then I paid a visit to the

concierge’s wife to receive her thanks expressed as by a great

tragedienne. Tell me, what was the reason for all that? None, except the

apértif.

I likewise buried an old fellow member of the Lawyers’ Guild. A clerk to

whom no one paid attention, but I always shook his hand. Where I worked

I used to shake everyone’s hand, moreover, being doubly sure to miss no

one. Without much effort, such cordial simplicity won me the popularity

so necessary to my contentment. For the funeral of our clerk the

President of the Guild had not gone out of his way. But I did, and on

the eve of a trip, as was amply pointed out. It so happened that I knew

my presence would be noticed and favorably commented on. Hence, you see,

not even the snow that was falling that day made me withdraw.

What? I’m getting to it, never fear; besides, I have never left it. But

let me first point out that my concierge’s wife, who had gone to such an

out lay for the crucifix, heavy oak, and silver handles in order to get

the most out of her emotion, had shacked up a month later with an

overdressed yokel proud of his singing voice. He used to beat her;

frightful screams could be heard and immediately afterward he would open

the window and give forth with his favorite song: “Women, how pretty you

are!”

“All the same!” the neighbors would say. All the same what? I ask you.

All right, appearances were against the baritone, and against the

concierge’s wife, too. But nothing proves that they were not in love.

And nothing proves either that she did not love her husband. Moreover,

when the yokel took flight, his voice and arm exhausted, she —that

faithful wife—resumed her praises of the departed. After all, I know of

others who have appearances on their side and are no more faithful or

sincere. I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a

scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships,

his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening

recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that’s all,

bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a

life full of complications and drama.

Something must happen—and that explains most human commitments.

Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray

then for funerals!

But I at least didn’t have that excuse. I was not bored because I was

riding on the crest of the wave. On the evening I am speaking about I

can say that I was even less bored than ever. And yet ...

You see, cher monsieur, it was a fine autumn evening, still warm in town

and already damp over the Seine. Night was falling; the sky, still

bright in the west, was darkening; the street lamps were glowing dimly.

I was walking up the quays of the Left Bank toward the Pont des Arts.

The river was gleaming between the stalls of the secondhand booksellers.

There were but few people on the quays; Paris was already at dinner. I

was treading on the dusty yellow leaves that still recalled summer.

Gradually the sky was filling with stars that could be seen for a moment

after leaving one street lamp and heading toward another. I enjoyed the

return of silence, the evening’s mildness, the emptiness of Paris. I was

happy. The day had been good: a blind man, the reduced sentence I had

hoped for, a cordial handclasp from my client, a few liberalities, and

in the afternoon, a brilliant improvisation in the company of several

friends on the hardheartedness of our governing class and the hypocrisy

of our leaders.

I had gone up on the Pont des Arts, deserted at that hour, to look at

the river that could hardly be made out now night had come. Facing the

statue of the Vert-Galant, I dominated the island. I felt rising within

me a vast feeling of power and—I don’t know how to express it—of

completion, which cheered my heart. I straightened up and was about to

light a cigarette, the cigarette of satisfaction, when, at that very

moment, a laugh burst out behind me. Taken by surprise, I suddenly

wheeled around; there was no one there. I stepped to the railing; no

barge or boat. I turned back toward the island and, again, heard the

laughter behind me, a little farther off as if it were going downstream.

I stood there motionless. The sound of the laughter was decreasing, but

I could still hear it distinctly behind me, come from nowhere unless

from the water. At the same time I was aware of the rapid beating of my

heart. Please don’t misunderstand me; there was nothing mysterious about

that laugh; it was a good, hearty, almost friendly laugh, which

re-established the proper proportions. Soon I heard nothing more,

anyway. I returned to the quays, went up the rue Dauphine, bought some

cigarettes I didn’t need at all. I was dazed and had trouble breathing.

That evening I rang up a friend, who wasn’t at home. I was hesitating

about going out when, suddenly, I heard laughter under my windows. I

opened them. On the sidewalk, in fact, some youths were loudly saying

good night. I shrugged my shoulders as I closed the windows; after all,

I had a brief to study. I went into the bathroom to drink a glass of

water. My reflection was smiling in the mirror, but it seemed to me that

my smile was double ...

What? Forgive me, I was thinking of something else. I’ll see you again

tomorrow, probably.

Tomorrow, yes, that’s right. No, no, I can’t stay. Besides, I am called

in consultation by that brown bear of a man you see over there. A decent

fellow, for sure, whom the police are meanly persecuting out of sheer

perversity. You think he looks like a killer? Rest assured that his

actions conform to his looks. He burgles likewise, and you will be

surprised to learn that that cave man is specialized in the art trade.

In Holland everyone is a specialist in paintings and in tulips. This

one, with his modest mien, is the author of the most famous theft of a

painting. Which one? I may tell you. Don’t be surprised at my knowledge.

Although I am a judge-penitent, I have my side line here: I am the legal

counselor of these good people. I studied the laws of the country and

built up a clientele in this quarter where diplomas are not required. It

wasn’t easy, but I inspire confidence, don’t I? I have a good, hearty

laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards. Besides, I

settled a few difficult cases, out of self-interest to begin with and

later out of conviction. If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced,

all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly

innocent, cher monsieur. And in my opinion—all right, all right, I’m

coming!—that’s what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything

would be just a joke.

III

REALLY, mon cher compatriote, I am grateful to you for your curiosity.

However, there is nothing extraordinary about my story. Since you are

interested, I’ll tell you that I thought a little about that laugh, for

a few days, then forgot about it. Once in a great while, I seemed to

hear it within me. But most of the time, without making any effort, I

thought of other things.

Yet I must admit that I ceased to walk along the Paris quays. When I

would ride along them in a car or bus, a sort of silence would descend

on me. I was waiting, I believe. But I would cross the Seine, nothing

would happen, and I would breathe again. I also had some health problems

at that time. Nothing definite, a dejection perhaps, a sort of

difficulty in recovering my good spirits. I saw doctors, who gave me

stimulants. I was alternately stimulated and depressed. Life became less

easy for me: when the body is sad the heart languishes. It seemed to me

that I was half unlearning what I had never learned and yet knew so

well—how to live. Yes, I think it was probably then that everything

began.

But this evening I don’t feel quite up to snuff either. I even find

trouble expressing myself. I’m not talking so well, it seems to me, and

my words are less assured. Probably the weather. It’s hard to breathe;

the air is so heavy it weighs on one’s chest. Would you object, mon cher

compatriote, to going out and walking in the town a little? Thank you.

How beautiful the canals are this evening! I like the breath of stagnant

waters, the smell of dead leaves soaking in the canal and the funereal

scent rising from the barges loaded with flowers. No, no, there’s

nothing morbid about such a taste, I assure you. On the contrary, it’s

deliberate with me. The truth is that I force myself to admire these

canals. What I like most in the world is Sicily, you see, and especially

from the top of Etna, in the sunlight, provided I dominate the island

and the sea. Java, too, but at the time of the trade winds. Yes, I went

there in my youth. In a general way, I like all islands. It is easier to

dominate them.

Charming house, isn’t it? The two heads you see up there are heads of

Negro slaves. A shop sign. The house belonged to a slave dealer. Oh,

they weren’t squeamish in those days! They had assurance; they

announced: “You see, I’m a man of substance; I’m in the slave trade; I

deal in black flesh.” Can you imagine anyone today making it known

publicly that such is his business? What a scandal! I can hear my

Parisian colleagues right now. They are adamant on the subject; they

wouldn’t hesitate to launch two or three manifestoes, maybe even more!

And on reflection, I’d add my signature to theirs. Slavery?—certainly

not, we are against it! That we should be forced to establish it at home

or in our factories—well, that’s natural; but boasting about it, that’s

the limit!

I am well aware that one can’t get along without domineering or being

served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air. Commanding is

breathing—you agree with me? And even the most destitute manage to

breathe. The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his

child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is

being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back. “One

doesn’t talk back to one’s father”—you know the expression? In one way

it is very odd. To whom should one talk back in this world if not to

what one loves? In another way, it is convincing. Somebody has to have

the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one

and there would never be an end to it. Power, on the other hand, settles

everything. It took time, but we finally realized that. For instance,

you must have noticed that our old Europe at last philosophizes in the

right way. We no longer say as in simple times: “This is the way I

think. What are your objections?” We have become lucid. For the dialogue

we have substituted the communiqué: “This is the truth,” we say. “You

can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few

years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.” Ah, this

dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of

what we are capable. Just take me, to change examples if not subjects, I

have always wanted to be served with a smile. If the maid looked sad,

she poisoned my days. She had a right not to be cheerful, to be sure.

But I told myself that it was better for her to perform her service with

a laugh than with tears.

In fact, it was better for me. Yet, without boasting, my reasoning was

not altogether idiotic.

Likewise, I always refused to eat in Chinese restaurants. Why? Because

Orientals when they are silent and in the presence of whites often look

scornful. Naturally they keep that look when serving. How then can you

enjoy the glazed chicken? And, above all, how can you look at them and

think you are right?

Just between us, slavery, preferably with a smile, is inevitable then.

But we must not admit it. Isn’t it better that whoever cannot do without

having slaves should call them free men? For the principle to begin

with, and, secondly, not to drive them to despair. We owe them that

compensation, don’t we? In that way, they will continue to smile and we

shall maintain our good conscience. Otherwise, we’d be obliged to

reconsider our opinion of ourselves; we’d go mad with suffering, or even

become modest—for everything would be possible. Consequently, no shop

signs, and this one is shocking.

Besides, if everyone told all, displayed his true profession and

identity, we shouldn’t know which way to turn! Imagine the visiting

cards: Dupont, jittery philosopher, or Christian landowner, or

adulterous humanist—indeed, there’s a wide choice. But it would be hell!

Yes, hell must be like that:

streets filled with shop signs and no way of explaining oneself. One is

classified once and for all.

You, for instance, mon cher compatriote, stop and think of what your

sign would be. You are silent?

Well, you’ll tell me later on. I know mine in any case: a double face, a

charming Janus, and above it the motto of the house: “Don’t rely on it.”

On my cards: “Jean-Baptiste Clamence, play actor.” Why, shortly after

the evening I told you about, I discovered something. When I would leave

a blind man on the sidewalk to which I had convoyed him, I used to tip

my hat to him. Obviously the hat tipping wasn’t intended for him, since

he couldn’t see it. To whom was it addressed? To the public.

After playing my part, I would take the bow. Not bad, eh? Another day

during the same period, to a motorist who was thanking me for helping

him, I replied that no one would have done as much. I meant, of course,

anyone. But that unfortunate slip weighed heavy on me. For modesty,

really, I took the cake.

I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting

with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be

heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting,

especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my

specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I

simply felt released in regard to all for the excellent reason that I

recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than

everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more

skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in

the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority—like

tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner—it was hard

for me not to think that, with a little time for practice, I would

surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this

explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I

was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit

went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.

Along with a few other truths, I discovered these facts little by little

in the period following the evening I told you about. Not all at once

nor very clearly. First I had to recover my memory. By gradual degress I

saw more clearly, I learned a little of what I knew. Until then I had

always been aided by an extraordinary ability to forget. I used to

forget everything, beginning with my resolutions. Fundamentally, nothing

mattered. War, suicide, love, poverty got my attention, of course, when

circumstances forced me, but a courteous, superficial attention. At

times, I would pretend to get excited about some cause foreign to my

daily life. But basically I didn’t really take part in it except, of

course, when my freedom was thwarted. How can I express it? Everything

slid off— yes, just rolled off me.

In the interest of fairness, it should be said that sometimes my

forgetfulness was praiseworthy.

You have noticed that there are people whose religion consists in

forgiving all offenses, and who do in fact forgive them but never forget

them? I wasn’t good enough to forgive offenses, but eventually I always

forgot them. And the man who thought I hated him couldn’t get over

seeing me tip my hat to him with a smile. According to his nature, he

would then admire my nobility of character or scorn my ill breeding

without realizing that my reason was simpler: I had forgotten his very

name.

The same infirmity that often made me indifferent or ungrateful in such

cases made me magnanimous.

I lived consequently without any other continuity than that, from day to

day, of I, I, I. From day to day women, from day to day virtue or vice,

from day to day, like dogs—but every day myself secure at my post. Thus

I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were,

never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely

loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went

through the gestures out of boredom or absentmindedness. Then came human

beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and

that was unfortunate—for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered

anything but myself.

Gradually, however, my memory returned. Or rather, I returned to it, and

in it I found the recollection that was awaiting me. But before telling

you of it, allow me, mon cher compatriote, to give you a few examples

(they will be useful to you, I am sure) of what I discovered in the

course of my exploration.

One day in my car when I was slow in making a getaway at the green light

while our patient fellow citizens immediately began honking furiously

behind me, I suddenly remembered another occasion set in similar

circumstances. A motorcycle ridden by a spare little man wearing

spectacles and plus fours had gone around me and planted itself in front

of me at the red light. As he came to a stop the little man had stalled

his motor and was vainly striving to revive it. When the light changed,

I asked him with my usual courtesy to take his motorcycle out of my way

so I might pass. The little man was getting irritable over his wheezy

motor. Hence he replied, according to the rules of Parisian courtesy,

that I could go climb a tree. I insisted, still polite, but with a

slight shade of impatience in my voice. I was immediately told that in

any case I could go straight to hell. Meanwhile several horns began to

be heard behind me. With greater firmness I begged my interlocutor to be

polite and to realize that he was blocking traffic. The irascible

character, probably exasperated by the now evident ill will of his

motor, informed me that if I wanted what he called a thorough dusting

off he would gladly give it to me. Such cynicism filled me with a

healthy rage and I got out of my car with the intention of thrashing

this coarse individual. I don’t think I am cowardly (but what doesn’t

one think!); I was a head taller than my adversary and my muscles have

always been reliable. I still believe the dusting off would have been

received rather than given. But I had hardly set foot on the pavement

when from the gathering crowd a man stepped forth, rushed at me, assured

me that I was the lowest of the low and that he would not allow me to

strike a man who had a motorcycle between his legs and hence was at a

disadvantage. I turned toward this musketeer and, in truth, didn’t even

see him. Indeed, hardly had I turned my head when, almost

simultaneously, I heard the motorcycle begin popping again and received

a violent blow on the ear. Before I had the time to register what had

happened, the motorcycle rode away. Dazed, I mechanically walked toward

d’Artagnan when, at the same moment, an exasperated concert of horns

rose from the now considerable line of vehicles. The light was changing

to green. Then, still somewhat bewildered, instead of giving a drubbing

to the idiot who had addressed me, I docilely returned to my car and

drove off. As I passed, the idiot greeted me with a “poor dope” that I

still recall.

A totally insignificant story, in your opinion? Probably. Still it took

me some time to forget it, and that’s what counts. Yet I had excuses. I

had let myself be beaten without replying, but I could not be accused of

cowardice. Taken by surprise, addressed from both sides, I had mixed

everything up and the horns had put the finishing touch to my

embarrassment. Yet I was unhappy about this as if I had violated the

code of honor. I could see myself getting back into my car without a

reaction, under the ironic gaze of a crowd especially delighted because,

as I recall, I was wearing a very elegant blue suit. I could hear the

“poor dope” which, in spite of everything, struck me as justified. In

short, I had collapsed in public. As a result of a series of

circumstances, to be sure, but there are always circumstances. As an

afterthought I clearly saw what I should have done. I saw myself felling

d’Artagnan with a good hook to the jaw, getting back into my car,

pursuing the monkey who had struck me, overtaking him, jamming his

machine against the curb, taking him aside, and giving him the licking

he had fully deserved. With a few variants, I ran off this little film a

hundred times in my imagination. But it was too late, and for several

days I chewed a bitter resentment.

Why, it’s raining again. Let’s stop, shall we, under this portico? Good.

Where was I? Oh, yes, honor! Well, when I recovered the recollection of

that episode, I realized what it meant. After all, my dream had not

stood up to facts. I had dreamed—this was now clear—of being a complete

man who managed to make himself respected in his person as well as in

his profession. Half Cerdan, half de Gaulle, if you will. In short, I

wanted to dominate in all things. This is why I assumed the man- ner,

made a particular point of displaying my physical skill rather than my

intellectual gifts. But after having been struck in public without

reacting, it was no longer possible for me to cherish that fine picture

of myself. If I had been the friend of truth and intelligence I claimed

to be, what would that episode have mattered to me? It was already

forgotten by those who had witnessed it. I’d have barely accused myself

of having got angry over nothing and also, having got angry, of not

having managed to face up to the consequences of my anger, for want of

presence of mind. Instead of that, I was eager to get my revenge, to

strike and conquer. As if my true desire were not to be the most

intelligent or most generous creature on earth, but only to beat anyone

I wanted, to be the stronger, in short, and in the most elementary way.

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a

gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy

as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies

on politics and joins the cruelest party. What does it matter, after

all, if by humiliating one’s mind one succeeds in dominating everyone? I

discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.

I learned at least that I was on the side of the guilty, the accused,

only in exactly so far as their crime caused me no harm. Their guilt

made me eloquent because I was not its victim. When I was threatened, I

became not only a judge in turn but even more: an irascible master who

wanted, regardless of all laws, to strike down the offender and get him

on his knees. After that, mon cher compatriote, it is very hard to

continue seriously believing one has a vocation for justice and is the

predestined defender of the widow and orphan.

Since the rain is coming down harder and we have the time, may I impart

to you another dis- covery I made, soon after, in my memory? Let’s sit

down on this bench out of the rain. For cen- turies pipe smokers have

been watching the same rain falling on the same canal. What I have to

tell you is a bit more difficult. This time it concerns a woman. To

begin with, you must know that I always succeeded with women—and without

much effort. I don’t say succeed in making them happy or even in making

myself happy through them. No, simply succeed. I used to achieve my ends

just about whenever I wanted I was considered to have charm. Fancy that!

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having

asked any clear question. And that was true of me at the time. Does that

surprise you? Come now, don’t deny it. With the face I now have, that’s

quite natural. Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for

his face. Mine ... But what matter? It’s a fact—I was considered to have

charm and I took advantage of it.

Without calculation, however; I was in good faith, or almost. My

relationship with women was natural, free, easy, as the saying goes. No

guile in it except that obvious guile which they look upon as a homage.

I loved them, according to the hallowed expression, which amounts to

saying that I never loved any of them. I always considered misogyny

vulgar and stupid, and almost all the women I have known seemed to me

better than I. Nevertheless, setting them so high, I made use of them

more often than I served them. How can one make it out?

Of course, true love is exceptional—two or three times a century, more

or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom. As for me, in

any case I was not the Portuguese Nun. I am not hard-hearted; far from

it—full of pity on the contrary and with a ready tear to boot. Only, my

emotional impulses always turn toward me, my feelings of pity concern

me. It is not true, after all, that I never loved. I conceived at least

one great love in my life, of which I was always the object.

From that point of view, after the inevitable hardships of youth, I was

early focused: sensuality alone dominated my love life. I looked merely

for objects of pleasure and conquest. Moreover, I was aided in this by

my constitution: nature had been generous with me. I was considerably

proud of this and derived many satisfactions therefrom—without my

knowing now whether they were physical or based on prestige. Of course

you will say that I am boasting again. I shan’t deny it and I am hardly

proud of doing so, for here I am boasting of what is true.

In any case, my sensuality (to limit myself to it) was so real that even

for a ten-minute adventure I’d have disowned father and mother, even

were I to regret it bitterly. Indeed—especially for a ten- minute

adventure and even more so if I were sure it was to have no sequel. I

had principles, to be sure, such as that the wife of a friend is sacred.

But I simply ceased quite sincerely, a few days before, to feel any

friendship for the husband. Maybe I ought not to call this sensuality?

Sensuality is not repulsive. Let’s be indulgent and use the word

“infirmity,” a sort of congenital inability to see in love anything but

the physical. That infirmity, after all, was convenient. Combined with

my faculty for forgetting, it favored my freedom. At the same time,

through a certain appearance of inaccessibility and unshakable

independence it gave me, it provided the opportunity for new successes.

As a result of not being romantic, I gave romance something to work on.

Our feminine friends have in common with Bonaparte the belief that they

can succeed where everyone else has failed.

In this exchange, moreover, I satisfied something in addition to my

sensuality: my passion for gambling. I loved in women my partners in a

certain game, which had at least the taste of innocence.

You see, I can’t endure being bored and appreciate only diversions in

life. Any society, however bril- liant, soon crushes me, whereas I have

never been bored with the women I liked. It hurts me to con- fess it,

but I’d have given ten conversations with [6o] Einstein for an initial

rendezvous with a pretty chorus girl. It’s true that at the tenth

rendezvous I was longing for Einstein or^(,) a serious book. In short, I

was never concerned with the major problems except in the intervals

between my little excesses. And how often, standing on the sidewalk

involved in a passionate discussion with friends, I lost the thread of

the argument being developed because a devastating woman was crossing

the street at that very moment.

Hence I played the game. I knew they didn’t like one to reveal one’s

purpose too quickly. First, there had to be conversation, fond

attentions, as they say. I wasn’t worried about speeches, being a

lawyer, nor about glances, having been an amateur actor during my

military service. I often changed parts, but it was always the same

play. For instance, the scene of the incomprehensible attraction, of the

“mysterious something,” of the “it’s unreasonable, I certainly didn’t

want to be attracted, I was even tired of love, etc. …” always worked,

though it is one of the oldest in the repertory. There was also the

gambit of the mysterious happiness no other woman has ever given you; it

may be a blind alley—indeed, it surely is (for one cannot protect

oneself too much)—but it just happens to be unique. Above all, I had

perfected a little speech which was always well received and which, I am

sure, you will applaud. The essential part of that act lay in the

assertion, painful and resigned, that I was nothing, that it was not

worth getting involved with me, that my life was elsewhere and not

related to everyday happiness—a happiness that maybe I should have

preferred to anything, but there you were, it was too late. As to the

reasons behind this decisive lateness, I maintained secrecy, knowing

that it is always better to go to bed with a mystery. In a way,

moreover, I believed what I said; I was living my part. It is not

surprising that my partners likewise began to “tread the boards”

enthusiastically. The most sensitive among them tried to understand me,

and that effort led them to melancholy surrenders. The others, satisfied

to note that I was respecting the rules of the game and had the

tactfulness to talk before acting, progressed without delay to the

realities. This meant I had won—and twice over, since, besides the

desire I felt for them, I was satisfying the love I bore myself by

verifying each time my special powers.

This is so true that even if some among them provided but slight

pleasure, I nevertheless tried to resume relations with them, at long

intervals, helped doubtless by that strange desire kindled by absence

and a suddenly recovered complicity, but also to verify the fact that

our ties still held and that it was my privilege alone to tighten them.

Sometimes I went so far as to make them swear not to give themselves to

any other man, in order to quiet my worries once and for all on that

score. My heart, however, played no part in that worry, nor even my

imagination. A certain type of pretension was in fact so personified in

me that it was hard for me to imagine, despite the facts, that a woman

who had once been mine could ever belong to another. But the oath they

swore to me liberated me while it bound them. As soon as I knew they

would never belong to anyone, I could make up my mind to break off—which

otherwise was almost always impossible for me. As far as they were

concerned, I had proved my point once and for all and assured my power

for a long time.

Strange, isn’t it? But that’s the way it was, mon cher compatriote. Some

cry: “Love me!” Others: “Don’t love me!” But a certain genus, the worst

and most unhappy, cries: “Don’t love me and be faithful to me!”

Except that the proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin

again with each new person.

As a result of beginning over and over again, one gets in the habit.

Soon the speech comes without thinking and the reflex follows; and one

day you find yourself taking without really desiring. Believe me, for

certain men at least, not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest

thing in the world.

This is what happened eventually and there’s no point in telling you who

she was except that, without really stirring me, she had attracted me by

her passive, avid manner. Frankly, it was a shabby experience, as I

should have expected. But I never had any complexes and soon forgot the

person, whom I didn’t see again. I thought she hadn’t noticed anything

and didn’t even imagine she could have an opinion. Besides, in my eyes

her passive manner cut her off from the world. A few weeks later,

however, I learned that she had related my deficiencies to a third

person. At once I felt as if I had been somewhat deceived; she wasn’t so

passive as I had thought and she didn’t lack judgment. Then I shrugged

my shoulders and pretended to laugh. I even laughed outright; clearly

the incident was unimportant. If there is any realm in which modesty

ought to be the rule, isn’t it sex with all the unforeseeable there is

in it? But no, each of us tries to show up to advantage, even in

solitude. Despite having shrugged my shoulders, what was my behavior in

fact? I saw that woman again a little later and did everything necessary

to charm her and really take her back. It was not very difficult, for

they don’t like either to end on a failure. From that moment onward,

without really intending it, I began, in fact, to mortify her in every

way. I would give her up and take her back, force her to give herself at

inappropriate times and in inappropriate places, treat her so brutally,

in every regard, that eventually I attached myself to her as I imagine

the jailer is bound to his prisoner.

And this kept up till the day when, in the violent disorder of painful

and constrained pleasure, she paid a tribute aloud to what was enslaving

her. That very day I began to move away from her. I have forgotten her

since. I’ll agree with you, despite your polite silence, that that

adventure is not very pretty. But just think of your life, mon cher

compatriote! Search your memory and perhaps you will find some similar

story that you’ll tell me later on. In my case, when that business came

to mind, I again began to laugh. But it was another kind of laugh,

rather like the one I had heard on the Pont des Arts. I was laughing at

my speeches and my pleadings in court. Even more at my court pleading

than at my speeches to women. To them, at least, I did not lie much.

Instinct spoke clearly, without subterfuges, in my attitude. The act of

love, for instance, is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity

shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself. Ultimately in that

regrettable story, even more than in my other affairs, I had been more

outspoken than I thought; I had declared who I was and how I could live.

Despite appearances, I was therefore more worthy in my private life—even

when (one might say: especially when) I behaved as I have told you—than

in my great professional flights about innocence and justice. At least,

seeing myself act with others, I couldn’t deceive myself as to the truth

of my nature. No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures—have I read that or

did I think it myself, mon cher compatriote?

When I examined thus the trouble I had in separating definitively from a

woman—a trouble which used to involve me in so many simultaneous

liaisons—I didn’t blame my soft-heartedness.

That was not what impelled me when one of my mistresses tired of waiting

for the Austerlitz of our passion and spoke of leaving me. At once I was

the one who made a step forward, who yielded, who became eloquent. As

for affection and soft-heartedness, I aroused them in women,

experiencing merely the appearance of them myself—simply a little

excited by this refusal, alarmed also by the possible loss of someone’s

affection. At times I truly thought I was suffering, to be sure. But the

rebellious female had merely to leave in fact for me to forget her

without effort, as I forgot her presence when, on the contrary, she had

decided to return. No, it was not love or generosity that awakened me

when I was in danger of being forsaken, but merely the desire to be

loved and to receive what in my opinion was due me. The moment I was

loved and my partner again forgotten, I shone, I was at the top of my

form, I became likable.

Be it said, moreover, that as soon as I had re-won that affection I

became aware of its weight. In my moments of irritation I told myself

that the ideal solution would have been the death of the person I was

interested in. Her death would, on the one hand, have definitively fixed

our relationship and, on the other, removed its compulsion. But one

cannot long for the death of everyone or, in the extreme, depopulate the

planet in order to enjoy a freedom that cannot be imagined otherwise. My

sensibility was opposed to this, and my love of mankind.

The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was

gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but

freedom to come and go—never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I

had just left another’s bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I

had just contracted toward one of them. In any case, however apparently

confused my feelings were, the result I achieved was clear: I kept all

my affections within reach to make use of them when I wanted. On my own

admission, I could live happily only on condition that all the

individuals on earth, or the greatest possible number, were turned

toward me, eternally in suspense, devoid of independent life and ready

to answer my call at any moment, doomed in short to sterility until the

day I should deign to favor them. In short, for me to live happily it

was essential for the creatures I chose not to live at all. They must

receive their life, sporadically, only at my bidding.

Oh, I don’t feel any self-satisfaction, believe me, in telling you this.

Upon thinking of that time when I used to ask for everything without

paying anything myself, when I used to mobilize so many people in my

service, when I used to put them in the refrigerator, so to speak, in

order to have them at hand some day when it would suit me, I don’t know

how to name the odd feeling that comes over me. Isn’t it shame, perhaps?

Tell me, mon cher compatriote, doesn’t shame sting a little? It does?

Well, it’s probably shame, then, or one of those silly emotions that

have to do with honor. It seems to me in any case that that feeling has

never left me since the adventure I found at the heart of my memory,

which I cannot any longer put off relating, despite my digressions and

the inventive efforts for which, I hope, you give me credit.

Look, the rain has stopped! Be kind enough to walk home with me. I am

strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought

of what I still have to say. Oh, well, a few words will suffice to

relate my essential discovery. What’s the use of saying more, anyway?

For the statue to stand bare, the fine speeches must take flight like

pigeons. So here goes. That particular night in November, two or three

years before the evening when I thought I heard laughter behind me, I

was returning to the Left Bank and my home by way of the Pont Royal. It

was an hour past midnight, a fine rain was falling, a drizzle rather,

that scattered the few people on the streets. I had just left a

mistress, who was surely already asleep. I was enjoying that walk, a

little numbed, my body calmed and irrigated by a flow of blood gentle as

the falling rain. On the bridge I passed behind a figure leaning over

the railing and seeming to stare at the river. On closer view, I made

out a slim young woman dressed in black. The back of her neck, cool and

damp between her dark hair and coat collar, stirred me. But I went on

after a moment’s hesitation. At the end of the bridge I followed the

guys toward Saint-Michel, where I lived. I had already gone some fifty

yards when I heard the sound—which, despite the distance, seemed

dreadfully loud in the midnight silence—of a body striking the water. I

stopped short, but without turning around. Almost at once I heard a cry,

repeated several times, which was going downstream; then it suddenly

ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still,

seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn’t stir. I was

trembling, I believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be

quick and I felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have

forgotten what I thought then. “Too late, too far ...” or something of

the sort. I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly

under the rain, I went away. I informed no one.

But here we are; here’s my house, my shelter! Tomorrow? Yes, if you

wish. I’d like to take you to the island of Marken so you can see the

Zuider Zee. Let’s meet at eleven at Mexico City. What?

That woman? Oh, I don’t know. Really I don’t know. The next day, and the

days following, I didn’t read the papers.

IV

A DOLL’S village, isn’t it? No shortage of quaintness here! But I didn’t

bring you to this island for quaintness, cher ami. Anyone can show you

peasant headdresses, wooden shoes, and ornamented houses with fishermen

smoking choice tobacco surrounded by the smell of furniture wax. I am

one of the few people, on the other hand, who can show you what really

matters here.

We are reaching the dike. We’ll have to follow it to get as far as

possible from these too charming houses. Please, let’s sit down. Well,

what do you think of it? Isn’t it the most beautiful negative landscape?

Just see on the left that pile of ashes they call a dune here, the gray

dike on the right, the livid beach at our feet, and in front of us, the

sea the color of a weak lye-solution with the vast sky reflecting the

colorless waters. A soggy hell, indeed! Everything horizontal, no

relief; space is colorless, and life dead. Is it not universal

obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible? No hu- man beings,

above all, no human beings! You and I alone facing the planet at last

deserted! The sky is alive? You are right, cher ami. It thickens,

becomes concave, opens up air shafts and doses cloudy doors. Those are

the doves. Haven’t you noticed that the sky of Holland is filled with

millions of doves, invisible because of their altitude, which flap their

wings, rise or fall in unison, filling the heavenly space with dense

multitudes of grayish feathers carried hither and thither by the wind?

The doves wait up there all year round. They wheel above the earth, look

down, and would like to come down. But there is nothing but the sea and

the canals, roofs covered with shop signs, and never a head on which to

light.

You don’t understand what I mean? I’ll admit my fatigue. I lose the

thread of what I am saying; I’ve lost that lucidity to which my friends

used to enjoy paying respects. I say “my friends,” moreover, as a

convention. I have no more friends; I have nothing but accomplices. To

make up for this, their number has increased; they are the whole human

race. And within the human race, you first of all. Whoever is at hand is

always the first. How do I know I have no friends? It’s very easy: I

discovered it the day I thought of killing myself to play a trick on

them, to punish them, in a way. But punish whom? Some would be

surprised, and no one would feel punished. I realized I had no friends.

Besides, even if I had had, I shouldn’t be any better off. If I had been

able to commit suicide and then see their reaction, why, then the game

would have been worth the candle. But the earth is dark, cher ami, the

coffin thick, and the shroud opaque, The eyes of the soul—to be sure—if

there is a soul and it has eyes! But you see, we’re not sure, we can’t

be sure. Otherwise, there would be a solution; at least one could get

oneself taken seriously. Men are never convinced of your reasons, of

your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your

death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right

only to their skepticism. So if there were the least certainty that one

could enjoy the show, it would be worth proving to them what they are

unwilling to believe and thus amazing them. But you kill yourself and

what does it matter whether or not they believe you? You are not there

to see their amazement and their contrition (fleeting at best), to

witness, according to every man’s dream, your own funeral. In order to

cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.

Besides, isn’t it better thus? We’d suffer too much from their

indifference. “You’ll pay for this!” a daughter said to her father who

had prevented her from marrying a too well groomed suitor. And she

killed herself. But the father paid for nothing. He loved fly-casting.

Three Sundays later he went back to the river—to forget, as he said. He

was right; he forgot. To tell the truth, the contrary would have been

surprising. You think you are dying to punish your wife and actually you

are freeing her.

It’s better not to see that. Besides the fact that you might hear the

reasons they give for your action.

As far as I am concerned, I can hear them now: “He killed himself

because he couldn’t bear ...” Ah, cher ami, how poor in invention men

are! They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it’s quite

possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to

them. So what’s the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself

to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will

take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your

action.

Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made

use of. As for being understood—never!

Besides, let’s not beat about the bush; I love life—that’s my real

weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not

life. Such avidity has something plebeian about it, don’t you think?

Aristocracy cannot imagine itself without a little distance surrounding

itself and its life. One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than

bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself. For example,

after all I have told you, what do you think I developed? An aversion

for myself? Come, come, it was especially with others that I was fed up.

To be sure, I knew my failings and regretted them. Yet I continued to

forget them with a rather meritorious obstinacy. The prosecution of

others, on the contrary, went on constantly in my heart. Of course—does

that shock you? Maybe you think it’s not logical? But the question is

not to remain logical. The question is to slip through and, above

all—yes, above all, the question is to elude judgment. I’m not saying to

avoid punishment, for punishment without judgment is bearable. It has a

name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune.

No, on the contrary, it’s a matter of dodging judgment, of avoiding

being forever judged without ever having a sentence pronounced.

But one can’t dodge it so easily. Today we are always ready to judge as

we are to fornicate. With this difference, that there are no

inadequacies to fear. If you doubt this, just listen to the table

conversation during August in those summer hotels where our charitable

fellow citizens take the boredom cure. If you still hesitate to

conclude, read the writings of our great men of the moment.

Or else observe your own family and you will be edified. Mon cher ami,

let’s not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!

Otherwise, we’ll be left in shreds. We are forced to take the same

precautions as the animal tamer. If, before going into the cage, he has

the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild

animals! I realized this all at once the moment I had the suspicion that

maybe I wasn’t so admirable. From then on, I became distrustful. Since I

was bleeding slightly, there was no escape for me; they would devour me.

My relations with my contemporaries were apparently the same and yet

subtly out of tune. My friends hadn’t changed. On occasion, they still

extolled the harmony and security they found in my company. But I was

aware only of the dissonances and disorder that filled me; I felt

vulnerable and open to public accusation. In my eyes my fellows ceased

to be the respectful public to which I was accustomed. The circle of

which I was the center broke and they lined up in a row as on the

judge’s bench. In short, the moment I grasped that there was something

to judge in me, I realized that there was in them an irresistible

vocation for judgment. Yes, they were there as before, but they were

laughing. Or rather it seemed to me that every one I encountered was

looking at me with a hidden smile. I even had the impression, at that

time, that people were tripping me up. Two or three times, in fact, I

stumbled as I entered public places. Once, even, I went sprawling on the

floor. The Cartesian Frenchman in me didn’t take long to catch hold of

himself and attribute those accidents to the only reasonable

divinity—that is, chance. Nonetheless, my distrust remained.

Once my attention was aroused, it was not hard for me to discover that I

had enemies. In my profession, to begin with, and also in my social

life. Some among them I had obliged. Others I should have obliged. All

that, after all, was natural, and I discovered it without too much

grief. It was harder and more painful, on the other hand, to admit that

I had enemies among people I hardly knew or didn’t know at all. I had

always thought, with the ingenuousness I have already illustrated to

you, that those who didn’t know me couldn’t resist liking me if they

came to know me. Not at all! I encountered hostility especially among

those who knew me only at a distance without my knowing them myself.

Doubtless they suspected me of living fully, given up completely to

happiness; and that cannot be forgiven. The look of success, when it is

worn in a certain way, would infuriate a jackass.

Then again, my life was full to bursting, and for lack of time, I used

to refuse many advances. Then I would forget my refusals, for the same

reason. But those advances had been made me by people whose lives were

not full and who, for that very reason, would remember my refusals.

Thus it is that in the end, to take but one example, women cost me dear.

The time I used to devote to them I couldn’t give to men, who didn’t

always forgive me this. Is there any way out?

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously

consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too

concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape.

Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched. As for me, the injustice was

even greater: I was condemned for past successes. For a long time I had

lived in the illusion of a general agreement, whereas, from all sides,

judgments, arrows, mockeries rained upon me, inattentive and smiling.

The day I was alerted I became lucid; I received all the wounds at the

same time and lost my strength all at once. The whole universe then

began to laugh at me.

That is what no man (except those who are not really alive—in other

words, wise men) can endure. Spitefulness is the only possible

ostentation. People hasten to judge in order not to be judged

themselves. What do you expect? The idea that comes most naturally to

man, as if from his very nature, is the idea of his innocence. From this

point of view, we are all like that little Frenchman at Buchenwald who

insisted on registering a complaint with the clerk, himself a prisoner,

who was recording his arrival. A complaint? The clerk and his comrades

laughed: “Useless, old man.

You don’t lodge a complaint here.” “But you see, sir,” said the little

Frenchman, “my case is exceptional I am innocent!” We are all

exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us

insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the

whole human race and heaven itself. You won’t delight a man by

complimenting him on the efforts by which he has become intelligent or

generous.

On the other hand, he will beam if you admire his natural generosity.

Inversely, if you tell a criminal that his crime is not due to his

nature or his character but to unfortunate circumstances, he will be

extravagantly grateful to you. During the counsel’s speech, this is the

moment he will choose to weep. Yet there is no credit in being honest or

intelligent by birth. Just as one is surely no more responsible for

being a criminal by nature than for being a criminal by circumstance.

But those rascals want grace, that is, irresponsibility, and they

shamelessly allege the justifications of nature or the excuses of

circumstances, even if they are contradictory. The essential thing is

that they should be innocent, that their virtues, by grace of birth,

should not be questioned and that their misdeeds, born of a momentary

misfortune, should never be more than provisional. As I told you, it’s a

matter of dodging judgment. Since it is hard to dodge it, tricky to get

one’s nature simultaneously admired and excused, they all strive to be

rich. Why? Did you ever ask yourself? For power, of course. But

especially because wealth shields from immediate judgment, takes you out

of the subway crowd to enclose you in a chromium-plated automobile,

isolates you in huge protected lawns, Pullmans, first- class cabins.

Wealth, cher ami, is not quite acquittal, but reprieve, and that’s

always worth taking.

Above all, don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere

with them. They merely hope you will encourage them in the good opinion

they have of themselves by providing them with the additional assurance

they will find in your promise of sincerity. How could sincerity be a

condition of friendship? A liking for truth at any cost is a passion

that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It’s a vice, at times a

comfort, or a selfishness. Therefore, if you are in that situation,

don’t hesitate: promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can.

You will satisfy their hidden desire and doubly prove your affection.

This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we.

Rather, we are more in- clined to flee their society. Most often, on the

other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our

weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for

we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be

pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should

like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the

effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough

virtue. We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. Do you

know Dante? Really? The devil you say! Then you know that Dante accepts

the idea of neutral angels in the quarrel between God and Satan. And he

puts them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule of his Hell. We are in the

vestibule, cher ami.

Patience? You are probably right. It would take patience to wait for the

Last Judgment. But that’s it, we’re in a hurry. So much in a hurry, in

deed, that I was obliged to make myself a judge-penitent.

However, I first had to make shift with my discoveries and put myself

right with my contemporaries’ laughter. From the evening when I was

called—for I was really called—I had to answer or at least seek an

answer. It wasn’t easy; for some time I floundered. To begin with, that

perpetual laugh and the laughers had to teach me to see clearly within

me and to discover at last that I was not simple.

Don’t smile; that truth is not so basic as it seems. What we call basic

truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

However that may be, after prolonged research on myself, I brought out

the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized, as a

result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to shine,

humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by

peaceful means and eventually used to achieve, through disinterested

means, everything I desired. For instance, I never complained that my

birthday was overlooked; people were even surprised, with a touch of

admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my

disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in

order to be able to complain to myself. Several days before the famous

date (which I knew very well) I was on the alert, eager to let nothing

slip that might arouse the attention and memory of those on whose lapse

I was counting (didn’t I once go so far as to contemplate falsifying a

friend’s calendar?). Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could

surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.

Thus the surface of all my virtues had a less imposing reverse side. It

is true that, in another sense, my shortcomings turned to my advantage.

For example, the obligation I felt to conceal the vicious part of my

life gave me a cold look that was confused with the look of virtue; my

indifference made me loved; my selfishness wound up in my generosities.

I stop there, for too great a symmetry would upset my argument. But

after all, I presented a harsh exterior and yet could never resist the

offer of a glass or of a woman! I was considered active, energetic, and

my kingdom was the bed. I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t

believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually

betray. Of course, my betrayals didn’t stand in the way of my fidelity;

I used to knock off a considerable pile of work through successive

periods of idleness; and I had never ceased aiding my neighbor, thanks

to my enjoyment in doing so. But however much I repeated such facts to

myself, they gave me but superficial consolations. Certain mornings, I

would get up the case against myself most thoroughly, coming to the

conclusion that I excelled above all in scorn. The very people I helped

most often were the most scorned. Courteously, with a solidarity charged

with emotion, I used to spit daily in the face of all the blind.

Tell me frankly, is there any excuse for that? There is one, but so

wretched that I cannot dream of advancing it. In any case, here it is: I

have never been really able to believe that human affairs were serious

matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was

not in all this I saw around me—which seemed to me merely an amusing

game, or tiresome. There are really efforts and convictions I have never

been able to understand. I always looked with amazement, and a certain

suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money, fell into

despair over the loss of a “position,” or sacrificed themselves with a

high and mighty manner for the prosperity of their family. I could

better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking

and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the

paper, read that the first H- bomb had been exploded, learned about its

wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

To be sure, I occasionally pretended to take life seriously. But very

soon the frivolity of serious- ness struck me and I merely went on

playing my role as well as I could. I played at being efficient,

intelligent, virtuous, civic-minded, shocked, indulgent,

fellow-spirited, edifying ... In short, there’s no need of going on, you

have already grasped that I was like my Dutchmen who are here without

being here: I was absent at the moment when I took up the most space. I

have never been really sincere and enthusiastic except when I used to

indulge in sports, and in the army, when I used to act in plays we put

on for our own amusement. In both cases there was a rule of the game,

which was not serious but which we enjoyed taking as if it were. Even

now, the Sunday matches in an over- flowing stadium, and the theater,

which I loved with the greatest passion, are the only places in the

world where I feel innocent.

But who would consider such an attitude legitimate in the face of love,

death, and the wages of the poor? Yet what can be done about it? I could

imagine the love of Isolde only in novels or on the stage. At times

people on their deathbed seemed to me convinced of their roles. The

lines spoken by my poor clients always struck me as fitting the same

pattern. Whence, living among men without sharing their interests, I

could not manage to believe in the commitments I made. I was courteous

and indolent enough to live up to what was expected of me in my

profession, my family, or my civic life, but each time with a sort of

indifference that spoiled everything. I lived my whole life under a

double code, and my most serious acts were often the ones in which I was

the least involved.

Wasn’t that after all the reason that, added to my blunders, I could not

forgive myself, that made me revolt most violently against the judgment

I felt forming, in me and around me, and that forced me to seek an

escape?

For some time, my life continued outwardly as if nothing had changed I

was on rails and speed- ing ahead As if purposely, people’s praises

increased. And that’s just where the trouble came from.

You remember the remark: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you!”

Ah, the one who said that spoke words of wisdom! Woe to me!

Consequently, the engine began to have whims, inexplicable breakdowns.

Then it was that the thought of death burst into my daily life. I would

measure the years separating me from my end I would look for examples of

men of my age who were already dead.

And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to

accomplish my task. What task? I had no idea. Frankly, was what I was

doing worth continuing? But that was not quite it. A ridiculous fear

pursued me, in fact: one could not die without having confessed all

one’s lies. Not to God or to one of his representatives; I was above

that, as you well imagine. No, it was a matter of confessing to men, to

a friend, to a beloved woman, for example. Otherwise, were there but one

lie hidden in a life, death made it definitive. No one, ever again,

would know the truth on this point, since the only one to know it was

precisely the dead man sleeping on his secret. That absolute murder of a

truth used to make me dizzy. Today, let me interject, it would cause me,

instead, subtle joys. The idea, for instance, that I am the only one to

know what everyone is looking for and that I have at home an object

which kept the police of three countries on the run is a sheer delight.

But let’s not go into that. At the time, I had not yet found the recipe

and I was fretting.

I pulled myself together, of course. What did one man’s lie matter in

the history of generations?

And what pretension to want to drag out into the full light of truth a

paltry fraud, lost in the sea of ages like a grain of sand in the ocean!

I also told myself that the body’s death, to judge from those I had

seen, was in itself sufficient punishment that absolved all. Salvation

was won (that is, the right to disappear definitively) in the sweat of

the death agony. Nonetheless the discomfort grew; death was faithful at

my bedside; I used to get up with it every morning, and compliments

became more and more unbearable to me. It seemed to me that the

falsehood increased with them so inordinately that never again could I

put myself right.

A day came when I could bear it no longer. My first reaction was

excessive. Since I was a liar, I would reveal this and hurl my duplicity

in the face of all those imbeciles, even before they discov- ered it.

Provoked to truth, I would accept the challenge. In order to forestall

the laughter, I dreamed of hurling myself into the general derision. In

short, it was still a question of dodging judgment. I wanted to put the

laughers on my side, or at least to put myself on their side. I

contemplated, for in- stance, jostling the blind on the street; and from

the secret, unexpected joy this gave me I recognized how much a part of

my soul loathed them; I planned to puncture the tires of invalids’

vehicles, to go and shout “Lousy proletarian” under the scaffoldings on

which laborers were working, to slap infants in the subway. I dreamed of

all that and did none of it, or if I did something of the sort, I have

forgotten it. In any case, the very word “justice” gave me strange fits

of rage. I continued, of necessity, to use it in my speeches to the

court. But I took my revenge by publicly inveighing against the

humanitarian spirit; I announced the publication of a manifesto exposing

the oppression that the oppressed inflict on decent people. One day

while I was eating lobster at a sidewalk restaurant and a beggar

bothered me, I called the proprietor to drive him away and loudly

approved the words of that administrator of justice: “You are

embarrassing people,” he said. “Just put yourself in the place of these

ladies and gents, after all!” Finally, I used to express, to whoever

would listen, my regret that it was no longer possible to act like a

certain Russian landowner whose character I admired. He would have a

beating administered both to his peasants who bowed to him and to those

who didn’t bow to him in order to punish a boldness he considered

equally impudent in both cases.

However, I recall more serious excesses. I began to write an “Ode to the

Police” and an “Apotheosis of the Guillotine.” Above all, I used to

force myself to visit regularly the special cafés where our professional

humanitarian free thinkers gathered. My good past record assured me of a

welcome. There, without seeming to, I would let fly a forbidden

expression: “Thank God ...” I would say, or more simply: “My God …” You

know what shy little children our café atheists are. A moment of

amazement would follow that outrageous expression, they would look at

one another dumbfounded, then the tumult would burst forth. Some would

flee the café, others would gabble indignantly without listening to

anything, and all would writhe in convulsions like the devil in holy

water.

You must look on that as childish. Yet maybe there was a more serious

reason for those little jokes. I wanted to upset the game and above all

to destroy that flattering reputation, the thought of which threw me

into a rage. “A man like you ...” people would say sweetly, and I would

blanch. I didn’t want their esteem because it wasn’t general, and how

could it be general, since I couldn’t share it? Hence it was better to

cover everything, judgment and esteem, with a cloak of ridicule. I had

to liberate at all cost the feeling that was stifling me. In order to

reveal to all eyes what he was made of, I wanted to break open the

handsome wag-figure I presented everywhere. For instance, I recall an

informal lecture I had to give to a group of young fledgling lawyers.

Irritated by the fantastic praises of the president of the bar, who had

introduced me, I couldn’t resist long. I had begun with the enthusiasm

and emotion expected of me, which I had no trouble summoning up on

order. But I suddenly began to advise alliance as a system of defense.

Not, I said, that alliance perfected by modern inquisitions which judge

simultaneously a thief and an honest man in order to crush the second

under the crimes of the first. On the contrary, I meant to defend the

thief by exposing the crimes of the honest man, the lawyer in this

instance. I explained myself very clearly on this point:

“Let us suppose that I have accepted the defense of some touching

citizen, a murderer through jealousy. Gentlemen of the jury, consider, I

should say, how venial it is to get angry when one sees one’s natural

goodness put to the test by the malignity of the fair sex. Is it not

more serious, on the contrary, to be by chance on this side of the bar,

on my own bench, without ever having been good or suffered from being

duped? I am free, shielded from your severities, yet who am I? A Louis

XIV in pride, a billy goat for lust, a Pharaoh for wrath, a king of

laziness. I haven’t killed anyone?

Not yet, to be sure! But have I not let deserving creatures die? Maybe.

And maybe I am ready to do so again. Whereas this man—just look at

him—will not do so again. He is still quite amazed to have accomplished

what he has.” This speech rather upset my young colleagues. After a

moment, they made up their minds to laugh at it. They became completely

reassured when I got to my conclusion, in which I invoked the human

individual and his supposed rights. That day, habit won out.

By repeating these pleasant indiscretions, I merely succeeded in

disconcerting opinion somewhat.

Not in disarming it, or above all in disarming myself. The amazement I

generally encountered in my listeners, their rather reticent

embarrassment, somewhat like what you are showing—no, don’t protest—did

not calm me at all. You see, it is not enough to accuse yourself in

order to clear yourself; otherwise, I’d be as innocent as a lamb. One

must accuse oneself in a certain way, which it took me considerable time

to perfect. I did not discover it until I fell into the most utterly

forlorn state. Until then, the laughter continued to drift my way,

without my random efforts succeeding in divesting it of its benevolent,

almost tender quality that hurt me.

But the sea is rising, it seems to me. It won’t be long before our boat

leaves; the day is ending.

Look, the doves are gathering up there. They are crowding against one

another, hardly stirring, and the light is waning. Don’t you think we

should be silent to enjoy this rather sinister moment? No, I interest

you? You are very polite. Moreover, I now run the risk of really

interesting you. Before ex- plaining myself on the subject of

judges-penitent, I must talk to you of debauchery and of the little-

ease.

V

You are wrong, cher, the boat is going at top speed. But the Zuider Zee

is a dead sea, or almost.

With its flat shores, lost in the fog, there’s no saying where it begins

or ends. So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can’t gauge

our speed We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It’s not

navigation but dreaming.

In the Greek archipelago I had the contrary feeling. Constantly new

islands would appear on the horizon. Their treeless backbone marked the

limit of the sky and their rocky shore contrasted sharply with the sea.

No confusion possible; in the sharp light everything was a landmark. And

from one island to another, ceaselessly on our little boat, which was

nevertheless dawdling, I felt as if we were scudding along, night and

day, on the crest of the short, cool waves in a race full of spray and

laughter. Since then, Greece itself drifts somewhere within me, on the

edge of my memory, tirelessly ... Hold on, I, too, am drifting; I am

becoming lyrical! Stop me, cher, I beg you.

By the way, do you know Greece? No? So much the better. What should we

do there, I ask you? There one has to be pure in heart. Do you know that

there male friends walk along the street in pairs holding hands? Yes,

the women stay home and you often see a middle-aged, respectable man,

sporting mustaches, gravely striding along the sidewalks, his fingers

locked in those of his friend. In the Orient likewise, at times? All

right. But tell me, would you take my hand in the streets of Paris?

Oh, I’m joking. We have a sense of decorum; scum makes us stilted.

Before appearing in the Greek islands, we should have to wash at length.

There the air is chaste and sensual enjoyment as transparent as the sea.

And we ...

Let’s sit down on these steamer chairs. What a fog! I interrupted

myself, I believe, on the way to the little-ease. Yes, I’ll tell you

what I mean. After having struggled, after having used up all my in-

solent airs, discouraged by the uselessness of my efforts, I made up my

mind to leave the society of men. No, no, I didn’t look for a desert

island; there are no more. I simply took refuge among women. As you

know, they don’t really condemn any weakness; they would be more

inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman

is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his

harbor, his haven; it is in a woman’s bed that he is generally arrested.

Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise? In distress, I

hastened to my natural harbor. But I no longer indulged in pretty

speeches. I still gambled a little, out of habit; but invention was

lacking. I hesitate to admit it for fear of using a few more naughty

words: it seems to me that at that time I felt the need of love.

Obscene, isn’t it? In any case, I experienced a secret suffering, a sort

of privation that made me emptier and allowed me, partly through

obligation and partly out of curiosity, to make a few commitments.

Inasmuch as I needed to love and be loved, I thought I was in love. In

other words, I acted the fool.

I often caught myself asking a question which, as a man of experience, I

had always previously avoided. I would hear myself asking: “Do you love

me?” You know that it is customary to answer in such cases: “And you?”

If I answered yes, I found myself committed beyond my real feelings. If

I dared to say no, I ran the risk of ceasing to be loved, and I would

suffer therefor. The greater the threat to the feeling in which I had

hoped to find calm, the more I demanded that feeling of my partner.

Hence I was led to ever more explicit promises and came to expect of my

heart an ever more sweeping feeling. Thus I developed a deceptive

passion for a charming fool of a woman who had so thoroughly read “true

love” stories that she spoke of love with the assurance and conviction

of an intellectual announcing the classless society. Such conviction, as

you must know, is contagious.

I tried myself out at tallying likewise of love and eventually convinced

myself. At least until she became my mistress and I realized that the

“true love” stories, though they taught how to talk of love, did not

teach how to make love. After having loved a parrot, I had to go to bed

with a serpent.

So I looked elsewhere for the love promised by books, which I had never

encountered in life.

But I lacked practice. For more than thirty years I had been in love

exclusively with myself. What hope was there of losing such a habit? I

didn’t lose it and remained a trifler in passion. I multiplied the

promises. I contracted simultaneous loves as, at an earlier period, I

had multiple liaisons. In this way I piled up more misfortunes, for

others, than at the time of my fine indifference. Have I told you that

in despair my parrot wanted to let herself die of hunger? Fortunately I

arrived in time and submitted to holding her hand until she met, on his

return from a journey to Bali, the engineer with graying temples who had

already been described to her by her favorite weekly. In any case, far

from finding myself transported and absolved in the whirlwind—as the

saying goes—of passion, I added even more to the weight of my crimes and

to my deviation from virtue. As a result, I conceived such a loathing

for love that for years I could not hear “La Vie en rose” or the

“Liebestod” without gritting my teeth. I tried accordingly to give up

women, in a certain way, and to live in a state of chastity. After all,

their friendship ought to satisfy me. But this was tantamount to giving

up gambling. Without desire, women bored me beyond all expectation, and

obviously I bored them too.

No more gambling and no more theater—I was probably in the realm of

truth. But truth, cher ami, is a colossal bore.

Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of

debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores

silence, and above all, confers immortality. At a certain degree of

lucid intoxication, lying late at night between two prostitutes and

drained of all desire, hope ceases to be a torture, you see; the mind

dominates the whole past, and the pain of living is over forever. In a

sense, I had always lived in debauchery, never having ceased wanting to

be immortal. Wasn’t this the key to my nature and also a result of the

great self-love I have told you about? Yes, I was bursting with a

longing to be immortal. I was too much in love with myself not to want

the precious object of my love never to disappear. Since, in the waking

state and with a little self-knowledge, one can see no reason why

immortality should be conferred on a salacious monkey, one has to obtain

substitutes for that immortality. Because I longed for eternal life, I

went to bed with harlots and drank for nights on end. In the morning, to

be sure, my mouth was filled with the bitter taste of the mortal state.

But, for hours on end, I had soared in bliss. Dare I admit it to you? I

still remember with affection certain nights when I used to go to a

sordid night club to meet a quick-change dancer who honored me with her

favors and for whose reputation I even fought one evening with a bearded

braggart. Every night I would strut at the bar, in the red light and

dust of that earthly paradise, lying fantastically and drinking at

length. I would wait for dawn and at last end up in the always unmade

bed of my princess, who would indulge mechanically in sex and then sleep

without transition. Day would come softly to throw light on this

disaster and I would get up and stand motionless in a dawn of glory.

Alcohol and women provided me, I admit, the only solace of which I was

worthy. I’ll reveal this secret to you, cher ami, don’t fear to make use

of it. Then you’ll see that true debauchery is liberating because it

creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it

remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person. It

is a jungle without past or future, without any promise above all, nor

any immediate penalty. The places where it is practiced are separated

from the world. On entering, one leaves behind fear and hope.

Conversation is not obligatory there; what one comes for can be had

without words, and often indeed without money. Ah, I beg you, let me pay

honor to the unknown and forgotten women who helped me then! Even today,

my recollection of them contains something resembling respect.

In any case, I freely took advantage of that liberation. I was even seen

in a hotel dedicated to what is called sin, living simultaneously with a

mature prostitute and an unmarried girl of the best society. I played

the gallant with the first and gave the second an opportunity to learn

the realities.

Unfortunately the prostitute had a most middle-class nature; she since

consented to write her memoirs for a confessions magazine quite open to

modern ideas. The girl, for her part, got married to satisfy her

unbridled instincts and make use of her remarkable gifts. I am not a

little proud likewise to have been admitted as an equal, at that time,

by a masculine guild too often reviled. But I’ll not insist on that: you

know that even very intelligent people glory in being able to empty one

bottle more than the next man. I might ultimately have found peace and

release in that happy dissipation. But, there too, I encountered an

obstacle in myself. This time it was my liver, and a fatigue so dreadful

that it hasn’t yet left me. One plays at being immortal and after a few

weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next

day.

The sole benefit of that experience, when I had given up my nocturnal

exploits, was that life became less painful for me. The fatigue that was

gnawing at my body had simultaneously cauterized many raw spots in me.

Each excess decreases vitality, hence suffering. There is nothing

frenzied about debauchery, contrary to what is thought. It is but a long

sleep. You must have noticed that men who really suffer from jealousy

have no more urgent desire than to go to bed with the woman they

nevertheless think has betrayed them. Of course, they want to assure

themselves once more that their dear treasure still belongs to them.

They want to possess it, as the saying goes. But there is also the fact

that immediately afterward they are less jealous. Physical jealousy is a

result of the imagination at the same time that it is a self-judgment.

One attributes to the rival the nasty thoughts one had oneself in the

same circumstances. Fortunately excess of sensual satisfaction weakens

both imagination and judgment. The suffering then lies dormant as long

as virility does. For the same reasons adolescents lose their

metaphysical unrest with their first mistress; and certain marriages,

which are merely formalized debauches, become the monotonous hearses of

daring and invention. Yes, cher ami, bourgeois marriage has put our

country into slippers and will soon lead it to the gates of death.

I am exaggerating? No, but I am straying from the subject. I merely

wanted to tell you the advantage I derived from those months of orgy. I

lived in a sort of fog in which the laughter became so muffled that

eventually I ceased to notice it. The indifference that already had such

a hold over me now encountered no resistance and extended its sclerosis.

No more emotions! An even temper, or rather no temper at all. Tubercular

lungs are cured by drying up and gradually asphyxiate their happy owner.

So it was with me as I peacefully died of my cure. I was still living on

my work, although my reputation was seriously damaged by my flights of

language and the regular exercise of my profession compromised by the

disorder of my life. It is noteworthy, however, that I aroused less

resentment by my nocturnal excesses than by my verbal provocations. The

reference, purely verbal, that I often made to God in my speeches before

the court awakened mistrust in my clients.

They probably feared that heaven could not represent their interests as

well as a lawyer invincible when it came to the code of law. Whence it

was but a step to conclude that I invoked the divinity in proportion to

my ignorance. My clients took that step and became scarce. Now and then

I still argued a case. At times even, forgetting that I no longer

believed in what I was saying, I was a good advocate. My own voice would

lead me on and I would follow it; without really soaring, as I once did,

I at least got off the ground and did a little hedgehopping. Outside of

my profession, I saw but few people and painfully kept alive one or two

tired liaisons. It even happened that I would spend purely friendly

evenings, without any element of desire, yet with the difference that,

resigned to boredom, I scarcely listened to what was being said. I

became a little fatter and at last was able to believe that the crisis

was over. Nothing remained but to grow older.

One day, however, during a trip’ to which I was treating a friend

without telling her I was doing so to celebrate my cure, I was aboard an

ocean liner—on the upper deck, of course. Suddenly, far off at sea, I

perceived a black speck on the steel-gray ocean. I turned away at once

and my heart began to beat wildly. When I forced myself to look, the

black speck had disappeared. I was on the point of shouting, of stupidly

calling for help, when I saw it again. It was one of those bits of

refuse that ships leave behind them. Yet I had not been able to endure

watching it; for I had thought at once of a drowning person. Then I

realized, calmly as you resign yourself to an idea the truth of which

you have long known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine

behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the

waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the

limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there

until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would

continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where

lies the bitter water of my baptism. Here, too, by the way, aren’t we on

the water?

On this flat, monotonous, interminable water whose limits are

indistinguishable from those of the land? Is it credible that we shall

ever reach Amsterdam? We shall never get out of this immense holy-water

fount. Listen. Don’t you hear the cries of invisible gulls? If they are

crying in our direction, to what are they calling us?

But they are the same gulls that were crying, that were already calling

over the Atlantic the day I realized definitively that I was not cured,

that I was still cornered and that I had to make shift with it.

Ended the glorious life, but ended also the frenzy and the convulsions.

I had to submit and admit my guilt. I had to live in the little-ease. To

be sure, you are not familiar with that dungeon cell that was called the

little-ease in the Middle Ages. In general, one was forgotten there for

life. That cell was distinguished from others by ingenious dimensions.

It was not high enough to stand up in nor yet wide enough to lie down

in. One had to take on an awkward manner and live on the diagonal; sleep

was a collapse, and waking a squatting. Mon cher, there was genius—and I

am weighing my words—in that so simple invention. Every day through the

unchanging restriction that stiffened his body, the condemned man

learned that he was guilty and that innocence consists in stretching

joyously. Can you imagine in that cell a frequenter of summits and upper

decks? What? One could live in those cells and still be innocent?

Improbable! Highly improbable! Or else my reasoning would collapse. That

innocence should be reduced to living hunchbacked—I refuse to entertain

for a second such a hypothesis. Moreover, we cannot assert the innocence

of anyone, whereas we can state with certainty the guilt of all. Every

man testifies to the crime of all the others—that is my faith and my

hope.

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize

and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to

punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of

the Last Judgment. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it

resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgment of men. For

them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed

to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting- cell, which a nation

recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up

box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that

locks him in his cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face

is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it.

The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is

allowed, it is true, to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human

invention. They didn’t need God for that little masterpiece.

What of it? Well, God’s sole usefulness would be to guarantee innocence,

and I am inclined to see religion rather as a huge laundering venture—as

it was once but briefly, for exactly three years, and it wasn’t called

religion. Since then, soap has been lacking, our faces are dirty, and we

wipe one another’s noses. All dunces, all punished, let’s all spit on

one another and—hurry! to the little-ease!

Each tries to spit first, that’s all. I’ll tell you a big secret, mon

cher. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment.

It takes place every day.

No, it’s nothing; I’m merely shivering a little in this damned humidity.

We’re landing anyway.

Here we are. After you. But stay a little, I beg you, and walk home with

me. I haven’t finished; I must go on. Continuing is what is hard. Say,

do you know why he was crucified—the one you are perhaps thinking of at

this moment? Well, there were heaps of reasons for that. There are

always reasons for murdering a man. On the contrary, it is impossible to

justify his living. That’s why crime always finds lawyers, and innocence

only rarely. But, beside the reasons that have been very well explained

to us for the past two thousand years, there was a major one for that

terrible agony, and I don’t know why it has been so carefully hidden.

The real reason is that he knew he was not altogether innocent. If he

did not bear the weight of the crime he was accused of, he had committed

others—even though he didn’t know which ones. Did he really not know

them? He was at the source, after all; he must have heard of a certain

Slaughter of the Innocents. The children of Judea massacred while his

parents were taking him to a safe place—why did they die if not because

of him? Those blood-spattered soldiers, those infants cut in two filled

him with horror. But given the man he was, I am sure he could not forget

them. And as for that sadness that can be felt in his every act, wasn’t

it the incurable melancholy of a man who heard night after night the

voice of Rachel weeping for her children and refusing all comfort? The

lamentation would rend the night, Rachel would call her children who had

been killed for him, and he was still alive!

Knowing what he knew, familiar with everything about man—ah, who would

have believed that crime consists less in making others die than in not

dying oneself!—brought face to face day and night with his innocent

crime, he found it too hard for him to hold on and continue. It was

better to have done with it, not to defend himself, to die, in order not

to be the only one to live, and to go elsewhere where perhaps he would

be upheld. He was not upheld, he complained, and as a last straw, he was

censored. Yes, it was the third evangelist, I believe, who first

suppressed his complaint.

“Why hast thou forsaken me?”—it was a seditious cry, wasn’t it? Well,

then, the scissors! Mind you, if Luke had suppressed nothing, the matter

would hardly have been noticed; in any case, it would not have assumed

such importance. Thus the censor shouts aloud what he proscribes. The

world’s order likewise is ambiguous.

Nonetheless, the censored one was unable to carry on. And I know, cher,

whereof I speak. There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the

slightest idea how I could reach the next one.

Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man,

or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain

cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman. And he was not

superhuman, you can take my word for it. He cried aloud his agony and

that’s why I love him, my friend who died without knowing.

The unfortunate thing is that he left us alone, to carry on, whatever

happens, even when we are lodged in the little-ease, knowing in turn

what he knew, but incapable of doing what he did and of dying like him.

People naturally tried to get some help from his death. After all, it

was a stroke of genius to tell us: “You’re not a very pretty sight,

that’s certain! Well, we won’t go into the details!

We’ll just liquidate it all at once, on the cross!” But too many people

now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance, even

if they have to trample somewhat on the one who has been there so long.

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to

practice charity. Oh, the injustice, the rank injustice that has been

done him! It wrings my heart!

Good heavens, the habit has seized me again and I’m on the point of

making a speech to the court. Forgive me and realize that I have my

reasons. Why, a few streets from here there is a museum called Our Lord

in the Attic. At the time, they had the catacombs in the attic. After

all, the cellars are flooded here. But today—set your mind at rest—their

Lord is neither in the attic nor in the cellar. They have hoisted him

onto a judge’s bench, in the secret of their hearts, and they smite,

they judge above all, they judge in his name. He spoke softly to the

adulteress: “Neither do I condemn thee!” but that doesn’t matter; they

condemn without absolving anyone. In the name of the Lord, here is what

you deserve. Lord? He, my friend, didn’t expect so much. He simply

wanted to be loved, nothing more. Of course, there are those who love

him, even among Christians. But they are not numerous. He had foreseen

that too; he had a sense of humor. Peter, you know, the coward, Peter

denied him: “I know not the man ... I know not what thou sayest ...

etc.” Really, he went too far! And my friend makes a play on words:

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” Irony could

go no further, don’t you think? But no, they still triumph! “You see, he

had said it!” He had said it indeed; he knew the question thoroughly.

And then he left forever, leaving them to judge and condemn, with pardon

on their lips and the sentence in their hearts.

For it cannot be said there is no more pity; no, good Lord, we never

stop talking of it. Simply, no one is ever acquitted any more. On dead

innocence the judges swarm, the judges of all species, those of Christ

and those of the Antichrist, who are the same anyway, reconciled in the

little-ease. For one mustn’t blame everything exclusively on the

Christians. The others are involved too. Do you know what has become of

one of the houses in this city that sheltered Descartes? A lunatic

asylum. Yes, general delirium and persecution. We, too, naturally, are

obliged to come to it. You have had a chance to observe that I spare

nothing, and as for you, I know that you agree in thought. Wherefore,

since we are all judges, we are all guilty before one another, all

Christs in our mean manner, one by one crucified, always without

knowing. We should be at least if I, Clamence, had not found a way out,

the only solution, truth at last ...

No, I am stopping, cher ami, fear nothing! Besides, I’m going to leave

you, for we are at my door.

In solitude and when fatigued, one is after all inclined to take oneself

for a prophet. When all is said and done, that’s really what I am,

having taken refuge in a desert of stones, fogs, and stagnant waters—an

empty prophet for shabby times, Elijah without a messiah, choked with

fever and alcohol, my back up against this moldy door, my finger raised

toward a threatening sky, showering imprecations on lawless men who

cannot endure any judgment. For they can’t endure it, très cher, and

that’s the whole question. He who clings to a law does not fear the

judgment that reinstates him in an order he believes in. But the keenest

of human torments is to be judged without a law. Yet we are in that

torment. Deprived of their natural curb, the judges, loosed at random,

are racing through their job. Hence we have to try to go faster than

they, don’t we? And it’s a real madhouse. Prophets and quacks multiply;

they hasten to get there with a good law or a flawless organization

before the world is deserted Fortunately, I arrived! I am the end and

the beginning; I announce the law. In short, I am a judge-penitent.

Yes, yes, I’ll tell you tomorrow what this noble profession consists of.

You are leaving the day after tomorrow, so we are in a hurry. Come to my

place, will you? Just ring three times. You are going back to Paris?

Paris is far; Paris is beautiful; I haven’t forgotten it. I remember its

twilights at about this same season. Evening falls, dry and rustling,

over the roofs blue with smoke, the city rumbles, the river seems to

flow backward. Then I used to wander in the streets. They wander now

too, I know! They wander, pretending to hasten toward the tired wife,

the forbidding home ... Ah, mon ami, do you know what the solitary

creature is like as he wanders in big cities? ...

VI

I’M EMBARASSED to be in bed when you arrive. It’s nothing, just a little

fever that I’m treating with gin. I’m accustomed to these attacks.

Malaria, I think, that I caught at the time I was pope. No, I’m only

half joking. I know what you’re thinking: it’s very hard to disentangle

the true from the false in what I’m saying. I admit you are right. I

myself ... You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into

three categories: those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than

being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide,

and finally those who like both lying and the hidden. I’ll let you

choose the pigeonhole that suits me.

But what do I care? Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t

all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t

they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are

true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have

been and of what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the

liar than into the man who tells the truth.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful

twilight that enhances every object.

Well, make of it what you will, but I was named pope in a prison camp.

Sit down, please. You are examining this room. Bare, to be sure, but

clean. A Vermeer, without furniture or copper pots.

Without books either, for I gave up reading some time ago. At one time,

my house was full of half- read books. That’s just as disgusting as

those people who cut a piece off a foie gras and have the rest thrown

out. Anyway, I have ceased to like anything but confessions, and authors

of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of

what they know. When they claim to get to the painful admissions, you

have to watch out, for they are about to dress the corpse. Believe me, I

know what I’m talking about. So I put a stop to it. No more books, no

more useless objects either; the bare necessities, clean and polished

like a coffin. Besides, these Dutch beds, so hard and with their

immaculate sheets—one dies in them as if already wrapped in a shroud,

embalmed in purity.

You are curious to know my pontifical adventures? Nothing out of the

ordinary, you know.

Shall I have the strength to tell you of them? Yes, the fever is going

down. It was all so long ago. It was in Africa where, thanks to a

certain Rommel, war was raging. I wasn’t involved in it—no, don’t worry.

I had already dodged the one in Europe. Mobilized of course, but I never

saw action. In a way, I regret it. Maybe that would have changed many

things? The French army didn’t need me on the front; it merely asked me

to take part in the retreat. A little later I got back to Paris, and the

Germans. I was tempted by the Resistance, about which people were

beginning to talk just about the time I discovered that I was patriotic.

You are smiling? You are wrong. I made my discovery on a subway

platform, at the Châtelet station. A dog had strayed into the labyrinth

of passageways. Big, wiry-haired, one ear cocked, eyes laughing, he was

cavorting and sniffing the passing legs. I have a very old and very

faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive. I

called this one, who hesitated, obviously won over, wagging his tail

enthusiastically a few yards ahead of me.

Just then, a young German soldier, who was walking briskly, passed me.

Having reached the dog, he caressed the shaggy head. Without hesitating,

the animal fell in step with the same enthusiasm and disappeared with

him. From the resentment and the sort of rage I felt against the German

soldier, it was dear to me that my reaction was patriotic. If the dog

had followed a French civilian, I’d not even have thought of it. But, on

the contrary, I imagined that friendly dog as the mascot of a German

regiment and that made me fly into a rage. Hence the test was

convincing.

I reached the Southern Zone with the intention of finding out about the

Resistance. But once there and having found out, I hesitated. The under

taking struck me as a little mad and, in a word, romantic. I think

especially that underground action suited neither my temperament nor my

preference for exposed heights. It seemed to me that I was being asked

to do some weaving in a cellar, for days and nights on end, until some

brutes should come to haul me from hiding, undo my weaving, and then

drag me to another cellar to beat me to death. I admired those who

indulged in such heroism of the depths, but couldn’t imitate them.

So I crossed over to North Africa with the vague intention of getting to

London. But in Africa the situation was not clear; the opposing parties

seemed to be equally right and I stood aloof.

I can see from your manner that I am skipping rather fast, in your

opinion, over these details which have a certain significance. Well,

let’s say that, having judged you at your true value, I am skipping over

them so that you will notice them the better. In any case, I eventually

reached Tunisia, where a fond friend gave me work. That friend was a

very intelligent woman who was involved in the movies. I followed her to

Tunis and didn’t discover her real business until the days following the

Allied landing in Algeria. She was arrested that day by the Germans and

I, too, but without having intended it. I don’t know what became of her.

As for me, no harm was done me and I realized, after considerable

anguish, that it was chiefly as a security measure. I was interned near

Tripoli in a camp where we suffered from thirst and destitution more

than from brutality. I’ll not describe it to you.

We children of the mid-century don’t need a diagram to imagine such

places. A hundred and fifty years ago, people became sentimental about

lakes and forests. Today we have the lyricism of the prison cell. Hence,

I’ll leave it to you. You need add but a few details: the heat, the

vertical sun, the flies, the sand, the lack of water.

There was a young Frenchman with me who had faith. Yes, it’s decidedly a

fairy tale! The Du Guesclin type, if you will. He had crossed over from

France into Spain to go and fight. The Catholic general had interned

him, and having seen that in the Franco camps the chick-peas were, if I

may say so, blessed by Rome, he had developed a profound melancholy.

Neither the sky of Africa, where he had next landed, nor the leisures of

the camp had distracted him from that melancholy. But his reflections,

and the sun, too, had somewhat unhinged him. One day when, under a tent

that seemed to drip molten lead, the ten or so of us were panting among

the flies, he repeated his diatribes against the Roman, as he called

him. He looked at us with a wild stare, his face unshaven for days.

Bare to the waist and covered with sweat, he drummed with his hands on

the visible keyboard of his ribs. He declared to us the need for a new

pope who should live among the wretched instead of praying on a throne,

and the sooner the better. He stared with wild eyes as he shook his

head.

“Yes,” he repeated, “as soon as possible!” Then he calmed down suddenly

and in a dull voice said that we must choose him among us, pick a

complete man with his vices and virtues and swear allegiance to him, on

the sole condition that he should agree to keep alive, in himself and in

others, the community of our sufferings. “Who among us,” he asked, “has

the most failings?” As a joke, I raised my hand and was the only one to

do so. “O.K., Jean-Baptiste will do.” No, he didn’t say just that

because I had another name then. He declared at least that nominating

oneself as I had done presupposed also the greatest virtue and proposed

electing me. The others agreed, in fun, but with a trace of seriousness

all the same. The truth is that Du Guesclin had impressed us. It seems

to me that even I was not altogether laughing. To begin with, I

considered that my little prophet was right; and then with the sun, the

exhausting labor, the struggle for water, we were not up to snuff. In

any case, I exercised my pontificate for several weeks, with increasing

seriousness. Of what did it consist? Well, I was something like a group

leader or the secretary of a cell.

The others, in any case, and even those who lacked faith, got into the

habit of obeying me. Du Guesclin was suffering; I administered his

suffering. I discovered then that it was not so easy as I thought to be

a pope, and I remembered this just yesterday after having given you such

a scornful speech on judges, our brothers. The big problem in the camp

was the water allotment. Other groups, political or sectarian, had

formed, and each prisoner favored his comrades. I was consequently led

to favor mine, and this was a little concession to begin with. Even

among us, I could not maintain complete equality. According to my

comrades’ condition, or the work they had to do, I gave an advantage to

this or that one. Such distinctions are far-reaching, you can take my

word for it. But decidedly I am tired and no longer want to think of

that period. Let’s just say that I closed the circle the day I drank the

water of a dying comrade. No, no, it wasn’t Du Guesclin; he was already

dead, I believe, for he stinted himself too much. Besides, had he been

there, out of love for him I’d have resisted longer, for I loved

him—yes, I loved him, or so it seems to me. But I drank the water,

that’s certain, while convincing myself that the others needed me more

than this fellow who was going to die anyway and that I had a duty to

keep myself alive for them. Thus, cher, empires and churches are born

under the sun of death. And in order to correct somewhat what I said

yesterday, I am going to tell you the great idea that has come to me

while telling all this, which—I’m not sure now—I may have lived or only

dreamed. My great idea is that one must forgive the pope. To begin with,

he needs it more than anyone else. Secondly, that’s the only way to set

oneself above him ...

Did you close the door thoroughly? Yes? Make sure, please. Forgive me, I

have the bolt complex.

On the point of going to sleep, I can never remember whether or not I

pushed the bolt. And every night I must get up to verify. One can be

sure of nothing, as I’ve told you. Don’t think that this worry about the

bolt is the reaction of a frightened possessor. Formerly I didn’t lock

my apartment or my car. I didn’t lock up my money; I didn’t cling to

what I owned. To tell the truth, I was a little ashamed to own anything.

Didn’t I occasionally, in my social remarks, exclaim with conviction:

“Property, gentlemen, is murder!” Not being sufficiently big-hearted to

share my wealth with a deserving poor man, I left it at the disposal of

possible thieves, hoping thus to correct injustice by chance. Today,

moreover, I possess nothing. Hence I am not worried about my safety, but

about myself and my presence of mind I am also eager to block the door

of the closed little universe of which I am the king, the pope, and the

judge.

By the way, will you please open that cupboard? Yes, look at that

painting. Don’t you recognize it? It is “The Just Judges.” That doesn’t

make you jump? Can it be that your culture has gaps? Yet if you read the

papers, you would recall the theft in 1934 m the St. Bavon Cathedral of

Ghent, of one of the panels of the famous van Eyck altarpiece, “The

Adoration of the Lamb.” That panel was called “The Just Judges.” It

represented judges on horseback coming to adore the sacred animal. It

was replaced by an excellent copy, for the original was never found.

Well, here it is. No, I had nothing to do with it. A frequenter of

Mexico City —you had a glimpse of him the other evening—sold it to the

ape for a bottle, one drunken evening. I first advised our friend to

hang it in a place of honor, and for a long time, while they were being

looked for throughout the world, our devout judges sat enthroned at

Mexico City above the drunks and pimps. Then the ape, at my request, put

it in custody here. He balked a little at doing so, but he got a fright

when I explained the matter to him. Since then, these estimable

magistrates form my sole company. At Mexico City, above the bar, you saw

what a void they left.

Why I did not return the panel? Ah! Ah! You have a policeman’s reflex,

you do! Well, I’ll answer you as I would the state’s attorney, if it

could ever occur to anyone that this painting had wound up in my room.

First, because it belongs not to me but to the proprietor of Mexico

City, who deserves it as much as the Archbishop of Ghent. Secondly,

because among all those who file by “The Adoration. of the Lamb” no one

could distinguish the copy from the original and hence no one is wronged

by my misconduct. Thirdly, because in this way I dominate. False judges

are held up to the world’s admiration and I alone know the true ones.

Fourth, because I thus have a chance of being sent to prison—an

attractive idea in a way. Fifth, because those judges are on their way

to meet the Lamb, because there is no more lamb or innocence, and

because the clever rascal who stole the panel was an instrument of the

unknown justice that one ought not to thwart. Finally, because this way

everything is in harmony. Justice being definitively separated from

innocence—the latter on the cross and the former in the cupboard—I have

the way clear to work according to my convictions. With a clear

conscience I can practice the difficult profession of judge-penitent, in

which I have set myself up after so many blighted hopes and

contradictions; and now it is time, since you are leaving, for me to

tell you what it is.

Allow me first to sit up so I can breathe more easily. Oh, how weak I

am! Lock up my judges, please. As for the profession of judge-penitent,

I am practicing it at present. Ordinarily, my offices are at Mexico

City. But real vocations are carried beyond the place of work. Even in

bed, even with a fever, I am functioning. Besides, one doesn’t practice

this profession, one breathes it constantly. Don’t get the idea that I

have talked to you at such length for five days just for the fun of it.

No, I used to talk through my hat quite enough in the past. Now my words

have a purpose. They have the purpose, obviously, of silencing the

laughter, of avoiding judgment personally, though there is apparently no

escape. Is not the great thing that stands in the way of our escaping it

the fact that we are the first to condemn ourselves? Therefore it is

essential to begin by extending the condemnation to all, without

distinction, in order to thin it out at the start.

No excuses ever, for anyone; that’s my principle at the outset. I deny

the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the

extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or

blessing. Everything is simply totted up, and then: “It comes to so

much. You are an evildoer, a satyr, a congenital liar, a homosexual, an

artist, etc.” Just like that. Just as flatly. In philosophy as in

politics, I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and

for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see in me, très cher, an

enlightened advocate of slavery.

Without slavery, as a matter of fact, there is no definitive solution. I

very soon realized that. Once upon a time, I was always talking of

freedom. At breakfast I used to spread it on my toast, I used to chew it

all day long, and in company my breath was delightfully redolent of

freedom. With that key word I would bludgeon whoever contradicted me; I

made it serve my desires and my power. I used to whisper it in bed in

the ear of my sleeping mates and it helped me to drop them I would slip

it ...

Tchk! Tchk! I am getting excited and losing all sense of proportion.

After all, I did on occasion make a more disinterested use of freedom

and even—just imagine my naïveté—defended it two or three times without

of course going so far as to die for it, but nevertheless taking a few

risks. I must be forgiven such rash acts; I didn’t know what I was

doing. I didn’t know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that

is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed

to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a chore, on the contrary, and

a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No champagne,

no friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately.

Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner’s bog before the

judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others’

judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why

freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you’re down with a fever,

or are distressed, or love nobody.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master,

the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God

being out of style. Besides, that word has lost its meaning; it’s not

worth the risk of shocking anyone. Take our moral philosophers, for

instance, so serious, loving their neighbor and all the rest—nothing

distinguishes them from Christians, except that they don’t preach in

churches. What, in your opinion, keeps them from becoming converted?

Respect perhaps, respect for men; yes, human respect. They don’t want to

start a scandal, so they keep their feelings to themselves. For example,

I knew an atheistic novelist who used to pray every night. That didn’t

stop anything: how he gave it to God in his books! What a dusting off,

as someone or other would say. A militant freethinker to whom I spoke of

this raised his hands—with no evil intention, I assure you—to heaven:

“You’re telling me nothing new,” that apostle sighed, “they are all like

that.” According to him, eighty per cent of our writers, if only they

could avoid signing, would write and hail the name of God. But they

sign, according to him, because they love themselves, and they hail

nothing at all because they loathe themselves. Since, nevertheless, they

cannot keep themselves from judging, they make up for it by moralizing.

In short, their Satanism is virtuous. An odd epoch, indeed! It’s not at

all surprising that minds are confused and that one of my friends, an

atheist when he was a model husband, got converted when he became an

adulterer!

Ah, the little sneaks, play actors, hypocrites—and yet so touching!

Believe me, they all are, even when they set fire to heaven. Whether

they are atheists or churchgoers, Muscovites or Bostonians, all

Christians from father to son. But it so happens that there is no more

father, no more rule! They are free and hence have to shift for

themselves; and since they don’t want freedom or its judgments, they ask

to be rapped on the knuckles, they invent dreadful rules, they rush out

to build piles of faggots to replace churches. Savonarolas, I tell you.

But they believe solely in sin, never in grace. They think of it, to be

sure. Grace is what they want—acceptance, surrender, happiness, and

maybe, for they are sentimental too, betrothal, the virginal bride, the

upright man, the organ music.

Take me, for example, and I am not sentimental—do you know what I used

to dream of? A total love of the whole heart and body, day and night, in

an uninterrupted embrace, sensual enjoyment and mental excitement—all

lasting five years and ending in death. Alas!

So, after all, for want of betrothal or uninterrupted love, it will be

marriage, brutal marriage, with power and the whip. The essential is

that everything should become simple, as for the child, that every act

should be ordered, that good and evil should be arbitrarily, hence

obviously, pointed out.

And I agree, however Sicilian and Javanese I may be and not at all

Christian, though I feel friendship for the first Christian of all. But

on the bridges of Paris I, too, learned that I was afraid of freedom. So

hurray for the master, whoever he may be, to take the place of heaven’s

law. “Our Father who art provisionally here ... Our guides, our

delightfully severe masters, O cruel and beloved leaders ...” In short,

you see, the essential is to cease being free and to obey, in

repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that

will be democracy. Without counting, cher ami, that we must take revenge

for having to die alone. Death is solitary, whereas slavery is

collective. The others get theirs, too, and at the same time as

we—that’s what counts. All together at last, but on our knees and heads

bowed.

Isn’t it good likewise to live like the rest of the world, and for that

doesn’t the rest of the world have to be like me? Threat, dishonor,

police are the sacraments of that resemblance. Scorned, hunted down,

compelled, I can then show what I am worth, enjoy what I am, be natural

at last. This is why, très cher, after having solemnly paid my respects

to freedom, I decided on the sly that it had to be handed over without

delay to anyone who comes along. And every time I can, I preach in my

church of Mexico City, I invite the good people to submit to authority

and humbly to solicit the comforts of slavery, even if I have to present

it as true freedom.

But I’m not being crazy; I’m well aware that slavery is not immediately

realizable. It will be one of the blessings of the future, that’s all.

In the meantime, I must get along with the present and seek at least a

provisional solution. Hence I had to find another means of extending

judgment to everybody in order to make it weigh less heavily on my own

shoulders. I found the means. Open the window a little, please; it’s

frightfully hot. Not too much, for I am cold also. My idea is both

simple and fertile.

How to get everyone involved in order to have the right to sit calmly on

the outside myself? Should I climb up to the pulpit, like many of my

illustrious contemporaries, and curse humanity? Very dangerous, that is!

One day, or one night, laughter bursts out without a warning. The

judgment you are passing on others eventually snaps back in your face,

causing some damage. And so what? you ask. Well, here’s the stroke of

genius. I discovered that while waiting for the masters with their rods,

we should, like Copernicus, reverse the reasoning to win out. Inasmuch

as one couldn’t condemn others without immediately judging oneself, one

had to overwhelm oneself to have the right to judge others. Inasmuch as

every judge some day ends up as a penitent, one had to travel the road

in the opposite direction and practice the profession of penitent to be

able to end up as a judge.

You follow me? Good. But to make myself even clearer, I’ll tell you how

I operate.

First I closed my law office, left Paris, traveled. I aimed to set up

under another name in some place where I shouldn’t lack for a practice.

There are many in the world, but chance, convenience, irony, and also

the necessity for a certain mortification made me choose a capital of

waters and fogs, girdled by canals, particularly crowded, and visited by

men from all corners of the earth. I set up my office in a bar in the

sailors’ quarter. The clientele of a port-town is varied. The poor don’t

go into the luxury districts, whereas eventually the gentlefolk always

wind up at least once, as you have seen, in the disreputable places. I

lie in wait particularly for the bourgeois, and the straying bourgeois

at that; it’s with him that I get my best results. Like a virtuoso with

a rare violin, I draw my subtlest sounds from him.

So I have been practicing my useful profession at Mexico City for some

time. It consists to begin with, as you know from experience, in

indulging in public confession as often as possible. I accuse myself up

and down. It’s not hard, for I now have acquired a memory. But let me

point out that I don’t accuse myself crudely, beating my breast. No, I

navigate skillfully, multiplying distinctions and digressions, too—in

short, I adapt my words to my listener and lead him to go me one better.

I mingle what concerns me and what concerns others. I choose the

features we have in common, the experiences we have endured together,

the failings we share—good form, in other words, the man of the hour as

he is rife in me and in others. With all that I construct a portrait

which is the image of all and of no one. A mask, in short, rather like

those carnival masks which are both lifelike and stylized, so that they

make people say: “Why, surely I’ve met him!” When the portrait is

finished, as it is this evening, I show it with great sorrow: “This,

alas, is what I am!” The prosecutor’s charge is finished. But at the

same time the portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror.

Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with

piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames

without losing sight of the effect I am producing, and saying: “I was

the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I” to the

“we.” When I get to “This is what we are,” the trick has been played and

I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup

together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives

me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I

accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I

provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of

the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we

merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze

and horrify ourselves. Just try. I shall listen, you may be sure, to

your own confession with a great feeling of fraternity.

Don’t laugh! Yes, you are a difficult client; I saw that at once. But

you’ll come to it inevitably. Most of the others are more sentimental

than intelligent; they are disconcerted at once.

With the intelligent ones it takes time. It is enough to explain the

method fully to them. They don’t forget it; they reflect. Sooner or

later, half as a game and half out of emotional upset, they give up and

tell all. You are not only intelligent, you look polished by use. Admit,

however, that today you feel less pleased with yourself than you felt

five days ago? Now I shall wait for you to write me or come back. For

you will come back, I am sure! You’ll find me unchanged. And why should

I change, since I have found the happiness that suits me? I have

accepted duplicity instead of being upset about it. On the contrary, I

have settled into it and found there the comfort I was looking for

throughout life. I was wrong, after all, to tell you that the essential

was to avoid judgment. The essential is being able to permit oneself

everything, even if, from time to time, one has to profess vociferously

one’s own infamy. I permit myself everything again, and without the

laughter this time.

I haven’t changed my way of life; I continue to love myself and to make

use of others. Only, the confession of my crimes allows me to begin

again lighter in heart and to taste a double enjoyment, first of my

nature and secondly of a charming repentance.

Since finding my solution, I yield to everything, to women, to pride, to

boredom, to resentment, and even to the fever that I feel delightfully

rising at this moment. I dominate at last, but forever.

Once more I have found a height to which I am the only one to climb and

from which I can judge everybody. At long intervals, on a really

beautiful night I occasionally hear a distant laugh and again I doubt.

But quickly I crush everything, people and things, under the weight of

my own infirmity, and at once I perk up.

So I shall await your respects at Mexico City as long as necessary. But

remove this blanket; I want to breathe. You will come, won’t you? I’ll

show you the details of my technique, for I feel a sort of affection for

you. You will see me teaching them night after night that they are vile.

This very evening, moreover, I shall resume. I can’t do without it or

deny myself those moments when one of them collapses, with the help of

alcohol, and beats his breast. Then I grow taller, très cher, I grow

taller, I breathe freely, I am on the mountain, the plain stretches

before my eyes. How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand

out definitive testimonials of bad character and habits. I sit enthroned

among my bad angels at the summit of the Dutch heaven and I watch

ascending toward me, as they issue from the fogs and the water, the

multitude of the Last Judgment.

They rise slowly; I already see the first of them arriving. On his

bewildered face, half hidden by his hand, I read the melancholy of the

common condition and the despair of not being able to escape it.

And as for me, I pity without absolving, I understand without forgiving,

and above all, I feel at last that I am being adored!

Yes, I am moving about. How could I remain in bed like a good patient? I

must be higher than you, and my thoughts lift me up. Such nights, or

such mornings rather (for the fall occurs at dawn), I go out and walk

briskly along the canals. In the livid sky the layers of feathers become

thinner, the doves move a little higher, and above the roofs a rosy

light announces a new day of my creation. On the Damrak the first

streetcar sounds its bell in the damp air and marks the awakening of

life at the extremity of this Europe where, at the same moment, hundreds

of millions of men, my subjects, painfully slip out of bed, a bitter

taste in their mouths, to go to a joyless work. Then, soaring over this

whole continent which is under my sway without knowing it, drinking in

the absinthe-colored light of breaking day, intoxicated with evil words,

I am happy—I am happy, I tell you, I won’t let you think I’m not happy,

I am happy unto death! Oh, sun, beaches, and the islands in the path of

the trade winds, youth whose memory drives one to despair!

I’m going back to bed; forgive me. I fear I got worked up; yet I’m not

weeping. At times one wanders, doubting the facts, even when one has

discovered the secrets of the good life. To be sure, my solution is not

the ideal. But when you don’t like your own life, when you know that you

must change lives, you don’t have any choice, do you? What can one do to

become another? Impossible. One would have to cease being anyone, forget

oneself for someone else, at least once. But how? Don’t bear down too

hard on me. I’m like that old beggar who wouldn’t let go of my hand one

day on a café terrace: “Oh, sir,” he said, “it’s not just that I’m no

good, but you lose track of the light.” Yes, we have lost track of the

light, the mornings, the holy innocence of those who forgive themselves.

Look, it’s snowing! Oh, I must go out! Amsterdam asleep in the white

night, the dark jade canals under the little snow-covered bridges, the

empty streets, my muted steps—there will be purity, even if fleeting,

before tomorrow’s mud. See the huge flakes drifting against the

windowpanes. It must be the doves, surely. They finally make up their

minds to come down, the little dears; they are covering the waters and

the roofs with a thick layer of feathers; they are fluttering at every

window. What an invasion! Let’s hope they are bringing good news.

Everyone will be saved, eh?—and not only the elect. Possessions and

hardships will be shared and you, for example, from today on you will

sleep every night on the ground for me. The whole shooting match, eh?

Come now, admit that you would be flabbergasted if a chariot came down

from heaven to carry me off, or if the snow suddenly caught fire. You

don’t believe it? Nor do I. But still I must go out.

All right, all right, I’ll be quiet; don’t get upset! Don’t take my

emotional outbursts or my ravings too seriously. They are controlled.

Say, now that you are going to talk to me about yourself, I shall find

out whether or not one of the objectives of my absorbing confession is

achieved. I always hope, in fact, that my interlocutor will be a

policeman and that he will arrest me for the theft of “The Just Judges.”

For the rest—am I right?—no one can arrest me. But as for that theft, it

falls within the provisions of the law and I have arranged everything so

as to make myself an accomplice: I am harboring that painting and

showing it to whoever wants to see it. You would arrest me then; that

would be a good beginning. Perhaps the rest would be taken care of

subsequently; I would be decapitated, for instance, and I’d have no more

fear of death; I’d be saved. Above the gathered crowd, you would hold up

my still warm head, so that they could recognize themselves in it and I

could again dominate—an exemplar. All would be consummated; I should

have brought to a close, unseen and unknown, my career as a false

prophet crying in the wilderness and refusing to come forth.

But of course you are not a policeman; that would be too easy. What? Ah,

I suspected as much, you see. That strange affection I felt for you had

sense to it then. In Paris you practice the noble profession of lawyer!

I sensed that we were of the same species. Are we not all alike,

constantly talking and to no one, forever up against the same questions

although we know the answers in advance?

Then please tell me what happened to you one night on the quays of the

Seine and how you managed never to risk your life. You yourself utter

the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and

that I shall at last say through your mouth: “O young woman, throw

yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the

chance of saving both of us!” A second time, eh, what a risky

suggestion! Just suppose, cher maître, that we should be taken

literally? We’d have to go through with it. Brr ...! The water’s so

cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too

late. Fortunately!

THE END.