has evaporated?”
“Because true intensity is to be found only in something lasting and testing. Don’t you remember the passage in
Confessions
where Rousseau says that barely touching the gown of a chaste woman affords more acute pleasure than possessing a woman of easy virtue?”
“Rousseau was not a well man,” said François.
“I loathe Rousseau,” said Odile.
Feeling them united against me, I set about defending Rousseau, about whom I was actually indifferent, with clumsy vehemence, and the three of us realized that we would now never be able to have a conversation together without it becoming confidential and dangerous beneath its veneer of transparency.
Several times when François was talking about his work I became so fascinated that I forgot my hostile feelings for a few minutes. After dinner one evening, as he walked across the salon with his rolling seaman’s stride, he asked, “Do you know how I spent my evening yesterday, Marcenat? WithAdmiral Mahan’s book, studying Nelson’s battles,” and, in spite of myself, I felt the little thrill of pleasure that seeing André Halff or Bertrand used to give me.
“Really?” I replied. “But were you doing it for your own pleasure or do you think it could be useful for you? Naval procedures must have changed so much. All those stories of boarding enemy ships, favorable winds, and the position to adopt to give a broadside, is that of any value still?”
“Don’t go believing that,” said François. “The qualities that result in victory, on land and at sea, are the same today as they were in Hannibal’s day, or Caesar’s. Take the Battle of the Nile, why were the English successful? … First, Nelson’s tenacity when, having searched all over the Mediterranean for the French fleet and failing to find them, he didn’t abandon his hunt; then the promptness of his decision when he finally found his enemy at anchor and the wind in his favor. Well, do you think those fundamental qualities—tenacity and audacity—are no longer valid because the Dreadnought has replaced the Victory? Not at all, and besides the basic principles of any strategy are immutable. Here, look …”
He took a piece of paper from a table and a pencil from his pocket.
“The two fleets … this arrow is the wind direction … This cross-hatching here, the shallows …”
I leaned over him. Odile had sat down at the same table, her hands together with her chin resting on them. She was admiring François and, from time to time, watched me from beneath her long eyelashes.
“Would she be listening like this,” I thought, “if
I
were describing a battle to her?”
Another fact that struck me during the few visits that François de Crozant made to our house was that Odile often dazzled as she related anecdotes and expressed ideas that I had told her about while we were engaged. She had never mentioned them to me again; I thought she had forgotten everything. Yet now here was all my poor knowledge resuscitated to amaze another man with the masculine clarity of a woman’s mind. As I listened to her, I remembered that this had been the case with Denise Aubry too, and that when we take great care to instruct an individual, we are almost always working for another man’s benefit.
The strange thing is that the beginnings of a true relationship between them probably coincided withwhat was a brief period of relative security for me. François and Odile, who had openly compromised themselves in front of me and all our friends for several weeks, suddenly became extremely cautious, rarely appearing together and never in the same group in a salon. She did not talk about him, and if, out of curiosity, another woman pronounced his name in her presence, she replied with such perfect carelessness that I myself was taken in by it for a few weeks. Unfortunately, as Odile herself said, I was demonically intuitive wherever she was concerned, and it was not long before logical
“Because true intensity is to be found only in something lasting and testing. Don’t you remember the passage in
Confessions
where Rousseau says that barely touching the gown of a chaste woman affords more acute pleasure than possessing a woman of easy virtue?”
“Rousseau was not a well man,” said François.
“I loathe Rousseau,” said Odile.
Feeling them united against me, I set about defending Rousseau, about whom I was actually indifferent, with clumsy vehemence, and the three of us realized that we would now never be able to have a conversation together without it becoming confidential and dangerous beneath its veneer of transparency.
Several times when François was talking about his work I became so fascinated that I forgot my hostile feelings for a few minutes. After dinner one evening, as he walked across the salon with his rolling seaman’s stride, he asked, “Do you know how I spent my evening yesterday, Marcenat? WithAdmiral Mahan’s book, studying Nelson’s battles,” and, in spite of myself, I felt the little thrill of pleasure that seeing André Halff or Bertrand used to give me.
“Really?” I replied. “But were you doing it for your own pleasure or do you think it could be useful for you? Naval procedures must have changed so much. All those stories of boarding enemy ships, favorable winds, and the position to adopt to give a broadside, is that of any value still?”
“Don’t go believing that,” said François. “The qualities that result in victory, on land and at sea, are the same today as they were in Hannibal’s day, or Caesar’s. Take the Battle of the Nile, why were the English successful? … First, Nelson’s tenacity when, having searched all over the Mediterranean for the French fleet and failing to find them, he didn’t abandon his hunt; then the promptness of his decision when he finally found his enemy at anchor and the wind in his favor. Well, do you think those fundamental qualities—tenacity and audacity—are no longer valid because the Dreadnought has replaced the Victory? Not at all, and besides the basic principles of any strategy are immutable. Here, look …”
He took a piece of paper from a table and a pencil from his pocket.
“The two fleets … this arrow is the wind direction … This cross-hatching here, the shallows …”
I leaned over him. Odile had sat down at the same table, her hands together with her chin resting on them. She was admiring François and, from time to time, watched me from beneath her long eyelashes.
“Would she be listening like this,” I thought, “if
I
were describing a battle to her?”
Another fact that struck me during the few visits that François de Crozant made to our house was that Odile often dazzled as she related anecdotes and expressed ideas that I had told her about while we were engaged. She had never mentioned them to me again; I thought she had forgotten everything. Yet now here was all my poor knowledge resuscitated to amaze another man with the masculine clarity of a woman’s mind. As I listened to her, I remembered that this had been the case with Denise Aubry too, and that when we take great care to instruct an individual, we are almost always working for another man’s benefit.
The strange thing is that the beginnings of a true relationship between them probably coincided withwhat was a brief period of relative security for me. François and Odile, who had openly compromised themselves in front of me and all our friends for several weeks, suddenly became extremely cautious, rarely appearing together and never in the same group in a salon. She did not talk about him, and if, out of curiosity, another woman pronounced his name in her presence, she replied with such perfect carelessness that I myself was taken in by it for a few weeks. Unfortunately, as Odile herself said, I was demonically intuitive wherever she was concerned, and it was not long before logical
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