then kissed an invisible mouth filled with flowing, silvery saliva; he touched the tip of a flattened breast, a shaven sex of horrifying but fiery nakedness. The taxi steered a lengthy course over the icy waters of the evening to the winking lights of Lourcine. When he climbed out, the young woman, whose name it seemed was Gladys, told him to wipe the lipstick from his mouth.
Simon saw her again. When he left her, on the threshold of her room full of calendars, with its velvet clown cushions on the bed, Gladys would put packets of cigarettes into his greatcoat pockets and tell him that she loved him, using expressions of disgusting obscenity from which he derived a kind of pride.
These dealings no doubt degraded him, but everything seemed to him justified by the freedom he had to roam aimlessly through the streets of the Left Bank; to go and have a lie down in town, in a lonely hotel room inhabited in the morning by a whore who left in it her aroma of heliotrope and soap, sunk in a private sleep that no bugle tone, no second call, was likely to disturb. He was living in a half-dream that bore no relation to his former or his future life; and when he thought about his Chartes dissertation on Charles V, he mostly felt like laughing.
IX
A few days after 1 May, Rosenthal, who was trembling with anger at the thought of the four thousand five hundred preventive arrests which the commissioner of police had organized that year, sent Simon an express letter asking him to come and see him, as though he were in a hurry to retaliate against the forcible measures of the police. André went to put on some civilian clothes he had entrusted to Gladys, then made his way to Avenue Mozart. He would have been ashamed to show himself in the uniform of a colonial regiment anywhere except between the Observatory and the Jardin des Plantes.
Bernard asked Simon how things were going with him and â since it almost always happens that young men lie rather less to their friends than to their parents and are prone to boast to them about things they would hide from their fathers â Simon told him. It had been understood between them for years that they told each other everything. Or almost everything.
It made a lengthy recital â the two barracks, the sergeant-majors, the whores, and the story of Gladys and the taxi from the 12th. These confidences, imparted in Rosenthalâs bedroom in front of the Lenin, the Chirico and the Descartes, suddenly appeared remarkable. Bernard grew annoyed: he had a moralistic side to him and found it hard to endure any of his friends enjoying a relaxed existence. Valuing nothing more highly than fullness and tension, he held the opinion that a man must be uneasy. Finally he upbraided Simon for seeming not to realize the baseness of his life, and told him that this indifference was worse than the enjoyment itself. Simon replied that he realized it perfectly well, but could not care less:
â My only pleasure consists in casting off all restraint, he said. This military life turns my very bones to jelly. I feel myself dissolving altogether. Luckily, Iâve discovered how to turn an idiotic bondage, from which I could get relief only by dint of constant guile and an extremely wearisome presence of mind, into a slightly dreary long vacation . . . My lack of restraint will be only temporary.
â No, said Rosenthal, whose one pleasure was giving advice and warnings to distraught or heedless people, writing MENE TEKEL PERES on every wall. No, this situation canât continue. Itâs high time to steel yourself. Do you want some tea?
Simon replied that he was thirsty and Rosenthal rang. A chambermaid knocked at the door and came in. Bernard gave her instructions with an embarrassed politeness: few practical problems struck him as harder to resolve than his relations with his parentsâ servants, whom he did not know what to call. Simon, who no longer doubted himself since the
Simon saw her again. When he left her, on the threshold of her room full of calendars, with its velvet clown cushions on the bed, Gladys would put packets of cigarettes into his greatcoat pockets and tell him that she loved him, using expressions of disgusting obscenity from which he derived a kind of pride.
These dealings no doubt degraded him, but everything seemed to him justified by the freedom he had to roam aimlessly through the streets of the Left Bank; to go and have a lie down in town, in a lonely hotel room inhabited in the morning by a whore who left in it her aroma of heliotrope and soap, sunk in a private sleep that no bugle tone, no second call, was likely to disturb. He was living in a half-dream that bore no relation to his former or his future life; and when he thought about his Chartes dissertation on Charles V, he mostly felt like laughing.
IX
A few days after 1 May, Rosenthal, who was trembling with anger at the thought of the four thousand five hundred preventive arrests which the commissioner of police had organized that year, sent Simon an express letter asking him to come and see him, as though he were in a hurry to retaliate against the forcible measures of the police. André went to put on some civilian clothes he had entrusted to Gladys, then made his way to Avenue Mozart. He would have been ashamed to show himself in the uniform of a colonial regiment anywhere except between the Observatory and the Jardin des Plantes.
Bernard asked Simon how things were going with him and â since it almost always happens that young men lie rather less to their friends than to their parents and are prone to boast to them about things they would hide from their fathers â Simon told him. It had been understood between them for years that they told each other everything. Or almost everything.
It made a lengthy recital â the two barracks, the sergeant-majors, the whores, and the story of Gladys and the taxi from the 12th. These confidences, imparted in Rosenthalâs bedroom in front of the Lenin, the Chirico and the Descartes, suddenly appeared remarkable. Bernard grew annoyed: he had a moralistic side to him and found it hard to endure any of his friends enjoying a relaxed existence. Valuing nothing more highly than fullness and tension, he held the opinion that a man must be uneasy. Finally he upbraided Simon for seeming not to realize the baseness of his life, and told him that this indifference was worse than the enjoyment itself. Simon replied that he realized it perfectly well, but could not care less:
â My only pleasure consists in casting off all restraint, he said. This military life turns my very bones to jelly. I feel myself dissolving altogether. Luckily, Iâve discovered how to turn an idiotic bondage, from which I could get relief only by dint of constant guile and an extremely wearisome presence of mind, into a slightly dreary long vacation . . . My lack of restraint will be only temporary.
â No, said Rosenthal, whose one pleasure was giving advice and warnings to distraught or heedless people, writing MENE TEKEL PERES on every wall. No, this situation canât continue. Itâs high time to steel yourself. Do you want some tea?
Simon replied that he was thirsty and Rosenthal rang. A chambermaid knocked at the door and came in. Bernard gave her instructions with an embarrassed politeness: few practical problems struck him as harder to resolve than his relations with his parentsâ servants, whom he did not know what to call. Simon, who no longer doubted himself since the
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