The Conspiracy. Paul Nizan

engraved; it was Pluvinage who made the suggestion.

      The year was ending. Rosenthal wanted everything to be ready for November. He invested the same impatience in this project that could sometimes draw him into pursuing a woman. Everything that Bernard undertook had to be accomplished at such a rapid pace that he seemed to have little time for living; to be preparing himself for a death full of regrets, memories, plans. His friends dared not resist him: such impatient individuals do sometimes play the role of leaders. Besides, it was Rosenthal who had found the funds for the journal: those twenty-five thousand francs, that skill in worldly matters, gave him the right and the means to convince young people who had not yet emerged from their studies and the confinement of the lycée, and to whose eyes money seemed absolutely magical.

      III

      In Rue d’Ulm it was that uncertain time when examinations are over and you have to wait for the results in a state of extreme idleness that is full of charm for naturally lazy adolescents forced for years into absurd labours.

      Laforgue used to spend whole afternoons on a divan covered in a golden material now grown very dark. He would take a book and begin to read, but he would soon fall asleep. When he was too hot, he would go down to the ground floor and take a shower, or a glass of something in a bar in Rue Claude-Bernard.

      One afternoon at around four, someone knocked: it was Pauline D., a young woman (no longer all that young) who from time to time used to come and see Laforgue in Rue d’Ulm, when she felt like being kissed. Laforgue had met her on a little beach in Britanny, where the young men would kiss the young women after strolls back and forth along the sea-wall, when they had stretched out on the sand and were disarmed by the darkness, the stars or the green phosphorescence of the sea which came to sputter out at their feet. Philippe always had great trouble keeping the conversation going with Pauline: he told himself he had never detested a woman as much as her, but since he did not have all that many opportunities to caress a bosom and legs, he made the best of it. He used to tell her roughly:

      — You know incredible people, like the parish priest of the Madeleine and the military governor of Paris. To think you’re the niece of a police commissioner! What on earth do you come here for?

      One day Pauline had taken him to a charity sale in the Hôtel des Invalides. It was spring on the streets. War invalids, sitting in their little carriages, read their newspapers in the sun. General Gouraud was parading his empty sleeve among the ladies of the Union of the Women of France; these former nurses, forewarned about the illusion amputees entertain (as much of a byword as Aristotle’s marble, or the well-worn quips of opticians), would move aside to avoid knocking against the empty sleeve, the phantom arm: did they picture the general suddenly letting himself go and releasing the scream of pain he had suppressed to the last on the fields of battle? Objects were being sold that nobody wanted to buy – it is always like that at sales, but luckily gifts are always needed for housekeepers or poor relations – cushions, mats, brushes and utensils made by blind veterans and sad as their guide-dogs, or by the yellow and black wards of the French nuns of Annam and the Somali Coast. Pauline always reminded Laforgue of wartime in the provinces, when he used to go each Thursday to the Sainte-Madeleine convent hospital to see the wounded making macramé or knitting mufflers and the sisters running about – those holy young women who had never had such a good time – and when, on Sunday evenings after he had served at the Office, tinkling the altar bells in front of the soldiers who would be dozing and thinking they were as well off there as anywhere, the convalescents used to give him cigarettes which made him throw up; returning home in a taxi with Pauline kissing him, he told himself that she was acceptable only as a childhood memory, the image of the blue-veiled nurses with their breasts so lovely beneath their square tuckers, beneath the throb of their epidemic medallions.

      Pauline began talking about the Conservatory auditions and the exhibition of artworks on loan from Rome; she never had a great deal to do, she did not miss a concert, an exhibition or a big sale; she used to go one day a week to a surgery and advise young mothers about the feeding of newborn infants and the illnesses of early childhood; she did not have much money; she was not getting married.

      Laforgue affected never to set foot in a picture gallery or an art dealer’s, in the Opera House or the Salle Pleyel: this was typical of him. Like his friends, he used to proclaim proudly to all and sundry that he didn’t give a fig for painting, music or the theatre, and that he preferred bars, fairs at the Belfort Lion, neighbourhood cinemas and the festivals in Avenue des Gobelins. This was a kind of challenge they threw out to people for whom the arts served as a merit, a justification or an alibi. Since he knew Spain and Italy quite well, Philippe could have spoken all the same about painting; but Pauline did not come to Rue d’Ulm to have a serious talk about pictures or music, and Laforgue considered there was no good reason to take the trouble to be polite. He sat down next to Pauline on the divan and she told him he wasn’t very chatty.

      — I’m sorry Pauline, he said. And Heaven knows there’s a lot going on! Thirty degrees in the shade at Perpignan, an anti-cyclone from beyond the Sargasso Sea is moving towards the Azores. The financier Loewenstein has drowned in the Channel, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange is significantly affected. Maya is playing at the Théâtre de l’Avenue, where we shall not be going. There were forty-eight dead at Roche-la-Molière, but since they’re miners the accident is hardly of much consequence; and M. Tardieu has had an informal chat with the wounded, which was extremely helpful. In Paris . . .

      — Just kiss me, said Pauline.

      Philippe kissed her and found a slightly irritated pleasure in doing so, because summer perspiration made Pauline’s lips rather salty, her lipstick had an odd taste, and she was one of those impossible women who parade all their feelings, tremble when you touch their breasts and late in life will stage perfectly faked nervous breakdowns.

      ‘Such airs and graces!’, thought Laforgue. ‘How would I look if Bloyé came home, with this histrionic girl apparently in a trance? Perhaps I’d better go and lock the door.’

      He detached himself from Pauline and went over to shoot the bolt.

      — Do you by any chance have evil intentions? she asked with a little contrived laugh. I’d probably better take off my dress.

      — I think so too, said Laforgue.

      Pauline stood up and took off her dress, a dress the colour of dead leaves that actually made a dry little rustle like dead leaves; she was wearing a mauve slip with broad strips of ochred lace running across her bosom and her legs.

      ‘This woman has no taste,’ Philippe said to himself: he liked women to wear either virginal underwear or the extravagant artifices of the tarts at the Madeleine or the Opéra.

      She had a rather skinny torso and shoulders, but fairly heavy legs and hips for which Philippe had a sufficient liking to forgive her her underwear. She stretched out on the divan and spread her dress over her knees; Laforgue, lying alongside that moist body, was thinking he ought to have drawn the curtain, what with all that sun they had full in their eyes and which was highlighting the freckles on Pauline’s white skin above the broad hem of her stockings; but he was beginning to purr and couldn’t face getting up. Pauline was not a woman with whom there was any question of going all the way; she used to defend herself with a stubborn presence of mind that scarcely hampered her pursuit of pleasure. She closed her eyes; the make-up disappeared from her cheeks; the movement of her belly was reminiscent of the spasmodic, dreamy throbbing of an insect’s abdomen; she was alone, absolutely enclosed within herself and the strange concentration of pleasure; her heart beat strongly throughout this intense labour; Laforgue remembered that he had not shaved that morning, and that Pauline would get red spots round her mouth and pink patches in the hollow of her shoulder – but since he was thinking about this alien being with resentment, he congratulated himself on that. These caresses, these movements, these jerky exhalations involved a mute and shifting torpor, a blind urgency, a grimness that seemed never-ending. Suddenly, however, Pauline clenched her teeth, opened her eyes again, and Laforgue was furious to see that distraught look – that anguish of the runner who has given his all – and the girl’s body grew taut, her thighs locked with incredible force upon Laforgue’s wrist, while he himself achieved a dubious pleasure.