The Conspiracy. Paul Nizan

We’re crazy, she sighed.

      She stretched, closed her eyes again. Later, she raised herself on one elbow, took a mirror from her handbag and looked at herself:

      — I do look a sight! she exclaimed.

      — A sorry sight, said Philippe.

      She was dishevelled, beads of sweat still bedewed her temples, her nostrils, the roots of her hair, after the hard begetting of pleasure. Laforgue looked at those pale lips:

      ‘Love doesn’t suit women,’ he said to himself.

      — Wipe your mouth, said Pauline. If your friends saw all that lipstick . . .

      She covered her breasts, which were set rather low, then stood up to slip on her dress. Pauline accomplished with admirable promptitude the difficult transition from the disorders of pleasure to life in society: with her clean face, her smooth hair, her ankle-length dress, nobody would have dreamed of showing her insufficient respect. She wanted to talk: idle chatter was one of the last echoes of pleasure for her. She read the titles of the books lying about everywhere; Laforgue had just finished a Greek year, the books were austere, on his table there were the Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics and Simplicius’ Commentary. Pauline sat down again on the divan. Her dress revealed the great silken beaches of her stockings; she looked at Philippe with a killing smile intended to speak volumes.

      ‘That’s quite enough for today,’ thought Laforgue. ‘We’re not accomplices on the strength of so little.’

      — How exciting it must be, all that Greek wisdom! she exclaimed.

      — As if I didn’t know! replied Laforgue.

      — So much more exciting than a woman like me, isn’t that so? sighed Pauline. A woman of no importance . . .

      — No comparison, said Philippe, telling himself: ‘She’s simpering, this is the limit.’ But you remind me, I was busy working when you arrived. It was one of my good days, would you believe . . .

      — Which must mean, replied Pauline, that I might perhaps now relieve you of my presence.

      Laforgue shrugged his shoulders slightly, but Pauline smiled: it was over, she was dressed again, she knew she could not demand of men any passionate gratitude for what she gave them.

      Laforgue accompanied her to the Rue d’Ulm door, she went off in the direction of the gate and the porter’s lodge.

      ‘One’s really too polite,’ he thought. ‘This time I should have had that girl.’

      Bloyé arrived at the foot of the portico steps, he was returning from the gardens. Laforgue said to him, rather loudly:

      — Bloyé, do you see that lady? Well, she doesn’t go all the way!

      Pauline turned round and cast an angry glance at them. Laforgue told himself ashamedly that the insult would not prevent her from returning, that she was not so proud – and he went back inside to wash his hands.

      This is how some of their love affairs used to pass off: it will perhaps be understood why these young men generally spoke of women with a crudity full of resentment. This department of their lives was not in order.

      At parties, at dances, during the holidays, they would meet girls whose lips before too long they could almost always taste, whose breasts and nerveless legs they could caress; but these brief strokes of luck never went very far, and left them irritating memories that engendered rage more than love. They thought with fury about how the girls were waiting for older men than they to marry them: how they were reserving their bodies. Philippe, when he danced with them, would sniff them with an animal mistrust; he preferred the insolent perfume of the tarts with whom he used to form easy liaisons on Boulevard Montparnasse or Boulevard Saint-Michel. Those gaudy women would permit silent relations, free from the theatricals of language and protocol; they were labourers in an absent-minded eroticism denuded of anything resembling an unlawful complicity.

      Rosenthal did not breathe a word about any women he might know. Bloyé used to go once a month to a house in Boulevard de Grenelle, from which he would hear, in the furthest bedroom, the trains roaring past on the elevated track where it entered the La Motte-Picquet Métro station. Jurien was sleeping with the maid from a little bar in Rue Saint-Jacques, a red and tawny woman with a missing incisor. Pluvinage’s lady friend was a tall, mannish girl who worked in an office.

      ‘What a dreadful creature!’ thought Laforgue in his bed that evening, mulling over Pauline’s visit before falling asleep and thinking with some distress that he really should have had her. ‘I don’t like this little war of escapes, these solitary pleasures. Let’s hurry up and be done with onanism for two.’

      He is a bit quick to generalize his own experiences. The fact is, he knows only whores or young girls, no women: which amounts to saying he knows nothing about anything. As yet, he has access only to that desert of solitude and bitterness through which a young man shapes his course towards love; of pleasure itself, he knows only a kind of organic wrench. He has never met a woman who has said to him dreamily after lovemaking:

      — How painful it must be for you too!

      He hopes to discover that love is a suspension of hostilities when, for a split second, a man and a woman escape from hatred and from themselves; when they forget themselves like two wartime soldiers fraternizing between the lines around a well or the burial of the dead.

      ‘When I know that,’ he said to himself, ‘will it be much more fun?’

      IV

      Half-way through November and with the interminable family holidays now over, Civil War made its appearance, with Pluvinage’s machine-gun, which they had finally adopted, in black on the blue cover. They were all rather proud of themselves because of their names in capitals on the contents page and Serge’s machine-gun.

      People took out subscriptions. At the editorial offices they had established in a damp and gloomy little shop in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, where the electric lamps were on all day, they received enthusiastic letters written by students from Dijon and Caen or Aix-en-Provence – people are so bored in the provinces that the faintest cry uttered in Paris will always find echoes there – or by country schoolteachers, sentimental and critical; by women; by lunatics, who would send them plans for perpetual Peace, suppressed inventions, symbolic fates, the imaginary documents and the defence speeches of never-ending trials, or heartrending appeals to Justice: their unknown friends consisted above all of defeated people. There also arrived abusive letters, and letters along the lines of Aren’t-you-ashamed-of-yourself-young-man, because Civil War expressed rather well a natural state of fury, and its editors used to attack, by name, living and genuinely respectable individuals. The reasons they used to give for these indictments, though based on a great display of philosophy, were not all rigorous or valid; but when you think that France at that time, by way of great men, had Prime Minister Poincaré, M. Tardieu and M. Maginot, it must be admitted that their instinct ran no risk of leading them far astray.

      The team’s first political memory went back to nineteen hundred and twenty-four. That was a year which had begun with deaths, with the disappearance of the most considerable symbols or actors of the first years of the Peace: Lenin had died in January, Wilson in February, Hugo Stinnes in April. In May, elections full of poetic enthusiasm had brought the Left Cartel to power: having just got rid of the Horizon-Blue Chamber, people thought war was over and done with for good and they were going quietly to recommence the little regular shift to the left in which serious historians see the Republic’s secret, finding that this providential inevitability solves many things and allows everyone to sleep like a log. In November, to please a country which in five months had not stopped hoping, it was decided to transfer the body of Jean Jaurès to the Panthéon, where the man who died in July ’14 was awaited by the grateful Fatherland and the mortal remains of the Great Men – La Tour-d’Auvergne, Sadi Carnot, Berthelot, Comte Timoléon de Cossé-Brissac and Comte Paigne-Dorsenne.

      That year Laforgue, Rosenthal and Bloyé were at Louis-le-Grand, preparing for the Ecole Normale. The lycée was a kind of great barracks