Thursday morning, at the library
Earlier this morning, coming down the hotel stairs, I heard Lucie complaining for the hundredth time to the patronne, while polishing the steps. The patronne was speaking with difficulty and in short sentences, because she hadn't put her false teeth in yet; she was almost naked, in a pink dressing-gown with Turkish slippers. Lucie was dirty as usual; every now and then she stopped rubbing and sat back on her heels to look at the patronne. She spoke without pausing, with a serious expression.
"I'd be much happier if he went with other women," she said; "it wouldn't make any difference to me, so long as it didn't do him any harm."
She was talking about her husband: at the age of about forty this swarthy little woman had bought herself, with her savings, a good-looking young man, a fitter at the Lecointe works. Her married life is anything but happy. Her husband doesn't beat her, isn't unfaithful to her: he drinks, he comes home drunk every night. He's in a bad way; in three months I have seen him turn yellow and melt away. Lucie thinks it's the drink. My opinion is that he's got tuberculosis.
"You've got to get on top of it," said Lucie.
It's gnawing away at her, I'm sure of that, but slowly, patiently: she gets on top of it, incapable either of consoling herself or of abandoning herself to her unhappiness. She thinks about it a little bit, a very little bit, now and then; she cadges a scrap of it. Especially when she is with people, because they console her and also because it comforts her a little to talk about it in a calm voice, as if she were giving advice. When she is alone in the rooms, I hear her humming to prevent herself from thinking. She is morose all day long, suddenly weary and sullen.
"It's there," she says, touching her throat, "it won't go down."
She suffers like a miser. She must be miserly too with her pleasures. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she could be free of this monotonous suffering, of these grumblings which start up as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't long to suffer once for all, to drown herself in despair. But in any case, that would be impossible for her: she is too set in her ways.
Thursday afternoon
Monsieur de Rollebon was extremely ugly. Queen Marie Antoinette was fond of calling him her 'dear monkey'. Yet he had all the women of the Court, not by clowning like Voisenon the baboon, but by a magnetism which drove his beautiful victims to the worst excesses of passion. He schemed and plotted, played a somewhat suspicious part in the affair of the Necklace, and disappeared in 1790, after being in close connection with Mirabeau-Tonneau and Nerciat. He turned up again in Russia, where he helped to assassinate Paul I, and from there he travelled to the most distant lands, to the Indies, China, Turkestan. He smuggled, plotted, spied. In 1813 he returned to Paris. By 1816 he had become all-powerful: he was the sole confidant of the Duchesse D'Angoulême. This capricious old woman, obsessed by horrible childhood memories, used to calm down and smile when she saw him. Through her, he ruled the roost at Court. In March 1820 he married Mademoiselle de Roquelaure, a very beautiful girl of eighteen. Monsieur de Rollebon was seventy; he enjoyed the supreme honours, was at the zenith of his life. Seven months later, accused of treason, he was arrested and thrown into a dungeon where he died after five years of imprisonment, without ever having been brought to trial.
It is with a certain melancholy that I have re-read this note by Germain Berger [Mirabeau-Tonneau et ses amis, page 406, note 2, Champion, 1906 (Editors' footnote)]. It was through these few lines that I first came to know Monsieur de Rollebon. How attractive he seemed to me, and how I loved him straightaway, on the basis of these few words! It is for his sake, for the sake of that little fellow, that I am here. When I returned from my travels, I could just as well have settled in Paris or in Marseille. But most of the documents concerning the Marquis's long stays in France are in the Municipal Library of Bouville. Rollebon was the squire of Marommes. Before the war, you could still find one of his descendants in that little town, an architect called Rollebon-Campouyré, who, on his death in 1912, left an important legacy to the Bouville library: some letters of the Marquis, a fragment of a diary, and papers of all sorts. I haven't gone through it all yet.
I am happy to have found these notes again. It is ten years since I last read them. My writing has changed, or so it seems to me: I used to write in a smaller hand. How I loved Monsieur de Rollebon that year! I remember one evening - a Tuesday evening: I had worked all day long in the Mazarine; I had just realized, from his correspondence of 1789-90, the masterly way in which he duped Nerciat. It was dark, I was going down the avenue du Maine, and on the corner of the rue de la Gaîté I bought some chestnuts. How happy I was! I laughed all by myself at the thought of the face Nerciat must have made when he came back from Germany. The Marquis's face is like this ink: it has grown much paler since I started taking an interest in him.
In the first place, as from 1801, I can't understand his behaviour anymore. This isn't for lack of documents: letters, fragments of memoirs, secret reports, police records. On the contrary, I have almost too many of these. What is lacking in all this testimony is firmness and consistency. True, they don't contradict one another, but they don't agree with one another either; they don't seem to concern the same person. And yet other historians are working on documents of the same sort. How do they do it? Is it that I am more scrupulous or less intelligent? In any case, put like that, the question leaves me completely cold. At bottom, what am I looking for? I don't know. For a long time, Rollebon the man has interested me more than the book to be written. But now, the man ... the man is beginning to bore me. It is the book to which I am growing attached, and I feel an every-increasing compulsion to write it - the older I get, you might say.
Obviously it is possible to agree that Rollebon took an active part in the assassination of Paul I, and that he then accepted an important espionage mission to the Orient on behalf of the Czar and consistently betrayed Alexander for Napoleon's benefit. At the same time he may have carried on an active correspondence with the Comte d'Artois and sent him unimportant information in order to convince him of his loyalty: none of all that is improbable, and Fouché, at the same period, was playing a much more complex and dangerous game. Possibly the Marquis also trafficked in rifles with the Asiatic principalities for his own profit.
Well, yes: he may have done all that, but there's no proof that he did: I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are reasonable hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I am only too well aware that they come from me, that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a single glimmer comes from Rollebon's direction. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them. I have the impression of doing a work of pure imagination. And even so, I am certain that characters in a novel would appear more realistic, or in any case would be more amusing.