Monday

How could I have written this absurd, pompous sentence yesterday:

      'I was alone, but I walked like a band of soldiers descending on a town.'

      I have no need to speak in flowery language.  I am writing to understand certain circumstances.  I must beware of literature.  I must let my pen run on, without searching for words.

      What really disgusts me is having been sublime yesterday evening.  When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes.  I knew very well that I was puffing myself up with heroism, but I let myself go, I enjoyed it.  After that, the next day I felt as disgusted as if I had awoken in a bed full of vomit.  I don't vomit when I'm drunk, but it would be better if I did.  Yesterday I didn't even have the excuse of drunkenness.  I got worked up like a fool.  I need to clean myself up with abstract thoughts, as transparent as water.

      This feeling of adventure definitely doesn't come from events: I have proved that.  It's rather the way in which moments are linked together.  This, I think, is what happens: all of a sudden you feel that time is passing, that each moment leads to another moment, this one to yet another and so on; that each moment destroys itself and that it's no use trying to hold back, etc., etc., and then you attribute this property to the events which appear to you in the moments; you extend to the contents what appertains to the form.  In point of fact, people talk a lot about this famous passing of time, but you scarcely see it.  You see a woman, you think that one day she will be old, only you don't see her grow old.  But there are moments when you think you see her growing old and you feel yourself growing old with her: that is the feeling of adventure.

      If I remember rightly, they call that the irreversibility of time.  The feeling of adventure would simply be that of the irreversibility of time.  But why don't we always have it?  Is it because time isn't always irreversible?  There are moments when you get the impression that you can do what you want, go forward or back, that it has no importance; and then other moments when you feel that the mesh has tightened, and in these cases it's not a question of failing in your attempt because you could never start again.

      Anny used to get the most out of time.  When she was at Djibouti and I was at Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she contrived to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were only sixty minutes, exactly sixty minutes, before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one.  I remember one of those terrible evenings.  I had to leave at midnight.  We had gone to an open-air cinema; we were desperately unhappy, she as much as I.  Only she led the dance.  At eleven o'clock, at the beginning of the main picture, she took my hand and pressed it between her hands without a word.  I felt myself flooded with a bitter joy and I understood, without needing to look at my watch, that it was eleven o'clock.  From that moment on we began to feel the minutes passing.  That time we were leaving each other for three months.  At one moment they projected a completely white picture on the screen, the darkness lifted, and I saw that Anny was crying.  Then, at midnight, she let go of my hand, after pressing it violently; I got up and left without saying a single word to her.  That was a job well done.

Seven o'clock in the evening

A working day.  It didn't go too badly; I wrote six pages, with a certain pleasure.  The more so in that they were six pages of abstract considerations on the reign of Paul I.  After yesterday's orgy, I stayed tightly buttoned up all day.  It would have been absolutely useless to appeal to my heart!  But I felt quite at ease taking the Russian aristocracy to pieces.

      But this Rollebon irritates me.  He makes a great mystery of the smallest things.  What could he have been doing in the Ukraine in August 1804?  He speaks of his trip in veiled terms:

      Posterity will judge whether the efforts, which success was unable to reward, did not deserve something better than a brutal rejection and humiliations which I have had to bear in silence, when I carried in my breast the wherewithal to silence the scoffers and fill them with fear.

      I let myself be caught once, when he was very reticent in a pompous way about a little trip he made to Bouville in 1790.  I wasted a month checking up on all his movements.  Finally it turned out that he had made the daughter of one of his tenant farmers pregnant.  Can it be that he is nothing more than a hoaxer?

      I feel full of ill-will towards that lying little fop.  Perhaps this is out of injured vanity: I was delighted to find him lying to others, but I would have liked him to make an exception of me; I thought that we were as thick as thieves and that he would be sure to end up by telling me the truth.  He has told me nothing, nothing at all; nothing more than he told Alexander or Louis XVIII whom he fooled to the top of their bent.  It matters a great deal to me that Rollebon should have been a decent fellow.  A rogue of course; who isn't?  But a big rogue or a little one?  I don't have a high enough regard for historical research to waste my time over a dead man whose hand, if he were alive, I wouldn't deign to touch.  What do I know about him?  You couldn't dream of a finer life than his: but did he live it?  If only his letters weren't so formal.... Ah, I wish I had known the look in his eyes, perhaps he had a charming way of cocking his head to one side, or of shrewdly placing his long index finger against his nose, or else, sometimes, between two polite lies, flying into a sudden temper which he could promptly stifle.  But he is dead: all that remains of him is a Treatise on Strategy and some Reflections on Virtue.

      If I let myself go, I should imagine him so well: beneath his brilliant irony which has made so many victims, he is a simple man, almost innocent.  He thinks little, but at all times, thanks to a profound intuition, he does exactly what should be done.  His rascality is frank, spontaneous, generous, as sincere as his love of virtue.  And when he has thoroughly betrayed his benefactor and friends, he looks gravely back over the events, to draw a moral from them.  He has never imagined that he had the slightest right over other people, any more than other people over him: he regards the gifts life has given him as unjustified and gratuitous.  He attaches himself passionately to everything but detaches himself easily.  And he has never written his letters or his works himself: he has always had them composed by the public letter-writer.

      But if this is where all my work has led me, I would have been better of writing a novel about the Marquis de Rollebon.

Eleven o'clock in the evening

I had dinner at the Rendez-vous des Cheminots.  Since the patronne was there, I had to fuck her, but it was really out of politeness.  She disgusts me slightly, she is too white and, besides, she smells like a new-born baby.  She pressed my head against her breast in a burst of passion: she thinks this is the right thing to do.  As for me, I toyed absentmindedly with her sex under the bedclothes; then my arm went to sleep.  I was thinking about Monsieur de Rollebon: after all, why shouldn't I write a novel on his life?  I let my arm move along the woman's side and suddenly I saw a little garden with low, wide-spreading trees from which huge hairy leaves were hanging.  Ants were running about everywhere, centipedes and moths.  There were some even more horrible animals: their bodies were made of slices of toast such as you put under roast pigeon; they were walking sideways with crab-like legs.  The broad leaves were black with animals.  Behind the cacti and the Barbary fig trees, the Velleda of the municipal park was pointing to her sex.  "This park smells of vomit," I shouted.

      "I didn't want to wake you up," said the patronne, "but the sheet got rucked up under my backside and, besides, I have to go down to attend to the customers from the Paris train."