Simone Beauvoir - She Came to Stay

‘My nice little hotel. Fortunately, I can rely on her inertia.’

Pierre walked over to the pile of manuscripts stacked on the table.

‘You know,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll hang on to Monsieur le Vent. This fellow interests me, he ought to be encouraged. I’ll ask him to have dinner with us one of these evenings so that you can form some opinion of him.’

‘I also want to look at Hyacinthe,’ said Françoise. ‘I think it’s promising.’

‘Show it to me,’ said Pierre. He began to look through the manuscript and Françoise leaned over his shoulder to read with him. She was not in a good mood: alone with Pierre, she would have got the private view over and done with very quickly, but with Xavière about, everything tended to become burdensome, it made one feel that one was walking through life with clods of clay on the soles of one’s shoes. Pierre should never have decided to wait for her; even he looked as though he had got out of the wrong side of the bed. Nearly half an hour passed before Xavière knocked. Then they hurried downstairs.

‘Where do you want to go?’ said Françoise.

‘I don’t mind,’ said Xavière.

‘Since we’ve only an hour,’ said Pierre, ‘let’s go to the Dôme.’

‘How cold it is,’ said Xavière, tightening her scarf round her face.

‘It’s only a few steps from here,’ said Françoise.

‘We haven’t got the same conception of distance,’ said Xavière whose face was screwed up.

‘Or of time,’ said Pierre dryly.

Françoise was beginning to read Xavière very well. Xavière knew that she was in the wrong. She thought they were angry with her and she was taking the lead; and besides, her attempts at moving had worn her out. Françoise wanted to take her arm: wherever they had gone on Friday night, they had walked arm in arm, and kept in step.

‘No,’ said Xavière, ‘it’s much faster on one’s own.’

Pierre’s face darkened again, Françoise was afraid he was going to lose his temper. They sat down at the back of the café.

‘You know,’ said Françoise, ‘this private view won’t be at all interesting. Aunt’s protégés never have an ounce of talent, she’s never been known to fail in that respect.’

‘I don’t care a hang about that,’ said Xavière. ‘It’s the reception I’m interested in. Pictures always bore me stiff.’

‘That’s because you’ve never seen any,’ said Françoise. ‘If you were to come with me to exhibitions, or even go to the Louvre …’

‘That wouldn’t make any difference,’ said Xavière. She made a wry face. ‘A picture is so arid, it’s completely flat.’

‘If you were to get to know a little about it, I’m sure you would enjoy it,’ said Françoise.

‘You mean I would understand why I ought to enjoy it,’ said Xavière. ‘I’d never be satisfied with that. The day when I no longer feel anything, I’m not going to look for excuses to feel.’

‘What you call feeling is really a way of understanding,’ said Françoise. ‘You like music, well then …!’

Xavière stopped her short.

‘You know, when people speak about good and bad music, it goes right over my head,’ she said with aggressive modesty. ‘I don’t understand the first thing about it. I like the notes for themselves; the sound alone is enough for me.’ She looked Françoise in the eye. ‘The pleasures of the mind are repulsive to me.’

When Xavière was being obstinate it was useless to argue. Françoise looked reproachfully at Pierre; after all, it was he who had wanted to wait for Xavière, he could at least join in the conversation, instead of entrenching himself behind a sardonic smile.

‘I warn you that the reception, as you call it, is not a bit amusing,’ said Françoise. ‘Just a lot of people exchanging polite remarks.’

‘Oh, still there’ll be a crowd, and excitement,’ said Xavière in a tone of passionate insistence.

‘Do you feel a need for excitement now?’

‘Of course I need it!’ said Xavière, and a wild untamed look glinted in her eyes. ‘Shut up in that room from morning till night, why, I’ll go mad! I can’t stand it there any more, you can have no idea how happy I’ll be to leave that place.’

‘Who prevents you from going out?’ asked Pierre.

‘You say that there isn’t any fun in going dancing with women, but Begramian or Gerbert would be only too glad to take you, and they dance very well,’ said Françoise.

Xavière shook her head.

‘Once you decide to have a good time to order, it’s always pitiful.’

‘You want everything to fall into your lap like manna from heaven,’ said Françoise, ‘you don’t deign to lift your little finger, and then you proceed to take it out on everyone. Obviously …’

‘There must be some countries in the world,’ said Xavière, as if in a dream, ‘warm countries – Greece or Sicily – where it surely isn’t necessary to lift a finger.’ She scowled. ‘Here you have to grab with both hands – and to get what?’

‘You have to do the same out there,’ said Françoise.

Xavière’s eyes began to sparkle.

‘Where is that red island that’s completely surrounded by boiling water?’ she said hungrily.

‘Santorin, one of the isles of Greece,’ said Françoise. ‘But that isn’t exactly what I told you. Only the cliffs are red, and the sea boils only between two small black islets thrown up by volcanic eruptions. Oh, I remember,’ she said, warming to her subject, ‘a lake of sulphurous water in the midst of the lava. It was all yellow and edged by a peninsula as black as anthracite and on the other side of this black strip the sea was a dazzling blue.’

Xavière looked at her with rapt attention.

‘When I think of all you’ve seen,’ she said in a voice filled with resentment.

‘You consider that it’s quite undeserved,’ said Pierre.

Xavière looked him up and down. She pointed to the dirty leather banquettes, the grubby tables.

‘To think, after seeing all that, that you can come and sit here.’

‘What good would it do to pine away with regrets?’ asked Françoise.

‘Of course, you don’t want to have any regrets,’ said Xavière. ‘You are so anxious to be happy.’ She looked away into space. ‘But I wasn’t born resigned.’

Françoise was cut to the quick. Surely she couldn’t contemptuously push aside the acceptance of this happiness that seemed to her so clearly to be asserting itself. Right or wrong, she no longer regarded Xavière’s words as outbursts: they held a complete set of values that ran counter to hers. However much she refused to acknowledge this fact, its existence was awkward.

‘This life of ours is no resignation,’ she said sharply. ‘We love Paris, and these streets, and these cafés.’

‘How can anyone love sordid places, and hideous things, and all these wretched people?’ Xavière’s voice emphasized her epithets with disgust.

‘The point is that the whole world interests us,’ said Françoise. ‘You happen to be a little aesthete. You want unadulterated beauty; but that’s a very narrow point of view.’

‘Am I supposed to be interested in that saucer because it presumes to exist?’ asked Xavière, and she looked at the saucer with annoyance. ‘It’s quite enough that it’s there.’ With intentional naïveté she added: ‘I should have thought that when one is an artist, it is just because one likes beautiful things.’

‘That depends on what you call beautiful things,’ said Pierre.

Xavière stared at him.

‘Heavens! you’re listening,’ she said, wide-eyed but gently. ‘I thought you were lost in deep thought.’

‘I’m paying close attention.’