Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

“Chantepie!”

He looked around to see whether one of those notes was not lying around that Chantepie left whenever he went out shopping to inform or ask questions of his master: “Has monsieur thought about tomorrow’s dinner?” or “The shirts have not come back, there was no word from the laundryman: monsieur must not scold me”.

Lying on top of the kitchen scales, Pierre found an envelope addressed to him:

Monsieur,

I want to respectfully say to monsieur that I no longer wish to serve him and that I’m off and that’s that. I’ve been to see Doctor Abraham the same one who cancels monsieur’s fines for me becoz he is the town councillor and who also gives me free consultations without making me pay even though he’s Jewish. “Chantepie you must calm down, you’re the delicate sort and cannot endure for long the heavy work that is put upon you, you’re killing yourself Chantepie.” “Monsieur Abraham,” I replied to him, “I would be happy to die on the job for I have no children and nothing but disappointments and no money.”

It’s not the muscles shrinking it’s the nerves that are killing me and I can’t stand monsieur any longer I’m fed up with rushing around for him all the time without a break and always at the double I can’t wait to slow down I swallow my tears but I’m going after so many years without whingeing I’m not angry with monsieur who was always honest with me and good and who often picked me up when I was feeling gloomy and when I couldn’t stand up on account of my rheumatism, monsieur is not stupid monsieur will understand.

Sincerely yours.

Chantepie (Gasparin)

“So Chantepie’s leaving too!” said Pierre mockingly. “Here I am twice cuckolded, and in the rarest manner, cuckold without a wife. Chantepie and Placide both agreeing to blame me for excessive speed. It’s comical!

“Meanwhile, here I am alone. Alone, alone,” he repeated as he paced up and down the hall. “If this continues I shall soon have no one to speak to. I shall think aloud like the polar explorers.

“Alone! In fact, it’s only right. What is speed if not a race that is won, the prize for which is loneliness. We sow what we reap… we sow in the hope that the seed will not grow again,” Pierre concluded angrily. “I’m the champion of adversity. I’ve endured that invisible pressure that infiltrates us and is known as slowness better than others. I am a sporting spectacle,” he concluded proudly.

“Yes, but what about when I’m old? When I’ll have lost my spurt (it’s the spurt that loses its edge first), and then my starting speed, when my pace has slowed down, when I start to look like everyone else, what will become of me?

“No, I’ll never be old. The day that slowness gets the better of me I shall die of asphyxiation. Death is probably nothing more than a difference of pressure between our outer and our inner beings. When the outer one becomes the stronger, we die.

“Nevertheless, I won’t always be able to pass through people like a ray, without clinging on to any of them. Human beings have a reality, a volume, movement: what a shock there’ll be when we meet one another! Or what they call meeting! That is to say exchange faithfulness, warmth, vitality, and all part of an intimacy that I have never known until now. In short, the day I fall in love with a woman, when there will be someone else close to me apart from colleagues or servants, from people I lunch, dine, sleep with, paddle or pedal with — the day when I shall have to split a part of myself in two, hoping that that part also splits into new sections which will be my children…

“It’s strange that with other people, all this should happen smoothly, without their even seeming to notice it; they must have an instinct that’s lacking in me and that operates differently. They bond together somehow… haphazardly… but it’s happiness all the same. What’s more,” he added to comfort himself, “it’s not without its difficulties: the pieces function and get stuck and even break up… at the law courts. But since the universal mechanism encompasses specific cogs, the world continues to roll along. Therefore I don’t have to worry about it.

“It’s me I ought to worry about. I’m frightened of not being normal, of being unnatural. I’m not sure that an understanding between me and other people is possible. The proof: Placide and Chantepie.

“Love is a dangerous territory for athletes. During the wars, the clearest skies were those in which the greatest number of aviators were killed. What will happen to me when I experience love?

“For I’m ready for love just as I am for death, or for poverty; I’m not the kind to tiptoe his way around the elemental forces and the great affairs of life. I shall pay cash on the nail when the time comes for me to become involved and commit myself.

“To do so you need to know yourself well, know who you are, what you’re worth. I believed myself to be a man like any other man, one merely endowed with a little more liveliness. Is this liveliness that I’m so proud of speed? Or is it a way of dissembling and dragging one’s feet, a delaying tactic, a way of avoiding the real answers, of substituting the great leap that every man must make into the unknown with a series of small hops? But Chantepie has left me. My cat has left me. Placide is leaving me. I have no friends. (He always dwelt on this.) Were I to ransack my bottom drawer, all I would come up with are relatives or colleagues. Am I a monster? My pulse is regular and my blood pressure is about normal. I know of no physical defects, my family background is excellent, my spinal cord would be the envy of a tightrope-walker. So why do people avoid me? Why am I left on my own? I thought of myself as a ball of fire; perhaps I’m just burnt out.”

Pierre had reached that point where he was no longer capable of expressing himself in sentences. Or else he no longer dared to.

He remembered something Regencrantz had said: “By moving so quickly, are you fleeing or pursuing?” “If I am fleeing,” he said to himself, “what exactly am I fleeing from?”

When he began to tackle this riddle, the fugitive found himself surrounded by question marks that held him back like hooks.

“ONE BEHIND MY NECK, really hot… One behind my left leg. This one’s cold and is freezing my right leg!”

Bonne de Boisrosé is surrounded by rubber hot-water bottles. She looks like a horse wading through a river on wineskins.

The table has been placed at the foot of the bed, a pretty little hexagonal chess table, lent by the uncle, on which the glasses touch one another, with a place laid at each of the six sides. The Boisrosé girls are serving at table, for the maid only comes in the morning. Maids have been solicited on several occasions by means of advertisements, but the concierge had painted such a colourful picture of the Boisrosé household beforehand that they never got beyond the entrance hall.

Fromentine has placed a white lotus flower in a celadon full of water in the centre of the table. Hedwige is putting the plates on top of the oven to warm. They have washed, for once discarding the bathrobes, morning coats, dressing gowns and other indoor clothes which they live in. Hedwige is wearing white: it’s Angélique’s dress. Angélique is in black: it’s Fromentine’s dress. Fromentine is in black and white: she has borrowed the dress from her elder sister and the tunic from her younger one; the gold necklaces are from her mother. Bonne de Boisrosé is wearing guipure, her bust resting on sheets trimmed with Valenciennes lacework, looking like a hairdresser’s model on a pedestal covered with ruffled material.

Pierre Niox is coming to dinner. He has been invited, ostensibly to thank him for his flowers, but in reality to discuss the sale of the Mas Vieux. Madame de Boisrosé had decided that this time it should be Angélique who would raise the subject, Hedwige not having proved up to the mark since she had allowed two opportunities to pass without reaching a conclusion.