Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

And during the months that followed (for Lezo and Georges joined us at Montpalais, in Gascony, where we soon went for the summer) the impression remained with me that indecision brought out the most heroic in both of them. Lezo always said the most unusual thing spontaneously, like, ‘The Buddhists were surrealist — or let us say Dadaist?’ and this would send Georges into a holy fury. Such frivolity should have been pardoned for, apart from the learning behind it, it was not so absurd. But in exasperation Georges would say something like, ‘You should be a journalist of philology or a trader in vocables!’ Moved by the helplessness of Lezo, for he was innocent as a child, Madeleine would go into the kitchen and make some hot coffee.

But when Georges spoke, even if she sat cross-legged, Madeleine would bend forward, bring her two feet together, and listen as one would to a hero, to a saint. For Georges spoke with the noble anguish of the believer, with the feeling that if God is not true he must be made true, and that if God could not be made true then must impious man be made to go through hellfire so that God might be, and in the image Georges had given the Supreme Being. Like Shatov, Georges could have said ‘I must, must believe in God.’

His sincerity was moving: one felt he bore the heavy history of humanity on his bent back. He carried our sorrows and our stupidities, rags that we threw on his back, as he went along the street; the more you threw, the more he blessed, for in the earth, deep in the mud, in the shine of the dung-lice and in the wound of the dog; in spittle and in dustbin-bone; in the face of a wriggling pink prostitute; would Georges find his proof of God. For him, to be was to know evil existed, to acknowledge sin was to be already at the ladder of the divine. ‘Dieu est, parce que le mal est,’ he used to repeat. And I often thought Georges was like some municipal street-cleaner in the Middle Ages, who after carrying the dirt on his back would make a bonfire on the other side of the rampart, and having warmed himself would look into the round space, cross himself, and see God. That Georges had seen God you could see from the pleroma of his face.

Madeleine threw all her rags on Georges, as though she were helping someone to be himself. And she felt much lighter after this performance. She hated him to be so impervious: Georges seemed to have only metaphysical interests. When, at Montpalais, we went out on our evening walks Lezo would stick to me, for Lezo wanted to know more of India, of Sanskrit, Buddhism, Jainism, the Lingayats; even the religion and the language of the Todas; and he knew more about India than I did myself. Georges and Madeleine would go off on some quiet mountain footpath, step by step, as if Georges had not only one arm but one leg as well. Sometimes when he stood before a boulder on the path, lost in some discourse of his own, Madeleine would help him as she would a father — though he was only thirty-one — and give him a hand to cross over to the other side.

She cared for his presence a great deal, did Madeleine, and the respect she showed him was not altogether happy for a Brahmin husband to bear. She felt that here was a man that possessed a secret knowledge of something, some magic that could make mountains move, or the seas recede. And Georges was too distant and too whole to think he had any other feeling for Madeleine but the most brotherly; he almost felt a paternal affection for her, and besides he liked being with her. Her agnosticism was childish, he knew, for her innocence was so great. God could not but inhabit where innocence was. In fact the moment Madeleine acknowledged her innocence God would shine on her soul. He was there already. ‘You are not a saint, you are not a heathen — you’re a girl,’ he would remark, just to exasperate her.

But when Georges went off on some abstruse theory of docetic Christology, or the theory of incarnation among the Monophysites, she would enjoy his tortuous logomachy as though it was so much time gained, and so much argument against some unnameable enemy.

~

Montpalais is a little château on the top of a sharp monticule, as they say in France, a lone, eleventh-century bastion, with many gaping eyes and hands and feet, all torn to bits, first of all by the Saracens against whom it was built. The comtes de Montpalais were cousins and vassals of the Ducs of Montségur, and when the Cathar heresy came the comte rose against his own overlord, joined the Dominicans — he had meanwhile married Isobel de Navarre — and fought with such violence that even today, in the region, they say ‘courage a celui de Montpalais’, meaning headstrong as an ass.

The castle was fortified again during the wars of religion, Comte Henri de Montpalais having joined Henri IV, and when this liberal-hearted prince went to Paris and was crowned king there was Monseigneur Henri, Comte de Montpalais, first as adjutant-general in the royal cavalry, and later as minister of marine. He enriched himself thus with booty from the Spaniards, but because of some strange streak of cruelty in him his wife left him and ran away; later he was shut up in the tower, on the second floor, where they say he still walks about in the costume of the Grenadiers.

Apart from Isobel of Navarre the women in the chateau were never very interesting, it would seem, except another Isobel, daughter of Louis de Montpalais; Isobel who though so near to Spain would visit Montaigne in his country house, write verses in the Italian manner, and was known to have ridden a horse in battle. The story of her lovers is the stuff of all the poetry round Montpalais, and when a girl is beautiful they call her Isobel-Marie, for by adding the name of the Virgin they feel she will remain in virtue. All she did for the chateau was to give it an Italian entrance, but when the Revolution came they just couldn’t tolerate anything outlandish; thus of the famous Italian double curve of steps there is nothing left but a bit of stone that juts out of the first floor right beneath the central balcony of the main hall.

Today you enter the chateau from the kitchen, for after the revolution nothing very much remained of the castle. The estate was bought by some bourgeois from Condom, and from generation to generation the family added horrors to make themselves feel at home, till mercifully one day a little daughter playing in the stables set fire to the hay outside, and for days on end, they say, Montpalais was one block of fire; you can still see the charred steps at the back and many charred beams. They offered the place then to anyone who wanted it, and some rich peasants from La Romieu bought the hill and the land, almost for nothing. The buildings served to keep hay and wheat and bottles of Armagnac. But during the Occupation, like many such old châteaus that came to life again, it was bought by some northern refugees from Laon, who made it comfortable with doors, windows, and balustrade. They must have had such nice taste: it was difficult to realize that only forty years before the whole structure had gone up in flame.

When the war was over, Robert Fern, an English painter, bought it, to be in the sunshine of France but not among the ‘Picassos’; he fitted it up with the necessary modern conveniences, and added to it all the English sense of comfort. He did not live there much, except in winter, for in summer he preferred to go yachting all over the Mediterranean. We had met Robert at St Rémy among the Cubists and Madame Férrol had such love for India that she often asked us over. When we wanted to go somewhere for the summer she suggested Montpalais, and Robert Fern was only too happy to let it to any decent people. He took only a nominal rent — all we could afford — and left us his servants, his horses, his cows, and even his canvases to admire. Cubism is not entirely in my line of understanding, but Madeleine and Georges would stand for hours before some portrait of a lady in a tub, which had nothing to say for itself other than that its quadrangles and its pentagons were of the most curious and coloured admixture. But Robert was a fine person for all that, so civilized, so noble- spoken; the whole castle felt him and his clear presence.