When I Was Old (19 page)

We impose the discipline of eating with the family on ourselves, so we eat at children's hours, hours as strict as those of a boarding house: twelve thirty and, in the evening, quarter to seven.

Having sketched the year
grosso modo
, I will try to show a day, since they are necessarily a good deal alike. I don't speak of the times when I'm writing novels, when the schedule never varies.

Most often, when D. comes to wake me with my tea (since I'm not allowed coffee) Johnny has already left for school at seven twenty.

It's Marie-Jo's turn to get dressed, to decide what she will wear, what she will eat, etc.

Boule (the cook) comes up for the menu. The telephone rings. One of the secretaries arrives. Errands must be assigned to Alphonse (the chauffeur).

Three days a week, massage. Three days without.

If it's a day with, D. spends from eight to nine having hers, I from nine to ten.

On a day without, I dress while the staff passes through the boudoir and the telephone rings.

I love this hour. Pierre comes and crawls around our legs. Only, among so many comings and goings, it's useless for me to try to have a moment alone with D.

I go down to my study at about nine fifteen. Read the mail. Glance at the papers. Light my fire. I go upstairs again five or six times during the morning.

Often, a short walk to the village to meet Pierre, who is taking the air with his nurse.

Then, almost always, something to do in Lausanne. Even if it isn't necessary. I like towns in the morning. Take photos to be developed, buy this or that, books or records … it doesn't matter …

Return. The study. Read the dailies or the weeklies.

Luncheon with the family. Then D. comes to have her coffee in my study.

Day with errands or without errands? I mean for her. Purchase of things for the children, underwear, dentist, doctor, hairdresser … If yes, I accompany her and I wait from store to store, which doesn't bother me, on the contrary.

Return. Read the afternoon paper. D. downstairs with her secretaries. I again in my study, where the children come to see me one by one. Reading. Medical reviews or others. Or else a few lines of some historical work, or a memoir …

And already it's dinnertime. Pierre in bed. Dinner over, Marie-Jo goes up first and goes to bed, accompanied by her mother, who tucks her in while I watch the television news with Johnny.

At eight thirty I put Johnny in bed in my turn. D. briefs
the staff for the next day, sometimes goes down to dictate in her office. Then I watch television for a little, if it's worth it. Most often I read, skipping from one to another.

I wait. Around eleven or eleven thirty, D. comes up and we go to bed, after kissing the sleeping children.

This seems very little set down that way, perhaps empty, all the same there's not a moment lost, so to speak, especially for D., who juggles time from morning to night.

Not once, this year, have we gone to the movies. Nor to the theatre. Nor to dinner in town.

Four or five times, around nine thirty, we have taken a break and gone for a walk, arm-in-arm, on the Rue de Bourg, window-shopping.

Then, when a journalist asks us:

‘How do you spend your days?'

What to tell him?

Even this truth is only approximate. And, if one subtracts our trips, the novels, the periods during which we have a visitor in the house, how many days are left in the year?

Which do I like best? Two kinds. Those that I've just described, and those that we spend in Paris, in Milan, in Florence, or elsewhere (soon in Cannes!), D. and I, above all when we can avoid seeing other people. Then I have her to myself.

Today, Sunday afternoon, she is in her office. I in my study. Pierre is walking in the garden; the other two, with their friends, are playing music in the playroom. A typical family Sunday. And perhaps, soon, I will be able
to persuade D. to go with me for a ride for half an hour. That will make it a lucky Sunday.

We didn't do it on purpose, neither she nor I, loading ourselves with all this work, taking all these cares on our shoulders. It isn't a question of ambition or a question of money. Letters pile up. They must be answered. And these novels written on this desk in eight days go from country to country, on the radio, on television, in films, make so much to-do …

And readers demand to be told that … to be told if … to be sent this or that …

Some ask for one or ten millions, or a house, or a car. This week someone demanded a cow from us!

But now, when I recall the time when I used to go horseback riding or when I fished, or when I went one hundred kilometres in the car to play golf and had guests almost every day, those years seem to me a frightening void.

And the present years are too short and so full.

Had just written this schedule when I realized that it is only valid for a rather short period. Three years ago, for example, I went twice in a week in the morning to do the marketing in Morges. I love markets. I rush to them each time I am in a new country or in a new region. After several months, when I know everyone, I'm tired of it. It was the same thing with Cannes, where, however, it lasted longer, because of the colour, the unique atmosphere.

All in all, from time to time, we adopt a new routine which seems to us permanent.

With fixed points in the schedule, however, which have been the same everywhere we have lived, like our little rides in the car, D. and I, and like our brief trips together.

Each person tries so hard to exist! It is perhaps the explanation of all human behaviour. Each one wants to
be
, from the weakest, the most helpless child.

A little phrase from last evening, though it isn't very original, keeps running through my head. I think that if I rewrote ‘Le Roman de l'Homme' I would place this need to exist ahead of fear. Its importance is clear in criminology, for example, or in psychiatry and, I think, in psychoanalysis. It would come before sexuality, because it may be one of the reasons for sexuality.

Never mind. That's not my concern. In fact, I would like, only for this notebook, to know shorthand, in order not always to be slowed down by writing. I think some author kept his notes in shorthand, but I can't remember which one. I took one lesson in shorthand at about seventeen, when I was a reporter. It was in the evening, in a dreary place, a class for mediocre, slow, and also dreary adults, and I never went back.

I come back to my vacation homework. I had said: schedule. That's done.

Now, the other chapter: reading. If the idea came to me it must have been when I was changing the arrangement of books in the different libraries in the house, and I came upon a book by Quéneau in which, somewhere, among many others, I listed the books I would take to a desert island. I had no recollection of this. Each week one gets such questionnaires. I answer, because I don't want to be hurtful to a journalist. Briefly. Almost always in a word or two, for each question, on the questionnaire itself. And behold, it winds up in a work published by the
Nouvelle Revue Française
! (Parenthetically, I admire Quéneau a great deal.)

I've often been asked which books have had a formative influence on me and I may not always have given the same answer. Because you can't give an absolute truth in a few words. And one would get a false idea of my reading from studying my library. Each time we've moved, I've sold a quarter, sometimes half my books.
*
*

For instance, I think I never mentioned that I read the Comtesse de Ségur, or Jules Verne, which I did, however, like all the children of my generation. At what age? Very early, surely. Between eight and thirteen, probably, for at twelve I was at Alexandre Dumas Père, and so on to … Paul de Kock. I also read several Fantomas, not many, with
a certain twinge, as if this were backsliding, and at about thirteen or fourteen, after Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott, the Russians, from Pushkin to Gorky through Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and above all Gogol, my favourite.

I never liked Turgenev. Balzac before, during, and after, in smaller doses. That went by periods. Then there was, among others, the period of plays: all of Labiche, all of Augier, all Alexandre Dumas Fils, and even Meilhac and Halévy. Why?

Auguste Comte, around sixteen or seventeen (I'm not mentioning the authors I studied in school), and Dickens at the same time as Shakespeare.

Among my friends, I was the only one who didn't like Anatole France and didn't like any novels in yellow covers, which later turned into novels in white covers. I preferred Descartes, Pascal, and above all Montaigne, who, for ten years at least, was my bedside book.

Hated Barrès and Bourget, whom I put on the same level as Georges Ohnet or Jules Claretie.

Mad about Maeterlinck for two years.

Then even madder about Conrad and Stevenson (above all the Stevenson of Tuamotu, of whom I found footprints later, first in the Pacific, then in Monterey, in California, where one can still see the house near the harbour where he lived).

At about twenty-three or twenty-four in Paris, I bought at one swoop the entire Collection Budé Greek and Latin classics, in French, alas, since I only did a year of Latin before branching off into the sciences. Ate them up greedily.

A little later discovered Faulkner, Dreiser, Sherwood
Anderson (whom I liked very much), then finally Dos Passos and …
The Magic Mountain
. My greatest admiration for an American writer went to Mark Twain and to the customs officer of the whale.

I read – and liked – Swann and
Within a Budding Grove
at twenty-two, at the same time that I was discovering the first translation of Freud.

For years, I devoured one to three books a day, from Goethe (
Dichtung und Wahrheit
is my favourite) to Napoleon's letters.

Then suddenly, around the age of twenty-seven, I decided to stop reading novels, except an occasional foreign one and the classics. It took an illness, in 1944, for me to reread from beginning to end, in sequence, first all of Proust, then all of Balzac, and later all of Stendhal (whom I admire but who makes me bristle, while Proust always charms me, and sometimes Claudel).

I must be forgetting some, but not a lot, in any case not the ones that count. If I try to sum up, I find the greatest enthusiasm for the Russians, then for the English, the Americans, the French coming last. Why? I don't know. Perhaps because they are moralists rather than novelists. Perhaps also because, in Balzac in particular, money is the basis of most of the conflicts. I prefer the soul, Protestant though it is, of Melville.

Read and reread the Bible and the Gospels many times, as well as the Civil and Penal Codes. Reread them still in small doses.

Tried to read Gide, with whom I was to become friendly. Couldn't. Never told him so.

I read, less for my novels than out of curiosity, almost all that has been written about criminology and continue to read works and reviews on the subject. Psychiatry fascinates me and, to keep things in balance, medicine.

Maigret wanted to be a doctor. And I? I didn't think of it when I was young. Later, yes. But without regret, and, as it happens, most of my friends have been and still are doctors. This interest grows continually and I now devour American, English, French, and Swiss medical reviews. I don't read all of them, of course. I don't have the scientific background. Many things are beyond me, or, in order to understand them, I'd have to do much research. But I'm lazy.

It's a curious enough mechanism that directs my present reading. I pass, for example and by chance, from a work on prehistoric animals to a work on palaeontology which suggests several others, which in turn lead me to books on biology.

On a tangent apropos of blood types I'm off on a study of human races. The connection is unexpected and my bookstore is always surprised by my orders, which aren't suggested by the preceding ones.

Actually, I know nothing. I wander about in the knowledge of others, trying to establish, for my personal use, some sort of balance.

By the same token I am not good at any sport because I have practised them all a little, in the same way that I know nothing in depth because I go into everything as an amateur.

Here and there, in all these works, in all these reviews,
I am seeking, ultimately, clues that will permit me to understand man a little better.

And man today – this brings me to my little phrase of last evening – is very troubled. He who has so much need of
being
sees his sense of being diminishing as his knowledge of the worlds grows. The infinitely large or cosmic space on the one hand. The infinitely small on the other.

So here he is, caught between these two infinities, knowing everything except the essential, which means knowing nothing; contemplating innumerable worlds in which his place appears more and more puny.

Hasn't it become obvious, from the arts, from the press, from the mood of the people, that human beings are developing a complex?

Man is no longer ‘the chosen' … He isn't even ‘the least of these' any more.

He makes use of physical laws that he does not understand and he understands still less – less and less as medicine progresses – what goes on within himself.

One of my American friends, a doctor, editor of a medical review, professor of medical history, has written a fascinating book:
The Antibiotic Saga
. It combines the history of the fight against the viruses, the story of their discovery, and, insofar as it is known, the history of the viruses themselves.

The book reads like an epic. One feels the author's awe before the infinitely small and, as it were, one even senses a certain envy.

I am scarcely exaggerating. We are on the way to a
virus complex. Especially since the Russian scientists have made it known that these viruses can resist radiations twenty thousand times stronger than those human beings can withstand.