The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [90]
We had studied Le Rouge et le Noir in the sixth form. I hadn’t liked it. The language seemed to me crude, and I thought the story was simple and unreal, more like a fairytale than a story about real people. I said this to Mr Deschampsneufs.
‘Well, it must seem like that to us out here. We don’t have people like marquises and so on here or anything like their society. And we can’t see the point of a man like Julien or the Marquis de la Mole. But still, they tell me it’s a great book.’
‘I know. I had to write essays about it. What were the paragraphs Stendhal marked?’
‘The paragraphs. You know the story well? You remember when Julien climbs into Mlle de la Mole’s room at night?’ He went to the bookcase and took out a book. It opened easily at the place he required. ‘Julien has just thrown the ladder and the rope down on the flowerbeds. You remember?’
‘That was the sort of fairytale thing I couldn’t appreciate.’
‘Yes, yes.’ He began to read from the book: ‘Et comment moi m’en aller? dit Julien d’un ton plaisant, et en affectant le langage créole.’ Mr Deschampsneufs’s accent was suitably broad. ‘Suddenly, you see, that fellow Beyle throws in a reference to creole French. For no reason at all. It’s a big moment in his story, and he goes and does a thing like that. And then he puts in, in brackets, mark you: Une des femmes de la maison était née à Saint-Domingue. – Vous, vous en aller par la porte, dit Mathilde, ravie de cette idée. For no reason at all. That bit of dialogue in creole French. Just for a private joke. And the joke was that he had exchanged those very words in the house of Clémentine Curial with that woman whose picture you see there.’
I was deeply impressed. I felt that Mr Deschampsneufs’s story had brought the past close. It was possible to believe in the link between our island and the great world. My own dreams were rendered absurd. The outside world was stripped of its quality of legend and reduced to the comprehensible. Grand figures came near. A writer accounted great had been turned into a simple man, fat and middle-aged and ironic. And nearness exalted; it did not diminish.
‘A whole life. And that is all that remains. A little aside in a novel, a sentence in brackets. A little affectionate, a little mocking. Femme de la maison. Not true, not nice. What do you think? I don’t know about you, but I feel it’s more than I’m going to leave behind. This immortality is a funny thing. You can never tell who is going to get it. How many people who read that book would stop and think about what I’ve just told you, you think? She tore up all the letters. Do you think she was right to feel insulted?’
Another familiar topic, clearly. And, as with the first, I took no part. Shortly afterwards I left. Champ walked part of the way with me. I asked him whether it was true about his ancestor and Stendhal. He said, ‘My father would kill himself if it wasn’t true. I believe Le Rouge is the only novel he’s read.’
It was the end of another of our Isabella days, the sun gone, the wind cool, the sky ablaze in the west with red-tinted clouds, and against this swiftly passing splendour the tall palmistes and branching saman were black, but with a suggestion of deeper, warmer tints. With Stendhal and the ancestor and the creole language of Santo Domingo in my head, I saw the scene as though I had already been removed from it and it was occurring in memory, in a book.
‘The painting of the lady, is that old?’
‘Don’t try to be too polite with me. It was done by a man in Florida or Minnesota or some such place. He paints from photographs and my father sent him a sketch of some sort. There is