“No, no. I shall take care to make him very disagreeable.”
Laura was fairly started.
“That’s just it; everybody will recognize you,” she said, bursting into such hearty laughter that the others were caught by its infection.
“And is the plan of the book made up?” enquired Sophroniska, trying to regain her seriousness.
“Of course not.”
“What do you mean? Of course not!”
“You ought to understand that it’s essentially out of the question for a book of this kind to have a plan. Everything would be falsified if anything were settled beforehand. I wait for reality to dictate to me.”
“But I thought you wanted to abandon reality.”
“My novelist wants to abandon it; but I shall continually bring him back to it. In fact that will be the subject; the struggle between the facts presented by reality and the ideal reality.”
The illogical nature of his remarks was flagrant—painfully obvious to everyone. It was clear that Edouard housed in his brain two incompatible requirements and that he was wearing himself out in the desire to reconcile them.
“Have you got on far with it?” asked Sophroniska politely.
“It depends on what you mean by far. To tell the truth, of the actual book not a line has been written. But I have worked at it a great deal. I think of it every day and incessantly. I work at it in a very odd manner, as I’ll tell you. Day by day in a notebook, I note the state of the novel in my mind; yes, it’s a kind of diary that I keep as one might do of a child. … That is to say, that instead of contenting myself with resolving each difficulty as it presents itself (and every work of art is only the sum or the product of the solutions of a quantity of small difficulties), I set forth each of these difficulties and study it. My notebook contains, as it were, a running criticism of my novel—or rather of the novel in general. Just think how interesting such a notebook kept by Dickens or Balzac would be; if we had the diary of the Education Sentimentale or of The Brothers Karamazov!—the story of the work—of its gestation! How thrilling it would be … more interesting than the work itself. …”
Edouard vaguely hoped that someone would ask him to read these notes. But not one of the three showed the slightest curiosity. Instead:
“My poor friend,” said Laura, with a touch of sadness, “it’s quite clear that you’ll never write this novel of yours.”
“Well, let me tell you,” cried Edouard impetuously, “that I don’t care. Yes, if I don’t succeed in writing the book, it’ll be because the history of the book will have interested me more than the book itself—taken the book’s place; and it’ll be a very good thing.”
“Aren’t you afraid, when you abandon reality in this way, of losing yourself in regions of deadly abstraction and of making a novel about ideas instead of about human beings?” asked Sophroniska kindly.
“And even so!” cried Edouard with redoubled energy. “Must we condemn the novel of ideas because of the groping and stumbling of the incapable people who have tried their hands at it? Up till now we have been given nothing but novels with a purpose parading as novels of ideas. But that’s not it at all, as you may imagine. Ideas … ideas, I must confess, interest me more than men—interest me more than anything. They live; they fight; they perish like men. Of course it may be said that our only knowledge of them is through men, just as our only knowledge of the wind is through the reeds that it bends; but all the same the wind is of more importance than the reeds.”
“The wind exists independently of the reed,” ventured Bernard. His intervention made Edouard, who had long been waiting for it, start afresh with renewed spirit:
“Yes, I know; ideas exist only because of men; but that’s what’s so pathetic; they live at their expense.”
Bernard had listened to all this with great attention; he was full of scepticism and very near taking Edouard for a mere dreamer; but during the last few moments he had been touched by his eloquence and had felt his mind waver in its breath; “But,” thought Bernard, “the reed lifts its head again as soon as the wind has passed.” He remembered what he had been taught at school—that man is swayed by his passions and not by ideas. In the meantime Edouard was going on:
“What I should like to do is something like the art of fugue writing. And I can’t see why what was possible in music should be impossible in literature. …”
To which Sophroniska rejoined that music is a mathematical art, and moreover that Bach, by dealing only with figures and by banishing all pathos and all humanity, had achieved an abstract chef d’oeuvre of boredom, a kind of astronomical temple, open only to the few rare initiated. Edouard at once protested that, for his part, he thought the temple admirable, and considered it the apex and crowning point of all Bach’s career.
“After which,” added Laura, “people were cured of the fugue for a long time to come. Human emotion, when it could no longer inhabit it, sought a dwelling place elsewhere.”
The discussion tailed off in an unprofitable argument. Bernard, who until then had kept silent, but who was beginning to fidget on his chair, at last could bear it no longer; with extreme, even exaggerated deference, as was his habit whenever he spoke to Edouard, but with a kind of sprightliness, which seemed to make a jest of his deference:
“Forgive me, sir,” said he, “for knowing the title of your book, since I learnt it through my own indiscretion—which however you have been kind enough to pass over. But the title seemed to me to announce a story.”
“Oh, tell us what the title is!” said Laura.
“Certainly, my dear Laura, if you wish it. … But
