With me, everything has been skillfully acquired and the part played by luck and accident proportionately reduced. The edifice is a fragile one. The slightest disturbance in the environment will be enough to shatter the too delicate shell. At least when that happens I shall know how to make another. If I have time and strength. And above all, if I still want to …

         

I never go back to Rennes without my footsteps leading me to the Thabor College, next door to the gardens of the same name which lie within the walls of the onetime Benedictine abbey of Saint-Mélaine. Thabor! A name of mystery, wrapped in an aura of magic, a sacred name, with its hints of gold and the tabernacle! All my adolescence trembles within me at the sound of it … But whatever its promised ecstasies and transfigurations, I was the only one of the three Surin children to be visited by the light of the Holy Ghost within its aged walls.

I picture with pain and no little distress the boredom those college years mean to a heterosexual. What a grayness there must be in his days and nights, sunk body and soul in a human environment devoid of sexual stimulus! But then surely that is a fair training for what life has in store for him.

Whereas for me, ye gods! Thabor was a melting pot of desire and satiety all through my childhood and adolescence. I burned with all the fires of hell in a promiscuity which did not let up for a second in any of the twelve phases into which our timetable divided it: dormitory, chapel, classroom, dining hall, playground, lavatories, gymnasium, playing fields, fencing school, staircases, recreation room, washrooms. Every one of those places was a high spot in its way, and the scene for twelve separate forms of chase and capture. From the first day, I was gripped by an amorous fever as I plunged into the atmosphere of the college, saturated with dawning virility. What wouldn’t I give today, cast out into the heterosexual twilight, to recover something of that fire!

My initiation came as a surprise when I was made the happy, willing victim of what the “Foils” used to call “shell fishing.” Evening prep was just over and we were filing out to the dining hall by way of the recreation area. I was among the last to leave, but not the last, and I was still some yards from the classroom door when the boy assigned to the task put out the lights. I went on slowly in an obscurity relieved only by the lights from the playground. I had my arms behind my back, hands linked, palm outward, over my bottom. I was vaguely aware of something going on behind me, and I felt something obtrusive being pushed into my hands with a determination that could not have been accidental. Giving way to it as far as I could without bumping into the boys ahead, I had to accept that what I was holding in my hands, through the thin stuff of his trousers, was the erect penis of the boy behind me. If I unclasped my hands and removed them from the offering, I should be unobtrusively rejecting the advance being made to me. I responded, on the contrary, by taking a step backward and opening my hands wide, like a shell, like a basket waiting to receive the first fruits of love on the sly.

This was my first encounter with desire experienced, not in solitude, like a shameful secret, but in complicity—I had almost said, and it would be true before long, in company. I was eleven. Now I am forty-five and still I have not emerged from the daze of wonder in which I walked through that damp, dark college playground, as though wrapped in an invisible glory. Never emerged from it … How I like that expression, so right and touching, suggesting some strange country, a mysterious forest whose spell is so powerful that the traveler who ventures there never emerges from it. He is seized with wonder, and the wonder never lets him go and keeps him from recovery and return to the gray, unprofitable world where he was born.

I was so completely overwhelmed by this discovery that I had no idea which one of the schoolfellows behind me had put into my hands the keys of a kingdom whose wealth, even now as I write, I have not yet done with exploring. Indeed I never did know for sure because I found out later that the action had been the outcome of a little conspiracy among three of them who sat together at the back of the class, members of a secret society called the Fleurets, the Foils, who were in the habit of trying out all new boys systematically. I am only going to talk about two of the Foils here, because they are characters who shine with incomparable brilliance in my memory.

Thomas “Drycome” got his pseudo-patronymic from an amazing discovery which made him famous at Thabor and about which I shall have more to say later. All the boys had made the insides of their desk lids into miniature picture galleries of their dreams, memories, heroes, and private myths. So you would see family snapshots next to pages out of sports magazines and portraits of music-hall singers side by side with comic strips. Thomas’ pictures were exclusively religious and devoted entirely to the character of Jesus. But this was not the infant Christ or the emaciated, suffering figure of the Cross. This was Christ the King, the champion of God, abounding in strength and vigor, “youth eternal,” whose image formed a pyramid upon the small wooden square. This triumphant iconography had, as it were, a kind of signature in a tiny picture tucked away in the left-hand corner which might have passed unnoticed by the uninitiated.