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But then he would go straight on to say that if his apartment remained cold and unwelcoming it was for want of feminine influence. Maria-Barbara was glued to La Cassine and never came to Paris, and if she, Florence, would not come to live with him, then there was no hope of the place ever coming to life.

“A house without a woman is a dead house,” he argued. “Move in here with your things, spread your own clutter about the rooms. Do you think I like living in this deserted museum? Look at the bathroom even! I can’t feel at home there unless I have to hunt through jars of cleansing cream and astringents and atomizers to find my razor. The whole pleasure of using a bathroom is the way one keeps coming across all sorts of feminine nonsense hidden away. This one is as cheerless as an operating theater!”

She smiled and was silent, and finally said that it was just like him, setting out to defend an apartment that was too smart, and ending up in the bathroom among jars of cream and powder puffs and curlers. But in the end it was always in her flat in the rue Gabrielle in Montmartre that they would meet, a red cavern, heavily curtained and stuffed with ornaments, made for living in by night, by the light of red lamps, and at floor level, on divans and poufs and fur rugs, amid a levantine bric-a-brac which Edouard extolled from the start for its “exquisite bad taste.” In fact, he was attached to Florence and her chocolate box of a flat by very strong but complex ties which he felt in his flesh and in his heart. The flesh was captive but the heart had reservations. He could not conceal from himself that he loved Florence in a way. But the incredible paradox was that he loved her unwillingly, keeping back a whole side of himself—the Gustave side, Alexandre would have said, sneering. And that side of himself, he knew, was at La Cassine with Maria-Barbara and the children, and the twins especially.

His trouble, after twenty happy, fruitful years of marriage, was a kind of split in his nature, separating his thirst for affection and his sexual hunger. As long as this hunger and thirst were closely bound up together and merged with his zest for life and passionate consent to existence, he had been strong, balanced, sure of himself and his family. But now Maria-Barbara had ceased to inspire him with anything more than a great tenderness, a vague, gentle feeling which engulfed his children, his home, and all the Breton side of his nature and which was deep but not passionate, like those autumn afternoons when the sun emerged from the mists of the Arguenon only to sink back almost at once into the smooth, golden haze. His manhood he recovered when he was with Florence in her red cave full of dubious, primitive magic, which repelled him a little, even while they pretended to laugh at it together. This was something else that surprised and attracted him, the faculty she possessed of standing back from her Mediterranean origins, from her family, about which she would talk in a detached way, and ultimately from herself. The ability to observe, to judge and mock at things, yet without rejecting them, preserving intact her sense of fellowship and deep, unassailable love—that was something he was incapable of, and here Florence set him a shining example.

He himself felt torn apart, a defaulter and a traitor twice over. He had dreams of making a break, of escaping back to his old wholehearted contentment. He would say goodbye once and for all to Maria-Barbara, the children, the Pierres Sonnantes and begin a new life in Paris with Florence. The misfortune of such a man—of many men—is that they have it in them to become successful husbands and fathers at least twice in their lifetimes, whereas a woman is exhausted and ready to give up well before her last child is independent. For a man to marry a second time a new wife a generation younger than his first is in the nature of things. But there were times when Edouard himself felt tired, worn out, his manhood no longer spoke out so loudly when he was with Florence—was sometimes silent altogether. He would think, then, that his place was. at home in Brittany, alongside his life’s companion, in the state of physical and emotional semi-retirement that comes with the settled, tranquil affection of old married couples.

Wars might have been designed on purpose to break such insoluble deadlocks.

CHAPTER  II

The Anointing of Alexandre

Alexandre

I think it is the effect of my age and that it is the same for everybody. My family and my family background, for which up to today I cared not one bit, now interest me more and more. There was certainly a basic hostility in the arrogant belief that I was a phenomenon unique among my own kin, inexplicable and unforeseeable. Now that the family circle in which I was so totally misunderstood is breaking up, its members dropping out one by one, my dislike is relaxed and I am more and more inclined to acknowledge myself a product of it Dare I confess that I can no longer look on the big house in the rue du Chapitre in the old town of Rennes, where several generations of Surins have been born and died, without a degree of emotion? That is a new sensation, not so very far removed from filial piety and not so long ago the mere suggestion would have made me sneer ferociously.

This, then, was the home of Antoine Surin (1860-1925), who started life as a builder and demolition contractor and ended it dealing in textiles and ready-made clothes. He had three children. The eldest, Gustave, who was in time to be taken into his original business, remained faithful to the old house. His wife and four daughters live there still. The business which our father left in his hands has developed toward the recovery and “repurgation” of municipal waste.