Others, the passionate men, had returned to society with their outrage, their fervour, their tormented desires. Still others, like Yves, had simply come home exhausted. At first they believed it would pass, that the memories of those dark hours would fade as life became peaceful, normal, serene; they believed they would wake up one beautiful morning as energetic, joyful and young as before. But time passed, and ‘it’ remained, like some slow-working poison. ‘It’: that strange faraway look which had seen every sort of human horror, every type of misery, every fear; a disregard for life and the bitter desire for its basest joys, its most carnal pleasures; idleness, because the only work they had done back there, for so many years, was to sit by, with folded arms, waiting for death; and a kind of bitter hostility towards others, all the others, because they hadn’t suffered, because they hadn’t seen … Many men had returned with these or similar thoughts; many had continued to exist, like Lazarus risen, walking among the living, arms outstretched, steps hindered by a shroud, pupils dilated in desolate terror.

It was only in 1919 that Yves, who had been wounded three times and awarded the Croix de Guerre, returned to Paris for good. He began to put his affairs in order, to calculate what remained of his fortune. His inheritance had been divided into two parts and held in trust by a lawyer until he reached his majority. The portion he had inherited from his mother had been invested in a factory belonging to his maternal uncle, a fabulously wealthy industrialist. Nothing left of that: his uncle had died penniless in 1915. As for his father’s money, it had been used before the war to buy foreign stocks and shares, Russian and German for the most part. In the end, Yves found himself with an income that was sufficient to pay for his cigarettes and taxis. He would have to work for a living. Later on, he could never think back on those years without a shiver down his spine. This young man, who for four years had been a kind of hero, was cowardly when faced with the daily grind, the need to work, the petty tyranny of existence. He undoubtedly could have taken a rich wife, as many others did, by marrying the daughter of some nouveau riche family or a wealthy American; but this went against his upbringing which had given him all the scruples and sensitivity that are a luxury, just like others, but more burdensome, along with certain principles that furnish a conscience similar to a Gothic chair: very hard with a high back, very beautiful and very uncomfortable. Yves had finally found a post in the administrative offices of a large agency specialising in international news – two thousand five hundred francs per month, better than he could have hoped for.

Since 1920 – it was now August 1924 – Yves had led the life of an employee, a life he hated in the way certain small boys who are very lazy and very sensitive hate boarding school. He had kept his old apartment; it was full of memories, flowers, beautiful objects lovingly displayed. Every morning at eight o’clock, when he had to get out of bed, quickly dress and leave its shadowy warmth for the brutally cold street and his hostile, bare office where the entire day was spent giving and receiving orders, writing and talking to people, Yves felt the same despair, the same hateful, vain impulse to rebel, a horrible, black, crushing boredom. He was neither ambitious nor motivated; he carried out his duties with care, almost the way a pupil prepares his lessons for school.

The very idea that he might be good at business or might fight to try to become rich again never even crossed his mind. As the son and grandson of rich men, idle men, he suffered from his lack of comfort, the inability to be carefree, the way other people suffer from hunger or cold. Gradually he grew used to his life, because people eventually get used to everything, more or less, but his grim resignation weighed heavily upon him. The days dragged on, each the same, bringing with them, come the evening, a feeling of extreme weariness, headaches, a bitter and unhealthy need for solitude. He would eat quickly at a restaurant, or sitting by the fire with his dog Pierrot at his feet, a curly white Spitz that looked like a china figurine of a sheep, and he would go to bed early because cabarets and dance halls were expensive, because he had to get up early the next day. He had mistresses, affairs that lasted two or three months at the most, quickly begun and quickly ended: he very soon got bored with them. He changed women often because he concluded that only the first encounter was worth anything: he was an expert at the essentially modern art of ‘dropping women’: he knew how to get rid of them gently. Sometimes, after he’d just broken off with one of them, he felt as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders and he would remember his father, who believed he could find the meaning of life in a woman’s eyes, her breasts, those brief explosions of pleasure. A woman … To Yves, a woman was nothing more than a pretty, useful object: firstly, he’d had so many since the war, they were so easy … and then because really … no, no, he did his best to look deep into those loving, lying eyes but never found that intimate essential thrill, that elusive glimpse of the unknown that his father believed he had attained and which Yves too, perhaps, was searching for blindly, without realising it. And he thought that for someone who had looked deep into the eyes of dying men, someone who had fallen in battle, wounded, someone who had opened his eyes wide in despair to catch a glimpse of sky before he died, for a man like that a woman held no secret, no mystery, no other attractions except her willingness, her beauty, her youth. Love … love must be a feeling of peace, of calm, of infinite serenity … Love must be so soothing … if it even existed …

4

EVERY SUMMER YVES got a few weeks off and, since he led a very frugal life all winter, he could allow himself to spend his holidays as he pleased. This year he had gone back to Hendaye, moved by the idea of seeing once more the enchanting beach of his childhood, and because he thought that Hendaye held fewer temptations than other places while still being close to Biarritz and Saint Sebastian, two of the most attractive cities on the cosmopolitan circuit.