Someone who insists on always being right will always feel alone against everyone else; it is impossible to live with others and be right at the same time. Jacques does not know that the only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone. But this presupposes a capacity for patience, the patience to make and to build, the only capacity that has ever produced great works, in history or in art.
Such patience is beyond the capacity of a certain type of man, however, who can be satisfied only by action alone. At the summit of this sort of men is the terrorist, of whom Jacques is one of the first representatives in our literature. He dies alone; even his example is useless, and the last man who sees him, a policeman, insults him as he finishes him off, because he hates having to kill him. Those like Jacques, who want to change life in order to change themselves, leave life untouched and, in the end, remain what they are: sterile and disturbing witnesses for everything in man that refuses and always will refuse to live.
The portrait of Antoine offers different problems and teaches different lessons. Unlike Jacques, Antoine loves life, carnally, with passion; he has a physical and wholly practical knowledge of it. As a doctor, he reigns in the kingdom of the body. But his nature explains his vocation. In him, knowledge always passes through the medium of the senses. His friendships, his loves, are physical. The shoulder of his friend or brother, a woman’s radiance, are the paths by which feelings set fire to his heart or kindle his intelligence.
Sometimes he even prefers what he feels to what he believes. He defends Protestantism, in front of Mme de Fontanin,5 solely out of physical attraction, for he never has any traffic with it otherwise. A liking for the physical sometimes leads to flabbiness or the cynicism of the sensualist. But it is balanced in Antoine by two complementary things, work and character. His life is ordered, occupied, and has, above all, a single purpose: his profession. Immediately, his sensuality is an advantage.
It helps him in his job and gives him a sense, an orientation no doctor can do without that guides his probings of the human body. It also softens his excessive determination. The result, his unshakable balance, his informed tolerance, and also his excessive self-assurance. For Antoine is far from perfect: he has the defects of his virtues. In the man who enjoys being what he is, a certain form of solitary happiness does not exist without selfishness and blindness.
Jacques and Antoine help us understand that there are two kinds of men; some will still be adolescents when they die, the others are born adult. But the adults run the risk of imagining that their balance is the general rule, and consequently that unhappiness is a sin. Antoine seems to believe that the world he lives in is the best possible and that anyone, indeed, can choose to live in a large town house on the rue de l’Université, to pursue the honorable calling of doctor of medicine, and welcome life in all its goodness.
This is his limitation, in the first volumes at least, and it leads him to adopt a number of unattractive attitudes. Born a bourgeois, he lives with the idea that everything around him is eternal, since everything surrounding him suits his convenience. This conviction even influences his true nature, which he drapes in the doublet of being a “Thibault son and heir.” He behaves as a man of wealth, even in his sexual adventures: he pays cash for his pleasures, striking an air of importance and authority.
Antoine will therefore not have to accept life. He will merely have to discover that he is not the only person living. In keeping with his nature, he will simply follow an opposite path to his brother’s. Here the profound truth of the novel is revealed. Martin du Gard knows that men learn not from circumstances themselves, but from the contact of their own natures with circumstances. They become what they are. And, quite naturally, it is a woman who breaks the shell with which Antoine protects himself. Truth can reach a carnal man only through the flesh. This is why its path cannot be foreseen.
Here the path is called Rachel, and the episode of her affair with Antoine remains one of the most beautiful in Les Thibault. The love affair between Rachel and Antoine, unlike so many affairs in literature, does not hover in the blissful heavens of verbal effusions. But it fills the reader with a secret joy, and gratitude for a world in which such truths are possible.
Rachel’s physical beauty radiates the whole of Les Thibault, and until the very eve of his death Antoine continues to draw warmth from it. He finds in Rachel not the tired or humiliated prey to which he had been accustomed, but his generous equal. She admires Antoine, of course, but she is not his subordinate. She has lived, seen the world, she remains slightly mysterious for him, and cannot free herself from what she has been.
Without ceasing to love Antoine, she says, “I am like this,” and he has to admit that people can exist independently of him, that this is nevertheless something good, which gives an added taste to life. From their first meeting, they are equals. On the stormy summer night when Antoine operates on a little girl with the emergency resources at his disposal, Rachel holds the lamp steadily and Antoine discovers that the doctor in him is helped simply by the fact that she is there. Later on, exhausted, sitting side by side, they fall asleep.
Antoine wakes, feeling a gentle warmth along one side of his body: Rachel has dozed off against him. They will become lovers a little later on, but they are already intimate, linked to each other so that each pours into the other a richer life. From this moment on, Antoine abdicates, joyfully and gratefully. When Jacques meets his brother again in Lausanne, after long years of separation, he finds him “changed.” What a hundred sermons could not have accomplished a woman has achieved. But this woman does not belong to the world Antoine had thought unique and unchangeable.
She is one of those who never stay, who are always nomads; what one inhales in her presence is liberty. A sensual freedom, of course, in which Antoine discovers for the first time that equality within difference which is the highest dream of minds and bodies. But this liberty is also a freedom from prejudices Rachel does not fight against; she does not even know that they are there, and her very existence quietly denies them.
This is why Antoine becomes less complicated with her and discovers the only valid aspects of his own nature: his personal generosity, his vitality, and his power to admire.6 He does not become better, but he fulfills himself a little more, outside himself and yet nearer to what he really is, in joyfully responding to a person who in turn acknowledges and welcomes him. Perhaps a certain royal truth is defined in this—a man who feels entitled to be just what he is, at the same time freeing another being by loving her very nature.
Long after their separation, this realization continues to inspire Antoine. “He was laughing the deep, youthful laugh he had so long repressed, that Rachel had permanently freed.” They do in fact separate, without seeing each other, on a foggy, rainy night; their story is apparently a short one. Rachel follows the darker slope of her character, returning to Africa to rejoin the mysterious man who dominates her (here, the motivation seems a bit romantic). Actually, she is moving toward death, with which this living creature has a natural complicity.
But she has helped Antoine to grow up, and she will even have helped him to die better since it is toward her that he turns once more when he is close to death. “Do not despise your uncle Antoine,” he writes in the notebook that he is keeping for Jacques’ son … “this poor adventure is, after all, the best thing that happened in my poor life.” The word “poor” is excessive here, but it is written in self-pity by a dying man.
Antoine’s love life has doubtless not been a very rich one, but, in this life, Rachel has been a royal gift that enriched him without obligation. When Jacques, to whom Antoine risks confiding something of this love, proclaims from the height of his ignorant purity: “Ah, no, Antoine, love is something different from that,” he does not know what he is talking about. There is a lesson he has missed, a knowledge worth having, which would make him humbler about love according to the flesh and freer for the joyous gifts that life and people can bestow.
Liberty and humility, these are the virtues Rachel awakens in Antoine. Life is bad, Antoine sometimes tries to tell himself, “as if he were talking to some stubbornly optimistic interlocutor; and this stubborn, stupidly satisfied person was himself, the everyday Antoine.” It is this Antoine, better informed, who survives the liaison with Rachel.
He knows that life is good, he moves easily through it, can he when he has to, and patiently waits for life to justify this confidence. Most of the time it does. But, somewhere within
