From this point of view, Antoine, because of his complexity, the different roles he plays in the novel, is a richer character than Jacques. Finally, and this is my principal reason, the basic theme of Les Thibault is more convincing in Antoine than in Jacques. Both of them, it is true, leave their private universe to rejoin the world of men. Jacques even does so before Antoine.
But his evolution is less significant since it is more logical and could have been foreseen. What is easier than to pass from individual revolt to the idea of revolution? But what is more profound, and more persuasive, on the other hand, than the inner metamorphosis of a happy, well-balanced man, full of strength and sincere self-esteem (a mark of nobility, according to Ortega y Gasset), that brings him to the recognition of a common misery in which he will find both his limits and his fulfillment?
The interest Les Thibault’s first readers took in Jacques is understandable, of course. Adolescents were in fashion at the time. Martin du Gard’s generation popularized the cult of youth in France, a cult at first merry and then fearful, which has contaminated our literature. (Nowadays, every writer seems riddled with anxiety to find out what young people think of him, when the only interesting thing would be to know what he really thinks about them.) However, I am not sure that the reader of 1955 will be tempted for very long to prefer Jacques to Antoine.
Let us admit at least that Martin du Gard succeeded, with Jacques, in giving us one of the finest portraits of adolescence our literature offers. Thin-skinned, courageous, self-willed, determined to say everything he thinks (as if everything one thinks were worth saying), passionate in friendship but clumsy in love, stiff and stilted like certain virginities, uncomfortable with himself and with other people, doomed by his purity and intransigence to lead a difficult life, he is superbly depicted by his creator.
But here again we have an exceptional destiny, a character who tears through life like a blind meteor. In a sense, Jacques is not made for life. His two great experiences, love and the revolution, are proof of this. It is worth noting, first of all, that Jacques experiences the revolution before he experiences love. When he sleeps with Jenny, he tries to live them both at the same time, a hopeless idea. When the revolution betrays both him and itself, he leaves Jenny suddenly and goes off to face a solitary death that he hopes will be exemplary.
His disappearance is the only guarantee that their love will endure. The wild, intractable Jenny, who begins by hating Jacques, without, moreover, being very fond of anyone, cannot bear to be touched, which has curious implications. Yet, separated from Jacques, she discovers she has a kind of hard passion for him, in which there is little tenderness. She can find lasting fulfillment, if this word has any meaning for her, only as a widow. It would seem that Jenny is the stuff of which suffragettes are made; faithfulness to the ideas of her dead husband, and the care given to the child of this curious love will be enough to keep her going.
And in truth, what other ending is conceivable for the adventure of these two trapped souls? Their love— in the Paris of August 1914, with Jenny in mourning following Jacques into all the public places where the socialist betrayal, and the beginnings of disaster, will unfold, with both of them running through the scorching afternoon as bells boom out the order to mobilize—is filled more with pain than delight. It is not without surprise that we learn these two lovers have occupied one bed; we would prefer, in fact, not to think about this formality. Artistically, the two characters are more than convincing; they are true.
In a human way, Jacques alone touches our hearts, because he is a figure of torment and failure. Setting out from his solitary revolt, he discovers history and its struggles, joins the socialist movement on the eve of one of its greatest defeats, lives through this defeat in anguish, discovers Jenny for the briefest of moments, abandons her in the same dreamlike state in which he had made her his mistress, and, despairing of everything, retreats into solitude, but this time to the loneliness of sacrifice. “To give oneself, to achieve deliverance by giving one’s all.” One definitive act removes him from this life, which he has never really known, but which at least he thinks he is serving this way. “To be right against everyone else and escape into death!” The formula is significant.
In reality, Jacques does not participate, even after having discovered participation. A solitary figure, he can rejoin other people only through a solitary form of sacrifice. His deepest desire (ours, too, after all) is to be right, along with everybody else. But if this is only a dream, which it is, in order to be consistent he would prefer to be right against everybody else. In his case, dying, deliberately, is the only way of being right once and for all.
In reality, Jacques has not only never been able to feel at one with other people, except through a great idea; but he has always felt hemmed in by them. “I always think of myself as the prey of other people; that if I escaped them, if I managed somewhere else, far from them, to begin an entirely new fife, I would finally achieve serenity.” Here Jacques expresses something all of us think, at one time or another. But there is no “somewhere else,” no new life either, or at least not one without other people.
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
