Gr,1 whom I acknowledge as father, was born where my real father died and was buried.
Pierre with Marie. At the beginning he could not take her: that is why he came to love her. On the contrary, J. with Jessica, immediate bliss. That is why it takes him time to really love her—her body conceals her.
The hearse on the high plains [Figari].
The story of the German officer and the child: nothing makes it worth dying for him.
The pages of the Quillet dictionary: their smell, the plates.
The odors of the cooperage: the chip that smells more []1 than sawdust.
Jean, eternally unsatisfied.
He leaves home as an adolescent in order to sleep alone.
Discovery of religion in Italy: through art.
End of chap. I: during this time, Europe was tuning its cannons. They went off six months later. The mother arrives in Algiers, holding a four-year-old by the hand, another child in her arms, this one swollen with bites from the Seybouse mosquitoes. They arrive at the grandmother’s, three rooms in a poor neighborhood. “Mother, thank you for taking us in.” The grandmother erect, looking at her with hard clear eyes: “Daughter, you’ll have to go to work.”
Maman: like an ignorant Myshkin. She does not know Christ’s life, except on the cross. Yet who is closer to it?
One morning, in the courtyard of a provincial hotel, waiting for M. That feeling of happiness he could never experience except in what was temporary, illicit—which by the fact that it was illicit guaranteed the happiness could never last—infected him most of the time, except the few times, like now, when it appeared in its pure state, in the gentle light of morning, among dahlias still shiny with dew …
Story of XX.
She arrives, pushes her way in, “I’m free,” etc., plays the emancipated woman. Then she gets in bed naked, does everything for … a bad []1 Unfortunate.
She leaves her husband—in despair, etc. The husband writes to the other man: “You’re responsible. Go on seeing her or she’ll kill herself.” Actually, sure failure: infatuated with the absolute, and in that case trying to woo the impossible—so she killed herself. The husband came. “You know what brings me here.” “Yes.” “All right, it’s your choice, I kill you or you kill me.” “No, it’s you who has to bear the burden of the choice.” “Go ahead and kill.” Actually, the kind of predicament that the victim is really not accountable for. But [no doubt] she was responsible for something else she never paid for. Foolishness.
XX. She has in her a disposition toward destruction and death. She is [dedicated] to God.
A naturist: in an eternal state of suspicion about food, air, etc.
In occupied Germany:
Good evening, herr offizer.
Good evening, says J., closing the door. He is surprised at the tone of his voice. And he understands that many conquerors use that tone only because they are embarrassed to be conquering and occupying.
J. wants not to be. What he does, loses his reputation, etc.
Character: Nicole Ladmiral.
The father’s “African sadness.”
End. Takes his son to Saint-Brieuc. On the little square, standing facing each other. How do you live? says the son. What? Yes, who are you, etc. (Happy) he feels the shadow of death thickening around him.
V.V. We men and women of that time, of this city, in this country, we embraced each other, rejected and took each other back, and finally parted. But through all that time we never stopped helping each other to live, with that marvelous complicity of those who have to fight and suffer together. Ah! that is what love is—love for all.
At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.
Free oneself from any concern with art and form. Regain direct contact, without intermediary, thus innocence. To give up art here is to give up one’s self. Renouncing the self, not through virtuousness. On the contrary, accept one’s hell. One who wants to be better prefers his self, one who wants to enjoy prefers his self. The only one who renounces his self, his I, is one who accepts whatever happens with its consequences. Then this one is in direct contact.
Regain the greatness of the Greeks or the great Russians through this distanced innocence. Do not fear. Fear nothing. But who will help me!
That afternoon, on the road from Grasse to Cannes, where in a moment of incredible rapture he discovers, suddenly, after an affair lasting years, that he loves Jessica, that at last he loves her, and that the rest of the world becomes like a shadow beside her.
I was not in any of what I said or wrote. It was not I who married, not I who was a father, who … etc …
Many documents about sending foundlings to settle in Algeria. Yes. All of us here.
The morning trolley, from Belcourt to the place du Gouvernement. In front, the motorman with his levers.
I am going to tell the story of an alien.
The story I am going to tell …
Maman and history: She is told about sputnik: “Oh, I wouldn’t like it up there!”
Chapter going backwards. Hostages Kabyle village. Emasculated soldier—roundup, etc., step by step to the first shot fired in the settlement. But why stop there? Cain killed Abel. Problem in technique: a single chapter or in countermelody?
Rasteil: a settler with a thick moustache, graying sideburns.
His father: a carpenter from Faubourg Saint-Denis; his mother: a fine-linen laundress.
All the settlers were Parisian anyway (and many were forty-eighters). Many unemployed in Paris. The Constituent had voted fifty million to send a “colony”:
For each settler:
a dwelling
2 to 10 hectares seeds, cultures, etc.
food rations
No railroad (it only went as far as Lyon). From there canals—on barges hauled by draft horses. “Marseillaise,” “Chant du Départ,” benediction by the clergy, flag to take to Mondovi.
Six barges 100 to 150 meters each. Cooped up, on straw mattresses. The women, to change underwear, undress behind bedsheets they hold up one after the other.
Almost a month journey.
In Marseilles, at the big Lazaret1 (1,500 people), for a week. Then loaded on an old paddlewheeler: the Labrador. Leave in a mistral. Five days and five nights—everyone sick.
Bône—with the whole population on the dock to greet the settlers.
Things piled up in the hold that disappear.
From Bône to Mondovi (on the army’s gun carriages, to leave room and air for the women and children) no road. By guesswork in the swampy plain or in the brush, under the hostile eyes of the Arabs, accompanied by the howling pack of Kabyle dogs—12/8/48.2 Mondovi did not exist, some military tents. During the night the women were weeping—8 days of Algerian rain on the tents, and the wadis were overflowing. The children relieved themselves in the tents. The carpenter put up light shelters draped with sheets to protect the furniture. Hollow reeds cut on the banks of the Seybouse so the children could urinate from the inside out.
Four months in the tents, then temporary wooden huts; each double hut had to lodge six families.
Spring 49: untimely hot season. They are roasting in the huts. Malaria then cholera. 8 to 10 deaths a day. The carpenter’s daughter, Augustine, dies, then his wife. His brother-in-law also. (They bury them in a layer of tuff.)
The doctors’ prescription: dance to heat the blood.
And they dance every night to a fiddler between two burials.
The land grants would not be distributed until 1851. The father dies. Rasine and Eugéne are left alone.
To go wash their laundry in a tributary of the Seybouse they needed an escort of soldiers.
Walls built + ditches by the army. Cabins and gardens, they build with their hands.
Five or six lions roar around the village. (Numidian lion with black mane.) Jackals. Boars. Hyena. Panther.
Attacks on the villages. Theft of livestock. Between Bône and Mondovi, a wagon bogs down. The travelers leave to get reinforcements, except a pregnant young woman. They find her with her belly slit and breasts cut off.
The first church: four clay walls, no chairs, a few benches.
The first school: a shack made of poles and branches. Three sisters.
The lands: scattered plots, they plow with a gun on their shoulder. At night you go back to the village.
A column of 3,000 French soldiers passing by raids the village during the night.
June 51: uprising. Hundreds of cavalrymen in burnooses around the village. Simulating cannons with stovepipes on the little ramparts.
In actual fact, the Parisians in the fields; many went to the fields wearing top hats and their wives with silk dresses.
Smoking cigarettes forbidden. Only the covered pipe was permitted. (Because of fires.)
The houses built in 54.
In the department of Constantine, 2/3 of the settlers died almost without having laid a hand on a spade or plow.
Old settler cemetery, immense oblivion.1
Maman. The truth is that, in spite of all my love, I had not been able to live that life of blind patience, without words, without plans. I could not live her life of ignorance. And I had traveled far and wide, had built, had created, had loved people and abandoned them. My days had been full to overflowing—but nothing had filled my heart like …
He knew he was going to leave again, make a mistake again, forget what he knew. But actually what he knew was that the truth of his life was there in that room … No doubt he would flee that truth. Who can live with his own truth? But it is enough to know it is there, it is enough to know it at last and that it feeds a secret and silent [fervor] in the self, in the face
