That big, somber city of conspiracy that Lyon then was would gradually empty. But we would not speak of the conspiracy. As a matter of fact, Leynaud, unless he absolutely had to, never spoke of it. We would exchange news of our friends. Sometimes we spoke of literature. He loved the poets of the sixteenth century and especially the School of Lyon. His library, rare and precious, which surrounded us then, was made up almost exclusively of poetry. But the poems came from all times and all places. I did not have his competence.
Yet I ventured to tell him the impatience I felt when faced with the short poem, the fleeting notation cultivated by so many moderns. We saw eye to eye on that point, and it was then that he told me of his plan for a long poem in which he would try to set down what he had to say. Recovered fragments of that poem figure in his volume of poetry.
But at that time Leynaud was not writing anything. He had decided that he would work afterward. From several indications, I guessed then that he was waiting impatiently for that afterward. This man who had never sidestepped any duty was to be especially congratulated because it so happened that he felt the full weight of duty. Fatigue would seize him at certain moments and give him that set look that would isolate him from the world for a time.
He was too close to all he loved—his wife, his child, a certain way of life—not to dream of a future in which his love would not be endangered and in which he himself could be what he really was. “What will you do when it’s all over?” he would ask me. But then as now I had no imagination and my replies were not clear. For Leynaud, everything was simple; he would resume his life at the point where he had left off, for he found it to his liking. Then, he had a child to raise. And though he rarely became animated, the name of his son was enough to make his eyes shine.
At other times we had less serious conversations. I used to like to see him laugh. He did so rarely, now that I stop to think about it, but then he would do so heartily, leaning back on his chair. The next moment he would be standing in a position in which I see him often, his feet apart, rolling his sleeves high above the elbows, and raising his vigorous arms to try to discipline his always tousled hair. We would talk of boxing, of swimming, and of camping.
He loved the physical life, muscular effort, the fraternal earth, and all that in silence, just as he used to eat, with a lively, uncommunicative appetite. As midnight approached, he would empty his pipe, lay out more cigarettes that he urged me to smoke during the night, and, his coat over his arm, would set forth energetically. I could still hear him on the stairs as I looked around me at what belonged to him.
I also had meetings with him at Saint-Etienne. Between trains, we would spend a few hours in that hopeless town. I recall very vividly the first of those meetings, in September 1943, because everything about it was a disappointment. I had warned Leynaud that nothing could be accomplished at Saint-Etienne, where I used to stop off frequently then—that I was no good for anything in a city where I never felt anything but the most unreasonable torpor.
In my opinion, if hell existed it would have to look like those interminable gray streets where everyone was wearing black. Leynaud assured me that I was exaggerating, and we made an appointment so that he could meet one of my friends whom he wanted to know. The friend was an energetic and irreverent Dominican who claimed to loathe the Christian Democrats and dreamed of a Nietzschean Christianity. Leynaud, who could not feel drawn to the cautious forms of Christianity, felt interested in that soldier-monk. Together with the priest, I was to wait for him at the Saint-Etienne station buffet. Unfortunately the priest, obliged to take a train early in the afternoon, had to lunch very early. Leynaud arrived finally during the dessert, but, suffering from a very obvious chest cold, he was hardly capable of talking coherently.
Five minutes later my white-robed friend had to dash toward the platform. And Leynaud and I, whose trains did not leave until late in the afternoon, began to wander in hell, drugged with heat and boredom, pausing at regular intervals in front of a lemonade sweetened with saccharine in deserted cafés full of flies. Meanwhile he was stuffing himself with aspirin. Around four o’clock we were finally able to talk a little. A bit later I took him to his train, and he was already on the steps of the car when we both broke out laughing. “You see,” I said to him, “it’s impossible to accomplish anything here.” He laughed heartily and, as the train started up, he continued to laugh as he waved in my direction. Of all the images I have of him, this one is especially dear to me.
Another day, in Place Bellecour among playing children and the few pigeons that had escaped the inhabitants’ hunger, Leynaud and I were talking of morality and were of the opinion that, if I dare say so, something should be done about it. That was the occasion when I had a chance to measure what particularly distinguished him, the force and quality of his silence, for we then spent more than half an hour side by side apparently absorbed in watching the passers-by but completely absorbed in pursuing a common thought.
The last time I saw him was in Paris in the spring of 1944. We were never closer to each other than during that last meeting. We had met in a restaurant in Rue Saint-Benoît, and afterward, walking along the quais in beautiful weather, we had spoken at length of the future. We were in such deep agreement that for the first time I felt an absolute confidence in the future of our country. I cannot set down here our conversation although I have it all clearly in mind and several of his letters still remind me that our words were as important to him as they were to me. We had decided then to work together after the liberation.
Leynaud was to settle in Paris and work for the same cause. But now he no longer belongs to anyone, and I shall take care not to give the impression that at present he would naturally be working with me. He left me that day at about four p.m. on the Pont du Carrousel. I am ashamed to say that I don’t recall his last words. And I hadn’t the slightest premonition as to his death. Sunk in stupid human confidence, sure of him and of his future, I merely waved at him from one end of the bridge to the other as he waved at me, with one arm in the air.
A few weeks before, he had written me: “May God grant us this year and a few others, and the joy of serving the same truth. These are my wishes for 1944 that I voice for you and for me because I am eager today not to dissociate you from a certain idea I have of myself, which is not, I hope, the least noble.”
But that year was not granted him.
If I dared paraphrase one of his letters, I should say simply that I often consult in myself an image he put there, or a virtue, that bears his name and his countenance. Truth needs witnesses. Leynaud was one of them, and this is why I miss him today. With him here, I saw more clearly, and his death, far from making me better, as the books of consolation say, made my revolt more blind. The finest thing I can say in his favor is that he would not have followed me in that revolt. But no good is done to men by killing their friends, as I know only too well by now.
And who can ever justify that dreadful death? What are duty, virtue, honors compared to what was irreplaceable in Leynaud? Yes, what are they but the paltry alibis of those who remain alive? We were cheated of a man three years ago, and since then we have had a heavy heart, that is all I can say. For us who loved him and for all those who, without knowing him, deserved to love him, this is a dead loss.
Introduction to POÉSIES POSTHUMES,
by René Leynaud (1947)
The end
