The Harpies of the Shore

by ANDRÉ MAUROIS

FROM THÉRÈSE TO ANTOINE

Évreux. October 7, 1932
Well, my dear, like the rest of the world I’ve been reading your book. Don’t worry; I thought it very fine.
In your place I should now begin to wonder: “Does she think it is fair? Did it hurt her?” But of course these questions never even occur to you. You will be so sure not only of being just to me but of having tempered your justice with mercy. That paragraph about our marriage!
“So eager was I for the ideal woman, the helpmate and the mistress in one, perhaps I overlooked the real woman. I was sure that the first days of my life with Therese would unfold the vision I had expected, with a little of the unpredictable too. I was a plebeian and an artist; Therese was the great middle class with all its worthiness and all its weakness. She was faithful, forbearing — even brilliant, according to her lights. But alas, no one could have been less equipped for the lifelong struggle of a spiritual crusade.”
Sure of that, Antoine? In spite of my parents, I gave in to your entreaties. We were married. Was that the start of your spiritual crusade? For me, certainly, it took a little courage. You were unknown then and your ideas of the world clashed with mine — frightened me even. I left a wealthy and united family to embark on the perilous journey of a lifetime. I didn’t protest a year later when you told me you couldn’t work in Paris and led me off to your own grim, empty corner of the country. That frightened little maid we had was the only creature lonelier than I was. I accepted it all. For quite a while I even pretended to be happy.

But what woman could really be happy with you? I laugh now — bitterly, to be sure — when the papers harp upon your “strength,” your “moral courage.” Strength! Antoine, I have never met a man weaker than you. Not one, ever. I am not speaking in hatred. The time for that is gone, and since we parted I have found peace. But this is something you ought to be told. Your never ending tension, your phobia of people, even as you hungered for their praise, your childish fear of illness and death — those are not strength, even though the novels which are their fruit may fool your worshipers.
Two or three times in your life, I admit, you have stood up for a principle. But only after you had cold-bloodedly calculated its final acceptance by the world. A long time ago, in one of your rare moments of candor you made an admission; —
“As a writer ages,” you told me, “his opinions ought to grow more and more radical. It’s the only way to keep a hold on the new generations.”
Little did your young idolators, so naively and frenziedly drunk on your Messages, suspect the synthetic passion, the satanic care, with which you had composed them.
You are not strong, not even healthy. Sorry to be cruel, but that has to be said. You were never a lover, Antoine, my dear. After we were divorced, I found the peace, the fullness of physical love, in those beautiful long nights when a woman sleeps fulfilled between the arms of a virile man. As long as I lived with you I saw only sorry mockeries, a few pitiful parodies of such love. I was loo young and ignorant to miss it. I believed you when you said that an artist should sublimate his passion. But I should have liked to sleep beside you if only to keep warm; if only to be granted a little tenderness, a little pity. But you slid from my arms, then my bed, then even my room, never guessing my despair.
You lived only for yourself and your reputation and that Byronic personality which so titillates your lady readers but which is not. your own, and you know it. An adverse notice in the book reviews upset you more than the suffering of the woman who loved you. The only evenings you thought of me were when politicians or critics who mattered had promised to come for dinner. Then you wanted me to shine. A day ahead, you would forget your allimportant work and lecture me half the day: what 1 should (or should not) say; which dish excited the palate of this senator, or which theory the enthusiasm of that doddering but important critic. On those evenings you wanted our household to seem Spartan, from principle, but our board Lucullan; because, after all, great men are only human.
Then Antoine, do you remember when you began to make money? Real money? You liked that because in the bottom of your heart you are a peasant, grasping for a square of earth; but at the same time you were a little embarrassed, because money has no place in your philosophy. 1 had to smile at those blindfolds which your greed bound over the eyes of your conscience. “1 shall give almost all of it to the Cause,” you used to say. Well, I handled the accounts, so I knew what you gave away and what you kept.
Sometimes, so ingenuously, I’d exclaim: “Why, Antoine, you are really getting very rich!”
Then you would sigh: “I hate the whole system, but as long as it exists, you have to adjust yourself to it.”
As fighting the system was the fashion, the more you fought it the richer you became. What a cruel fate, my poor Antoine. Still, I must admit that where I wras concerned you were impeccably orthodox. When you became a millionaire I did venture to hope, like all women deprived of love, for a few luxuries, for furs and jewels. Then, I admit, you denounced the Golden Calf with all your heart.
“A sable coat? Pearls?” you cried in horror. “Can’t you see what my enemies would say if my wife grew into one of those bejeweled country-club wives whose caricatures have made me famous!”
1 did see. I understood that the wife of Antoine Vcncc should be above suspicion. I acknowledged my indecency. To be sure, you had real estate and securities for playthings. But bank accounts are invisible, while diamonds sparkle in the accusing sun. As usual, Antoine, you were right. So I resigned myself again to that and everything else; even this last book. All my friends praise the young, true, unflinching courage of its theories; its kindliness (you arc one of the few really mean human beings 1 have ever known); its generosity towards me. Either I don’t answer or I agree: “Yes, he has been very fair, and I have no reason to complain.” But am I right to play up to you? Is it wise to nurse this glittering legend of which you arc the hero? Should youth be allowed to follow a man who I know is not a man? I ask, but have no answer. I shan’t even write the expected but useless apologia, for you have made me disgusted with words.
Good-bye,Antoine.

FROM ANTOINE TO THÉRÈSE

Paris. October 15, lf32
Just like okl times, your efforts to hurt me. Cheer up, you have succeeded.
Therese, you don’t understand yourself. You are so invariably the victim — it’s almost masochism. It took even me a long time to understand you. At first I accepted your version of the crushed violet, but little by little your cruelty and your deceit entrapped me. Just because the beauty of your sister anil the vulgarity of your parents humiliated you in youth, you dedicate the rest of your life to avenging yourself on those unlucky enough to love you. When I met you, 1 had confidence in myself. You determined to undermine it, and assaulted it in my beliefs, in my soul, and in my body. You made me ridiculous in my own eyes. Even now that I am rid of you, I am ashamed to remember the secret wounds which your “candor” inflicted.
Your cold and implacable eye! “You are a small man,” you would say, “very small.”
True enough, I wras short and, like most men who work with head instead of hand, had a little more fat than muscle. Was that a crime? Or even a defect? You never let me forget that it was at least something to laugh at. Love abhors constraint and distrust. When a couple strip off their clothes, they strip their fears, their tension, and their shame. Stretched out beside me, you were not a wife but a host ile judge, master of your senses, eyeing me with your cold clarity. Perfect love casteth out fear. IIow could 1 be the perfect man when I met in you, my mate, only constraint and prudery? You accuse me of avoiding your bed. Are you sure you didn’t drive me out?
“For me, certainly,” you write, “it took a little courage to marry you.” But didn’t you know at the beginning that I should soon rise from obscurity? You had chosen me because you had found in me something real and alive, unknown in your own people. Perhaps a little because you felt you could wound me, and to wound is your dearest, your only delight. I can hardly remember what kind of man I was when I met you; but I believe I was unusual enough to have faith in my own ideas — no, I’m going to say “my genius.”
You did all you could to kill that man. You murdered my happiness with pity. Strange thing! You had married me for my strength, and it was that very strength which you set yourself to destroy. But I must not look for logic or even design in your actions. Like so many women, you are the wretched slave of your nervous and sexual system; warped by an adolescent dream, furious at its failure. As long as you lived with your parents you poured out on them that liquid venom which you harbor; when 1 became your husband, you spat it upon me.
“A brand-new platform,” you are thinking, “knocked together especially to answer my letter.”
And you will proudly pass my book around, open at the passages you so carefully underlined. “My wife was faithful, forbearing, brilliant.”
Take a grain of salt with this overgenerous recommendation. Now that I must use any weapon, as my back is to the wall, I confess that this sentence was a lie. I wanted the book to be sportsmanlike, but I was wrong. The least hypocrisy spoils any work of art. Bitterly, relentlessly, I should have exposed you as a monster, as the destroyer of my soul.
“Faithful?” Before we parted, I knew you were no longer so. Yet why should 1 blazon it in a public page, and give you at my expense the prestige of the adulteress? “Forbearing?” You have the devil’s pride, and the passion to dominate and dazzle lies behind your every word and action. “ Brilliant? ” Yes, even now many people think you brilliant; in fact, you have become so. But do you know why? Because I formed you. Because for over twenty years you received from me everything you lacked: your thoughts, your knowledge, your very vocabulary. Today, after our long separation, you live by the breath 1 infused into you, and that letter by which you hoped to finish me off owes what vigor it has to me.
Am I vain? No, proud; though I need to repeat my self-belief, like a rosary, to break tlie spell of your evil. I shan’t take up your letter point by point — it would play your game to torment myself in vain. But one more word. “I laugh now — bitterly, to be sure — ” you write, “ when the papers harp upon your strength. I have never met a man weaker than you.”

Therese, you know quite well that you attack me there on two different scores which you pretend to confuse. That is not fair. What my character was in our own relations is between ourselves alone. I agree with you now that in that struggle I was too weak. Weak out of pity; and pity is not always untainted by cowardice. But you pretend not to know that a man can be weak in the affairs of the world and yet create power; that often, in fact, his work is vigorous because his life is weak. You may be sure, Therese, that what Youth sees in my work is really there.
And on second thought perhaps I ought humbly to thank you for the suffering you have caused. To your unwavering hatred I owe an enormous part of what 1 have accomplished.
Before everything you are a Destroyer. That is the form your rancor has taken. Because you arc unhappy, you hate happiness. Because you are frigid, you scorn passion. Spite has made you a penetrating and mordant observer, like those X-rays which reveal in the steel the straw which threatens the beam’s stability. You make unerringly for a man’s vulnerable spot. You see straws in every triumph. A remarkable gift, Therese, but a curse. T own to those weaknesses which you so cruelly point out to me. You have seen clearly and well. But they are bound in a matrix so heavy, so tough, that no human strength can break it. You have shattered yourself against it, and my work and ray soul have survived your sinister reign.
“But what woman,” you write, “could really be happy with you?” I want you to know that 1 too have discovered love since we were divorced. At last, with a simple good wife i have found peace. I can see you smiling, “Yes, but what about her?” If you could see Sabine for a moment, you would not doubt her happiness. Not all women need, like you, to kill in order to live.
Whom are you killing now?

FROM SABINE TO THÉRÈSE

Paris. February 2, 19S7
MY DEAR MADAME BERGER: —
You must be surprised to receive a letter from me. We are supposed to be enemies. I do not know how you feel; but I, far from hating, have a sort of unwilling sympathy for you. Long ago, at the time of your divorce, you may have been the adversary whom I had to drive at any cost from the heart of the man I had chosen. But after our marriage von soon became an invisible friend. Doubtless Bluebeard’s wives, half-dead, often meet in the memory of their common husband. In spite of himself, Antoine used to speak of you. I would try to picture you in company with that exacting and strange being, and often felt that your discipline had been a wiser prescription for him than my patience.
Since Antoine’s death I have had to sort out his papers. I have found many of your letters among them. One in particular impressed me: the one you wrote him five years ago after the publication of his Diary, in which he mentioned you. I often told him that page would offend you and begged him to omit it. But that weakling was surprisingly obstinate — or bold, if you will — where his work was concerned. Your answer was cruel, but I must say I found it .just. Are you surprised?
Please do not think I am betraying Antoine now that he is dead. 1 loved him; T am still loyal to him. But I know him and I cannot lie. As a writer he had the talent and the conscience of genius. But you were right about him as a man. Antoine was not a crusader; or at least, though he may have seemed so to his followers, lie never fooled us who were his wives. He had always to surround his actions, his social theories, everything, with a halo of sanctity; but we know that the motives behind them may sometimes have been petty.
lie made a virtue of his hatred for society, but we both know that the cause was his neurotic fear. Towards women he was a watchful and considerate comrade; but, as you wrote him, that was less real tenderness than weakness. He shunned acclaim, but because of pride and forethought rather than modesty. All in all, he never made a sacrifice without getting a reward, and we two were the victims of his affected crusades.
I truly believe, Madame, that he never knew his real nature; and that Antoine, so penetrating and so severe in judging others, died in t he belief that he was honest.
Was I happy with him? Yes, in spite of so much disillusion, because he was an enormously interesting human being, with something always new to watch. The very double life 1 have just described made him a walking riddle. I never wearied of listening, asking, and watching. Ills weakness was most touching of all. In his last years, I grew to feel more like an indulgent mother than a woman in love.
Ah, well, if one loves a man, what matter how? Whenever he left me I cursed him. The moment he returned, 1 was his slave again. At least, he never knew my anguish. What could have been the use?
I concluded that he would have hated any woman who unmasked him and forced him to the mirror, and that even then he would not believe what he saw there. After all, you yourself didn’t attempt

this until after knowing you would never meet him again.
But what an impression you had left! After your divorce Antoine did nothing but rewrite the history of that separation with me at his elbow. You were his only heroine, the central figure of all his books. Again and again, under different names, I met in their pages your Florentine page haircut, your slow gestures, your aspiration, your aloof purity, and the hard brilliance of your eyes. He never port rayed my character or my person. He tried once or twice, to please me.
But, ah, if you knew what I endured each time to see the woman whom he modeled on me evolve in spite ol her creator into a woman who was unmistakably yourself. One of his stories, “Sabine,” he named for me, but who could help seeing that its remote and virginal heroine is you all over again? Many is the time I have cried as I copied out. the chapters where you are first the mysterious Beloved, then the Wife, faithless but adored, then the Enemy, hateful and vile but still desired.
Yes, after you left him he lived on his memories, those evil memories you had left him. At first, I tried to make him lead a calm and healthy life devoted wholly to his work. 1 wonder now if I was right. Perhaps a great artist ought to suffer. Perhaps monotony is worse for him than jealousy or hatred or suffering. I cannot deny that when Antoine and you were married he wrote the richest and most human of his books; that bereft of you he could do nothing but. relive the last months of your marriage. Even the cruelty of your letter did not cure him of his passion. He spent his last years trying to answer it in his heart and in his books. His last book — unfinished; l have the manuscript here — is a sort of relentless confession in which he destroys himself in self-defense. Ah, Madame, I covet the coldness which could so awake him!
Why am I writing you this? Because I have so long wanted to say it. Because you alone, 1 believe, can understand it. And because my honesty will, I hope, induce you to do me a favor. You know that since Antoine’s death a lot has been written about him. What they have said about his work is neither very accurate nor very profound, but I shall not correct it. Critics have the right to make mistakes. Posterity is the final critic, and 1 believe that Antoine, as a writer, is among the immortals. But I cannot be so casual when his biographers distort his character and his life. Only you and l, Madame, have really known their intimate details. After much hesitation I have decided that it is my duty to make our memories permanent.
So I am going to write a book on Antoine. 1 know I haven’t the talent, but this is a case where fact is more important than form. And at least I shall have made a start; some day, perhaps, a great historian will use it in the ultimate biography. For some months I have been trying to assemble all the information I need. But I am short on one period; the time of your engagement and marriage. It may be unconventional, or overbold, but at least 1 think it straightforward and loyal to come directly to you for help. Probably I should not have ventured this unless I had that curious but heartfelt sympathy for you which I mentioned at first. Though we have never met, I feel I know you better than anyone else. So won’t you write me where and when I. can meet you to explain my scheme?
No doubt it would t ake you a little time to find and sort out the old letters — if indeed you still have them; but at any event I should love to have a talk with you as soon as convenient. I want to tell you how I plan the book; you will see that 1 shall not be hard on you, or even one-sided. On the contrary, I promise to use every device I can in your favor. I know, of course, that you have built a new life, and shall be very careful not to quote or relate anything that might be awkward. Let me thank you in advance for what I am sure you are willing to do to make my task easier.
SABINE ANTOINE-VENCE

P.S. This summer I am going to Uriage, where Antoine met you, so that 1 can describe from real life the background of your encounter on t he terrace of the Hotel Stendhal. Then I should like to visit your parents’ estate and make the acquaintance of your beautiful sister.

P.P.S. I haven’t much on the affair of Antoine with Madame de Vaulges. Do you know more than 1? He always spoke of you, but never about that youthful adventure. Is it true that he met Madame de Vaulges at Modane in 1907 and made a trip through Italy with her? Was Antoines father s mother named Hortense or Melanie?

FROM TIIERESE TO SABINE

Évreux. February 4, 1937
DEAR MADAME; —
To my great regret, I cannot be of the slightest help. In fact, I have decided to publish a life of Antoine Vcnce myself. You are of course his widow, bearing his name, so that a short volume of memories would be appropriate. But we must be frank with each other, Madame; so let us admit that you hardly knew Antoine. You married him at a time when he was already famous, when his public life

overshadowed his private. On the other hand he was mine during his formative years as a writer, when the legend was born; and you yourself were kind enough to admit that the best of his work was composed either with or in memory of me.
Besides which, no real life of Antoine could be written without the documents which I have: two thousand of his love (and hate) letters — not counting my answers, the best examples of which I have kept. For twenty years I cut out all clippings about him and his books, and classified them whether by his friends or by unknown admirers. I have all his speeches, his letters, his articles in the Temps. The Director of the Bibliotheque Nationale, who has just inventoried this treasure (for J plan to leave it to the nation), tells me: “It is an incomparable collection.”
For instance, you ask me the first name of his grandmother from Bordeaux. I have a whole folder on this Hortense-Pauline-Melanie Vence, as well as on all Antoine’s forebears.
He loved to call himself a man of the people. That is not true. At the end of the eighteenth century the Venccs owned a vineyard at Graves, small but excellent; and Antoine’s maternal grandparents boasted a hundred hectares near Mcrignac. In the time of Louis-Philippe his grandfather was mayor of his village. One of his great-uncles was a Jesuit priest. The Vences, though sturdy vintners, were bourgeois in a way, and I shall prove it. Not that I want to emphasize the reverse snobbishness which was one of poor Antoine’s weaknesses. I shall be unbiased, even indulgent. But still I must be accurate. There, Madame, lay the most venial fault of the great man whom we two loved and judged.
Towards you I shall be no less kindly than you have generously proposed to be towards me. \\ hy should we not be united? From letters which I have before me it is clear that you were Antoine s mistress before becoming his wife, but I shall not quote them. I abhor scandal for others as well as myself. Besides, however just my grievances against Antoine, I am still a faithful admirer of his genius and shall exalt it as best I can without thought of self. Possibly, since our two books will appear so closely together, it might be well if we exchanged our proofs, so as to avoid any contradictions for the crit ics to cavil at.
You know more than I about Antoine’s last years, and his decline after his first stroke. That period of his life I leave to you. 1 shall end the book at the time we separated. Why bring up the quarrels which ensued? But in an epilogue I shall relate your marriage, then my own; and tell how I heard the news of Antoine’s death when I happened to be in

America with my second husband. In a newsreel one day I saw flashed across the screen his last portrait, his state funeral, and a picture of yourself, Madame, coming down from a stand on ihe arm of the President of the Republic. It would be an apt end.
But I am sure your own little book will be delightful.

FROM SABINE TO THE PORTICO PUBLISHING COMPANY

Paris. February 7, 1937
I have just learned that Madame Therese Berger (who was, as you know, my husband’s first wife) is getting out a book of memoirs. To get ahead of her, we must publish as soon as possible. You will receive my manuscript July 15. I am glad to hear that options have already been requested in Brazil and the United States.

FROM THÉRÈSE TO SABINE

Èvreux. December 9, 1937
MADAME: —
On top of the American success of my book (it was chosen by the Book-of-thc-Month Club) I have just received from Hollywood two long cables on which I ought to consult you. An agent for one of the big producers suggests filming a life of Antoine Vence. You arc aware that Antoine is widely read in the United States among the liberal and intellectual sets and that his Messages have become classics.
This popularity, and the almost crusading quality which the person of our husband has taken on, make the producer eager to give the film a stirring and noble character. At first, some of his conditions startled me. But on second thought 1 believe that no sacrifice will be too great for us if we can assure to Antoine that consecration with the public which in these days the movies alone can give. We both knew him well enough to be sure this would have been his own answer; and surely historical accuracy was the least of his worries when publicity was at stake. Here are the three most ticklish points:—
1. Hollywood insists that Antoine must be a man of the people, desperately poor, and wants to picture his early struggles in a tragic light. This is false, we know; but it is the reading which pleased Antoine and we cannot be more exacting than the hero.
2. Hollywood wants Antoine to take violent sides in the Dreyfus case, and to have risked his whole career for the captain. Historically this is wrong and chronologically impossible; but it couldn’t harm his memory. Quite the contrary, in fact.
8. Finally, and this is hardest of all, Hollywood thinks it awkward to have two women in Antoine’s life. His first marriage having been for love (made specially romantic by my family’s opposition), the strange creed of the cinema demands that it should be happy. Therefore the producer asks my permission to “fuse” the two into one. For the last of the film he would use the description in your book, but give me your personality at the time of Antoine’s illness and death.
I can well picture your qualms, and in fact at first refused the last request. But the agent has cabled again with an unanswerable argument. The part of Madame Vence will, of course, be played by a star. Now no great luminary of the screen would agree to appear in a film if she had to disappear after the first reel. He gave me an instance: in Mary Stuart, to persuade a famous actor to take the part of Bothwcll, they had to present him as the love of her youth. Idyllic but quite anachronistic. You must admit that if history can accommodate itself to the needs of the screen in such well-known events, it would ill become us to display a ridiculous pedantry in regard to our own humble lives.
I might add that (a) this composite wife would have neither your features nor mine, since the actress who would play us will be the one with whom the producer has a contract at this moment, and who resembles neither of us; and (b) the sum proposed is very high (sixty thousand dollars, or over a million francs at the present rate), and that, of course, if you accept the proposed versions, I should liberally reward the great help your book has given.
Please wire your answer, for I must cable Hollywood myself.

FROM SABINE TO THÉRÈSE

SUBJECT TOO IMPORTANT FOR CORRESPONDENCE. TAKING TRAIN PARIS 2.23. ARRIVE EVREUX ABOUT 6.00. BEST REGARDS.

SABINE ANTOINE-VENCE

FROM THÈRÈSE TO SABINE

Évreux. August 1, 1938
Here I am again in this small cottage which you know and arc kind enough to like. I am by myself as my husband is away for three weeks. Why don’t you come down and make me a visit, for as long as you can? I should love it. You can read, write, or work, for I am so busy with my new book that I shall have to leave you to your own devices. Take my car whenever you want to tour the countryside. But in the evening, we can talk over our memories — and our business.
With love and best wishes,
THERESE BERGER