Passages from The Counterfeiters

The relief of discovering you owe nothing to the people who raised you.

Owing to an accidental discovery I happened to make this afternoon, I have become aware that I must cease to regard you as my father. This is an immense relief to me. Realizing as I do how little affection I feel for you, I have for a long time past been thinking myself an unnatural son; I prefer knowing I am not your son at all.

The moment a rescue boat becomes a border.

The recollection which remains most vividly with me and which nothing will ever efface from my mind and my heart is this.—There were about forty or so of us in the boat, all crowded together, for a number of swimmers had been picked up at the last gasp like me. The water was almost on a level with the edge of the boat. I was in the stern and I was holding the little girl I had just saved tightly pressed against me to warm her—and to prevent her from seeing what I couldn’t help seeing myself—two sailors, one armed with a hatchet and the other with a kitchen chopper. And what do you think they were doing? … They were hacking off the fingers and hands of the swimmers who were trying to get into our boat.

The idol you marry is not the person you live with.

What an admirable subject for a novel—the progressive and reciprocal decrystallization of a husband and wife after fifteen or twenty years of married life. So long as he loves and desires to be loved, the lover cannot show himself as he really is, and moreover he does not see the beloved—but instead, an idol whom he decks out, a divinity whom he creates.

Why the person someone might become is more seductive than who they are.

Nov. 7th.—Nothing that I wrote yesterday is true. Only this remains—that reality interests me inasmuch as it is plastic, and that I care more—infinitely more—for what may be than for what has been. I lean with a fearful attraction over the depths of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality.

What gets pruned from a person so they can fit where they live.

Those novelists deceive us who show the individual’s development without taking into account the pressure of surroundings. The forest fashions the tree. To each one how small a place is given! How many buds are atrophied! One shoots one’s branches where one can. The mystic bough is due more often than not to stifling. The only escape is upwards.

Filial love, measured and found too large, taken in at the seams.

“Look here, my dear fellow, I don’t want to appear cynical, but I have a horror of reach-me-down sentiments. In my early days I cut out my filial love according to the pattern I had in my heart; but I soon saw that my measurements had been too ample, and I was obliged to take it in. The old man never in his life occasioned me anything but trouble and vexation and constraint. If he had any tenderness left, it was certainly not to me that he showed it. My first impulses of affection towards him, in the days before I knew how to behave, brought me nothing but snubs—and I learnt my lesson. You must have seen for yourself when you were attending him. … Did he ever thank you? Did you ever get the slightest look, the smallest smile from him? He always thought everything his due.

What it feels like to watch yourself from across the room.

Oct. 26th.—The only existence that anything (including myself) has for me, is poetical—I restore this word its full signification. It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but that I merely imagine I exist. The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality. I am constantly getting outside myself, and as I watch myself act I cannot understand how a person who acts is the same as the person who is watching him act, and who wonders in astonishment and doubt how he can be actor and watcher at the same moment.

Between the world and your picture of it, which one do you live in?

I am beginning to catch sight of what I might call the “deep-lying subject” of my book. It is—it will be—no doubt, the rivalry between the real world and the representation of it which we make to ourselves. The manner in which the world of appearances imposes itself upon us, and the manner in which we try to impose on the outside world our own interpretation—this is the drama of our lives. The resistance of facts invites us to transport our ideal construction into the realm of dreams, of hope, of belief in a future life, which is fed by all the disappointments and disillusions of our present one. Realists start from facts—fit their ideas to suit the facts. Bernard is a realist. I am afraid we shall never understand each other.

A room where the shutters are closed and a clock does the talking.

Sept. 29th.—Visit to La Pérouse. The maid hesitated before letting me in. “Monsieur won’t see anyone.” I insisted so much that at last she showed me into the drawing-room. The shutters were shut; in the semi-obscurity I could hardly make out my old master, as he sat huddled up in a straight-backed armchair. He did not rise. He held out a limp hand, without looking at me, and let it fall again as soon as I had pressed it. I sat down beside him, so that I could see him only in profile. His features were hard and unbending. By moments his lips moved, but he said nothing. I actually doubted whether he recognized me. The clock struck four; then, as though he too were moved by clockwork, he slowly turned his head.

A son's guided tour of the bad art that explains his father.

For that matter, he has never been inside the place. He has other things to do, you understand, than worrying over his son’s habitat. My papa’s a wonderful fellow. He has by heart a number of consoling phrases for the principal events of life. It’s magnificent to hear him. A pity he never has any time for a little chat. … You’re looking at my picture gallery; one can enjoy it better in the morning. That is a colour print by a pupil of Paolo Ucelli’s—for the use of veterinaries. In an admirable attempt at synthesis, the artist has concentrated on a single horse all the ills by means of which Providence chastens the equine soul; you observe the spirituality of the look. … That is a symbolical picture of the ages of life from the cradle to the grave.