IV

TO A LADY WHO WANTED TO SEND ME “THE DICTIONARY OF WEATHERVANES”

Believe me, Madame, you must give up this idea of offering me a copy of the Dictionary of Weathervanes, in which you say I have been given a prominent place. I thank you for your good intentions, but I would beg you to spare yourself this expense, because I confess that I do not entertain a very flattering opinion of the author. If he puts people in his dictionary for the purpose of maligning them, and if he holds that a change of opinion is the mark of a poor mind, I fear he is nothing but a fool, and what would I want with a book written by a fool? So far as I am concerned, I should not be proud to belong to that species of men whose ways of thinking were set in their youth, and who react at sixty as they did at twenty, not indeed to the wind that happens to be blowing, but in accordance with an inner urge forever blocked and broken by the same obstacles.

Do not fear, however, that I am trying to gild the lily. I understand that only political weathervanes are of interest to our man and, I imagine, to yourself, and that in your eyes I am one. To be perfectly frank, the one most common way of remaining steadfast in one’s opinions is to be held that way by party requirements. I believe you will concede that all these mules, both young and old, who are held between the same shafts, sweat in the same harness, and make the same little Marxist or Maurrasian bells tinkle until they die deserve neither praise nor blame in this matter that concerns us. Everything depends upon the freedom of mind they have kept in spite of brace and bit. There are some who trot along meekly, and these, we know, are incapable of making a break: Claude Morgan, for instance. … But look at the foam and the streak of blood in the nostrils of Aragon! Oh, I do not mean to be malicious; I, too, have chafed at times under the harness. During the half century I have spent between the shafts, the various coachmen who have in turn occupied the driver’s seat have watched me with an eye that was both affectionate and distrustful. Are they any surer of the old horse of today than they were of the untried young colt of former years? I wouldn’t care to swear to it.

This, Madame, is the point I am trying to make: there is a kind of loyalty, on which I pride myself, that has always made me unwilling to bow to the directives of any party and that even in the Church (which with all my heart I wish to serve, and which I believe I have served well in my own way) has kept me from being one of its ever accommodating servants: this is the loyalty that arises from the determination to refuse to write anything that I do not truly believe. As a summation of my public life, I might very well deserve the one which the most illustrious son of my native Guyenne applied to himself: “Applauded on the right, applauded on the left, a Guelf to the Ghibellines, a Ghibelline to the Guelfs.”

Come to think of it, isn’t it strange that it is precisely this irreducible part of ourselves, which politics can never corrupt, that causes us to be numbered among the weathervanes? Any journalist would have been nothing but a weathervane if what he had written in July of 1940 about the victor of Verdun he had also written three months later about the treaty-maker of Montoire. In like manner, suppose that after collaborating in the clandestine Lettres françaises and the Editions de minuit with the Communists of the national front, I had managed, six months after the liberation, to remain faithful to this alliance and join the communizing third order, which would have meant serving, in the name of Stalin, the same gluttonous police-state monster that we had fought under Hitler. To give another example, I do not know whether or not André Gide is listed in the Dictionary of Weathervanes: keeping faith with himself, he publicly bore witness to the admiration he felt for the Communists, until the day came when this same loyalty to his own ideals prevented him from approving those things in the USSR which to him seemed worthy of condemnation. In his case, you will admit that rather than recant he might have yielded to the fear of being called a weathervane and pretended to admire things which from that point on only aroused his horror.

It is bad taste to praise oneself, and I am going to stop praising myself. It will perhaps surprise you if I confess that I am not very proud of this immobility and steadfastness in my principles which has almost invariably been the cause of fluctuations for which I have been reproached on the political plane. It will also surprise you that I seriously question myself on this score. We, who attach such great value to intellectual honesty, and who have suffered so much from the sins of conformity which certain leaders of thought have committed against it, have we ourselves always questioned what was not altogether clear to us? Have we not been satisfied with formulas given to us from the outside? Set your mind at ease: I am not aiming at those things which have to do with religion, because faith, and I mean living faith, is truly the least set and unchanging of all things, even when it is not a continuous staircase that follows the footsteps of saints; our relations with God (mine at any rate) are of an emotional nature and are stirred by the beating of the heart, just as any other sort of love is stirred. If in that respect I have marked time or stepped backwards, at least I have not stood still; or if I have, it has been with the false immobility of one who is bogged down. A Christian is delivered up not to the wild beasts, but to his own “deep mud,” to quote the Scriptures—that mud from which the sinner must unceasingly try to extricate himself.

However, moved by this inner debate, I should like to make sure that I have not given to any other sort of question the same answer that was given me in my college days. If I react to certain problems, particularly those of a social nature, like the adolescent I was then, it is perhaps a sign that I have given them too little attention. You see, Madame, the point I am making; it is not my fluctuations that scandalize me, but rather the state of suspended judgment and watchful waiting which I thought was temporary, but which I find I still hold, and from which I feel I shall never depart. “To lend oneself to life’s perfecting process …” Have I followed this advice that Barrès gave me when we parted? That is what really matters, not a servile, literal adherence to set rules. We feel indeed that a Maritain or a Gide, to take two types that are the antithesis of each other, have each developed in their own way according to inner models they had shaped for themselves. It matters little that Maritain has passed from Bergsonism to Thomism, that he underwent for a time the influence of Maurras only to turn violently against him later on; it matters still less that Gide was a Protestant, then the immoralist we know, or that he had periods of returning to Christianity, then this abrupt and passing taste for Communism. Through so many contradictory movements and eddies, these two lives have built themselves in accordance with their own inner laws, even the one of the two who chose what to us Christians is the evil way. Do you understand, Madame, that the life of every man worthy of the name ought to be at one and the same time a quest and a struggle, not a submission to political regulations and ideologies? How many minds does a Marx, a Nietzsche or a Maurras chain to his chariot! And how much security some people find in their chains! The real, basic question is not whether we have been weathervanes, but whether through the fear of seeming to be such we have let ourselves become prisoners of a system. “Axiom, religion, or prince of men?” wondered young Barrès in days gone by. Mollusk minds, like the hermit crab, seek from the outset a shell in which to hide. And even from the true faith, which should be life and soul to them, they draw only excuses for asking themselves no more questions about anything.

The marble of olden times chains us up to the loins

And every energetic man is like a god of boundaries.

Deceptive energy of confined men who work out their own confinement! Rather than a Dictionary of Weathervanes I should suggest to you, Madame, a dictionary of boundary gods, men set, fastened, congealed, petrified to the letter of the law, but from whom there arises from time to time, if they are poets, the mournful, musical plaint that the rising sun used to strike from the statue of Memnon.

I am letting my pen run along as if it were not to you that I am writing, as if there were any place in your pretty little head for reflections of this nature. To tell the truth, I am not very sure that you exist. But a man is ashamed to be caught openly talking to himself. We always talk to ourselves, yet nothing makes us look more insane than these soliloquies. Molière’s valet talked to his cap, and I talk to you, Madame, so that I will not seem to be demented.