The Boys Also by HENRY DE MONTHERLANT and translated by TERENCE KILMARTIN The Dream The Bachelors Chaos and Night The Girls THE BOYS a novel by Henry de Montherlant translated by Terence Kilmartin First published in France in 1969 under the title Les Garçons English translation published in 1974 “If I hadn’t loved you so much, everything would have been easier.” The Boys, Part Two The Ekaterinburg Regiment occupied the trenches in front of No. 4 Bastion by surprise, chased away or killed the enemy forces and then withdrew with three wounded. The officer commanding the sortie was presented to the Grand-Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich. “So you were the hero of this affair?” the Grand-Duke said. “Tell me what happened.” “When I left the Bastion and started towards the trenches the soldiers stopped and did not want to advance further . .” “How dare you, Sir!” the Grand-Duke exclaimed, moving away. “Have you no shame?” Filosopov interjected. “Away with you!” finished Menshikov. Tolstoy, Journal, 27th November 1854 “Any view of things that fails to recognise their oddity is false.” Paul Valéry Two Notes 1 In January 1969, as I was about to send this book to press (having completed it two years earlier), I realized that I had yielded to an unfortunate tendency of mine, which is to take too long over setting the scene. In Port-Royal and in Le Chaos et la nuit, the action begins half-way through the work. It was the same with Les Garçons. Les Garçons was many years in gestation; and I have learnt from experience that there is a serious disadvantage in leaving a work in one’s desk for too long: it turns sour on one. I did not want to delay the publication of Les Garçons by recasting the over-lengthy first part; I therefore decided simply to cut certain passages so that the book could be published on the scheduled date in April 1969. Les Garçons, as it appears here, is complete in itself. There are connoisseurs of antiques who break off the arm or the hand of a statue they have acquired intact. And the horsemen of the Parthenon are obliterated here and there by damage to the marble; they disappear, only to reappear further on. No one laments these missing sections. It is felt that they leave room for the imagination. 2 The chronology of the three novels which are known by the overall title La jeunesse d’Alban de Bricoule is as follows: Les Bestiaires (bull-fighting), Les Garçons (school), Le Songe (war). The author apologizes if, as a result of the long gap between the writing of certain of these novels—forty-seven years between Le Songe and Les Garçons!—the dates mentioned in the course of the narrative do not always correspond from book to book, and if there are even a few enormities (for instance, Mme. de Bricoule, who dies in 1913 in Les Garçons, reappears alive for a few lines in 1918 in Le Songe). An error on the author’s part, of course, but not a very important one since each of the novels was designed to be read independently and since, moreover, the work is in no sense an autobiography but is very slightly autobiographical in its background, which has been considerably re-arranged. Similar discrepancies in dates are to be found in Tolstoy, Zola and Proust. Preface Forty years ago I spent a few days in a famous abbey. The friend who accompanied me had warned me that the abbot was known to be an “out-and-out” unbeliever. I watched him officiate, a handsome, imposing man of some sixty years, whose whole bearing inspired respect for the religion he represented in that eminent position. I was very impressed by him. Subsequently, three or four other people confirmed to me that the abbot was indeed an atheist, having hinted as much to some one who had been unable to resist the sordid pleasure of divulging such a rare secret. An atheist priest seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon. I planned to write a novel about such a priest—I will not go so far as to say an excellent priest, but a priest who carried out the duties of his ministry to the end, for the greater good of his flock and for their constant edification. As one who has a feeling for Christianity without being a believer, I felt it was a subject made for me. The Christian death of an unbelieving priest had been a central idea of mine since before my thirtieth year; the subject was to haunt me all my life. In that same year of 1929, no doubt because I had just re-read my play l’Exil with a view to its first publication, and this had revived my interest in dramatic writing which I had neglected since 1914, I embarked on two plays, Les Crétois and Don Fadrique. And I had in my bottom drawer the youthful version of La Ville dont le prince est un enfant which I had written at seventeen. It was then that I began to be haunted by the desire, or rather the hunger, to deal with the same theme both in the form of a novel and of a play. Such an exercise is fascinating for a literary technician. And then, the novel can and should go deeper than the play, since it is not subject to the constraints of stage performance or the necessity to please an audience (of course, even in a novel one can tell only half-truths, but half-truths are enough, as I have often said). Which of the plays I had already sketched out should I also treat as a novel? La Ville seemed to lend itself best. And my atheist priest could be Father de Pradts. Les Crétois and Don Fadrique were soon abandoned. At about this time I was reading Sainte-Beuve’s Port-Royal, which I found extremely moving. It appealed to the austere side of my nature, not only through the spirit of Jansenism but because it began with a moral “reformation”—and as an adolescent I had attempted such a reformation at my school. And I was impressed by the fact that this work, which of all those I had read that were calculated to reconcile me with Christianity was the only one to achieve this end, had been written by an unbeliever. Thus in writing a novel of which the kernel would be the subject of La Ville, I would satisfy my three desires: to treat the same subject both as a novel and as a play, to develop the character of an atheist priest, and to deal with a movement of reform. I began Les Garçons in 1929 and wrote fifty pages of it;* then I stopped, postponing this task, as I also postponed the completion of La Ville, until a time when my mind and my experience were more mature, especially for the purpose of depicting the priests. This day came in 1951 for La Ville, and in 1965 for the novel. It was thus that Les Garçons was born, the offspring of La Ville. Meanwhile, in 1932, a man of great intellectual distinction, much older than I, whom I had recently met, gave me a detailed account of the customs of a college in the French provinces where he had been brought up in the early 1880s—customs so extraordinary, and confirming so strikingly what I have always thought about reality being more improbable than fiction, that I made up my mind to draw on them for my novel when the time came. As a result, it would lose much of the autobiographical character of La Ville, without however becoming a work of pure invention since in one way and another its ingredients would be largely grounded in reality. I made notes of what my informant * Which appeared in 1948 in a limited edition of 262 copies under the title Serge Sandrier, illustrated with lithographs by Mariette Lydis. told me. Thus the present novel took shape, the product of memory, information, and imagination. Apart from the afore-mentioned fifty pages, Les Garçons was written between July 1965 and March 1967. I may say of the novel what I have always thought of La Ville, that it is a book from which the reader should emerge more Christian if he is a Christian, and more sympathetic towards Christianity if he is not, as I emerged from reading Sainte-Beuve’s Port-Royal. The book was not, of course, written with this intention. Paris, 1969 Part One A Children’s Paradise New school year, 1912, at the College of Notre-Dame du Parc: a college Academy For the school year 1912–13, the Father Superior of the College of Notre-Dame de —— (commonly known as Notre-Dame du Parc, because of its fine gardens), in the Boulevard de Montmorency at Auteuil, had instituted a new governmental device: an Academy. It was to be made up of ten pupils from the upper and lower sixth, who would reconstitute it annually by their own votes—ratified, not to say inspired, by the authorities—and who were supposed to represent the flower of the college as regards literary talent, intellectual distinction, and “general conduct”, which was naturally taken for granted. A category of “candidate academicians” was also created, for third-, fourth- and fifth-form pupils (ages twelve to fourteen). Since the Frenchman’s sole aim is to become a person of importance, the authorities were confident that from the age of twelve upwards the children, either of their own accord, or, if by some mischance they were so stupid as to despise worldly vanities, at the instigation of their families, would develop the habit of doing what was necessary with a view to entering the Academy in the fullness of time—to wit, suppressing everything individual or forceful in themselves, striving to please, and above all never telling the truth when it might be detrimental to established ideas.