Roger Martin du Gard, french novelist and
dramatist whose vivid novel, The World of
the Thibaults, won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1937. Martin du Gard and Gide's
friendship lasted nearly forty years, beginning
as a student/mentor relationship it became a
friendship of equals. Few other friends put
up with so many of Gide's eccentricities as
Martin du Gard did. The correspondance
is collected within the pages of Gide Journals
(Knopf, various dates) and within Roger
Martin du Gard's diary excerpts published in
Recollections of Andre Gide
This excerpt is taken from Martin du Gard's book
Recollections of Andre Gide
(Viking Press, 1953)
November, 1913
At last I have met Andre Gide!
Last Sunday I was invited to the Nouvelle Revue Francaise before dinner. It was their monthly reception for contributors and friends.
In the shop on the rue Madame, I found about a dozen young men, grouped round Gaston Gallimard and Jean Schlumberger (the author of L'Inquiete paternite). On the counter, between the accountant's ledgers and the typewriter, were some cups, none of them matching, and a plateful of dry buns. The editorial secretary, a tall, thin, and very young man with a graceful awkwardness of manner, had a smile for us all as he handed round the tea. We might have been in a boy's club. His name is Jacques Riviere. (Copeau is still nominally in charge of the magazine; but sine Vieux-Colombier opened, not long ago, he has no time for anything but this theater.) I had already met Jean Schlumberger. As he moved from one to another of us there was a well-mannered coolness about him: even he himself seemed intimidated by it, and it was touching to see how he tried to transform it into an appearance of smiling good nature...
Mr. Jean Barois has just come out, and I was both flattered and embarrassed by the curiosity with which everyone crowded round to speak to me about it. They all said that it was a remarkable book; but I soon had the feeling that not one of them - not even Gaston, perhaps? - had read it, really read it, from cover to cover.
In the middle of the next room I found a hilarious, uproarious Bluebeard in a state of demonic excitement. It was Henri Gheon: two blazing eyes in a radiant face; a beard - square, dark short and thick; florid cheeks; a gleaming cranium. As he turned toward me there was tenderness and cruelty and great good spirits in his glance. He overwhelmed me with exaggerated compliments. He sputters and gesticulates as he talks, and punctuates every conversation with a loud whinnying: you feel that he is drunk, perpetually drunk, with the fact of being alive.
I moved on. Next it was Paul Fargue who was pinning me against the window. A face that is made into a perfect egg-shape by the tall, bulging, ungarnished forehead and the pointed end of his beard. Almond eyes, wrinkled eyelids, a caressing glance which, though seemingly distracted, misses nothing. A strange mixture of quivering sensuality and oriental impassivity. As he talks, with a cigarette planted squarely in the middle of his mouth, there is no more than the barest perceptible parting of his delicately pursed lips. The voice is soft and coaxes. He listens to himself as if he were dictating an article and savoring, as a connoisseur, each passing phrase. He claimed to have devoured my Barois in a single night: he described himself - not without satisfaction - smoking, now lying flat, now hoisting himself up on one elbow, in the intimate circle of the lamplight; and it seemed as if the soft rose-pink light, the warm bed, the silence of the night, the intoxication of tobacco, and the interest of my novel had fused in a single voluptuous memory.
The door is pushed ajar. A man sidles into the shop as a down-and-out slips into the warmth of a church. His eyes are hidden behind the brim of a battered old hat; an enveloping cloak hangs down from his shoulders. He looks like an old, half-starved, out-of-work actor; or like one of those bohemian wrecks who end up in a doss-house when their luck's run out; or else like one of those habitues of the Bibliotheque Nationale, professional copyists with their dubious collars and cuffs, who fall asleep on their folios in the middle of the day after lunching off a croissant. Or an unfrocked priest, perhaps? An unfrocked priest with a bad conscience? Gautier accursed Renan of having kept his "parsonical look."...
But they all go to greet him; evidently he has something to do with the magazine. He takes off his hat and his cloak; his shapeless, outworn traveling suite doesn't seem to belong to his awkward limbs; his detachable collar, frayed and hanging loose, reveals a neck like that of some elderly bird. The hair recedes from the forehead and is beginning to turn gray; it is tufty above the coat-collar and looks drab, as if it were dead at the roots. The mongol mask, in which the oblique ridges of the brow predominate, is flawed by warts. The features are emphatic but flaccid; the complexion is grayish; the cheeks hollow and ill shaven. The line of the thin-set lips is sinuous and elastic. There is no candor in the eyes as they hover beneath the eyelids, and with the momentary flashing glance there goes a smile that is almost a grimace: a smile at one childlike and sly, at once timid and rehearsed.
Schlumberger brought him over to me. I was dumfounded: it is Andre Gide...
The three of us exchanged a few conventional phrases. Gide seemed dreadfully embarrassed, and of course this made my own shyness the more acute. After a few moments Schlumberger left us together. Gide hesitated again and then - with a furtive glance to left and to right, and that air of exaggerated mystery with which an inexperienced actor signals to his audience that he is about to do someone in - he drew me into the empty back room of the shop, among the stacks of books and bales of paper. And there, not looking me in the eyes, squatting on a pair of library steps, and leaning forward in the attitude of a gargoyle, he murmured a few amiable words to me in a tone of pretentious embarrassment.
What did he say? That he had been interested to read my book? No: that he had been compelled, in self-defense, to take my enormous manuscript to the country this last summer; that he had been first bored, and then later surprised, by what he read; that he had been "very curious indeed" to meet the author; and that he was astonished to find that I was barely more than thirty ... I said little or nothing in reply. And then suddenly he looked up, put one elbow on his knee, rested his chin on his hand (closed but not clenched), looked at me, and began to talk quite freely.
The voice flows easily and naturally; it has an admirable timbre-deep, warm, solemn. A voice that coaxes and whispers, a voice made for confidences, with the subtlest modulations, and just occasionally an abrupt heightening of tone to make way for a rare epithet or an original, meaningful turn of phrase. At such moments he seems to launch the word in triumph upon the air, to give it its full resonance - much as one lifts a diapason to allow it its maximum vibration.
I didn't know what to think, let alone what to say ... The ideas which he developed and defined in this burst of improvisation are completely new to me, alike in substance and in form. Their iridescence dazzled me. Never, in conversation, had anybody given me such an impression of natural power, of genius ... Perhaps all that brilliance would be insupportable if I could detect in it the element of artifice; but Gide seems true to himself even in his preciosities and his coquetry, and it is with enchantment that I yield to his seduction.
What does he look like? I examined him with new eyes. When he came in I had seen him, but I hadn't looked at him.
I disregarded the two days' growth of beard, the unkempt hair, the rumpled collar. How vividly I noticed now the nobility of the face, charged with feeling and intelligence, the subtle tenderness of his smile, the musical voice, and the attentive and glowing good nature with which he enveloped me! For now he never took his eyes off my face. Quite palpably, he wanted me to respond, to fall in with what he was saying. If it was an exchange that he offered, it was an ally that he was after. All this quite overwhelmed me. Emboldened by it, I made haste to reply; I should have liked to describe the ever-remembered day when I discovered his Nourritures Terrestres...
But suddenly, with no warning, no change of tone, without even finishing the phrase he had begun-allowing it, in fact, to peter out in an indistinct murmur, accompanied by some unintelligible murmur, accompanied by some unintelligible motions of the head and the most affectionate of smiles-Gide got up: lithe, graceful, hasty, awkward-he is all these things at once. He put on his hat, threw his flowing cloak over one shoulder, and vanished from the shop without giving his hand to anyone-not even to me.
I wonder if he came just to find out what the author of Jean Barois looks like?
January, 1923
My first stay at Cuverville, the season notwithstanding. Gide brought me down from Paris.
Felt most uncomfortable throughout the journey.....
It began the moment we got to the Saint-Lazare station. Gide--who is always having to make this journey-wandering about the station, with no idea of where to buy his ticket, where to get onto the platform, what time the train left for Le Havre, or even if there was a connection that would allow us to catch the local to Cricquetot. Unwilling to ask anybody anything, he ran from place to place with vague cries of "Let's try here!....Come on!....Just follow me....." We climbed at the very last moment into a half-full train, which I hoped was the right one; and Gide at once began to behave as oddly as only he can. Swathed in an overcoat that he'd thrown across his shoulders, with a furry black hat perched on the very top of his head, his arms piled high with books and magazines, with a wild, inquisitive gleam in his eye (and that winning, undecided smile, that spuriously natural air that he assumes in such cases, under the illusion that a free-and-easy manner will enable him to pass unnoticed), he made his way along the train, dragging me behind him along the ice-cold and largely deserted corridors. We did the whole distance several times-from the front coach to the guard's van, and vice versa. He scrutinized each carriage in turn, stopped wherever the compartment was at all full, tried one after another, turned against this one for some indecipherable reason and that one from a motive that he did not disclose, and then, suddenly regretting one that he had decided against at the other end of the train, he hauled me off to look for it. But he couldn't find it, and so that whole thing began again. In the end I left him to his maneuvers and settled myself carefully in a corner seat of my own choosing. But I couldn't begin to read.
The discomfort I spoke of is very difficult to define; but it was made up of a double feeling, in which responsibility and insecurity both played a part. Some people would understand this; others wouldn't...It's as if I had charge of a child who was on the point of committing the most ghastly imprudences...Or of an invalid with high fever...
There have been many occasions during my visit to Cuverville when certain signs of distress, on the part of Madame Gide, have made me think back to this disagreeable journey. Signs? Hints, rather: sudden silences, moments of confusion that she tried quickly but unsuccessfully to conceal, and sometimes a flicker of anxiety, of fear almost, that vanished almost at once.... There are moments when, if her husband is in the room (and usually when he is at his best - gay, natural, and talkative), she seems to be walking on red-hot coals. What happens within her at such moments?
What thoughts, what suspicions, what memories flash across her mind? I would swear that the momentary disquiet is like my own, and that my feeling of insecurity is something of which she has long experience, and anguish. How can one believe that this timid, delicate, all-fearing woman, with her conservative, the obstinately austere cast of mind, has ever found the least support in her capricious companion-that perpetual submission to the unforeseeable? Even if there were no serious ground for disagreement, that in itself would set up an intimate disharmony.
"I needn't say, my dear Roger, that you've made a conquest of my wife," Gide keeps on saying. He seems touched, as am I myself, by the extraordinarily gracious welcome which Madame Gide always extends to me.
I see her mostly at meals and after dinner. She takes her part quite spontaneously in the conversation, and her contributions show great finesse of mind. Once again I note how oddly they behave to each other-that attentive politeness, that mixture of the easy and the studied that they introduce into every aspect of their relationship, the eager consideration they show for each other, the tender affability, the smiling watchfulness...and, at the same time, an impenetrable coldness beneath it all, a belt of ice in the depths: the absence, in fact, not merely of anything approaching the normal familiarity of marriage, but even of the intimacy which unites two friends, or two traveling companions. Their love for each other-patent as it is-remains distant, sublimated, uncommunicated; it is the love of two strangers who are never quite sure that they thoroughly know or thoroughly understand each other, and who never communicate with each other in the secret places of their hearts.
Once again, moreover, I was struck by the flashes of gaiety which sometimes dart, at the slightest pretext, across that face which is normally so serious, so tightly held in. There is a touching contrast at such moments between the features, on which age has already left its mark, and the freshness, the pearly ring, the amazingly youthful-not to say childish-timbre of her laughter. Like a spring that bubbles up under dead leaves....(There are old maids and gray-haired schoolmistresses who can never, one things, have been young; but they too have bursts of sudden, uncontrollable laughter in which one can glimpse the clear face of adolescence as it replaces, for a miraculous second, the mask of middle age.)
The house has great charm. It is plan and unluxurious in style, with the simplicity of a handsome middle-class house of the eighteenth century. Two stories of small-paned windows in a long flat facade, unadorned save by the harmony of its lines, the distinction of its proportions, and the central pediment: a white triangle that stands out against a high slate roof. The plasterwork is pale yellow; and the shutters white.
To the left a century-old plantation of beeches overlooks the garden, which is much longer than it is broad, and is divided in two: in front of the perron by which you enter the house is a large lawn, shaded to the right by an enormous cedar (planted, Gide tells me, a hundred years ago by his grandfather, at the time he bought the estate): on the other side is a romantic little park, with narrow paths that wind round grassy beds, each bearing the plants that Gide knows individually, and watches over, and tends with his own hands. Both facades look out onto open country; on one side and the other the view, to the far horizon, is that of the monotonous, wild, rather melancholy landscape of Normandy; a vast expanse of open fields, flat and bare, but varied occasionally by the beech avenues, those long and lofty "hedges" that protect the farms from the rain-bearing winds that blow in from the Channel.
To the right of the imitation-marble hall there is a drawing room, with white boiseries and windows on both sides. It is not lived in in winter, but in high summer it must be charming, with its polished mahogany furniture, its credences, its armchairs with flowered tapestry covers, its spick-and-span curtains, and its honey-colored parquet: all this has been the same for the last hundred years. Farther on is the study; this also is not in use, and is full of apples and pears that have been laid out to ripen on wicker trays. To the left of the hall is the dining room, the only room which is really lived in at the moment. There are three wicker chairs in front of the chimney-piece; a wood fire is kept burning the whole day-mainly, it would seem, on behalf of three huge Siamese cats. These majestic, every-sleepy animals, weighed down with their own fat and wrapped in their heavy coats of brown fur, my generally be found in occupation of the three chairs.
The meals, devised with no great show of imagination, are copious in the extreme and served with an Anglo-Saxon regard for good form; we take them on a round table beside one of the windows. One of the doors leads off to the sanctuaries of the mistress of the house: the pantries, the dairy, the storerooms for fruit and lamps and candles and oil, and the immense kitchen, gleaming with coppery reflections, like a Dutch picture. Madame Gide toils away there, hour after hour, among the heady smells of petrol and beeswax and turpentine. For the tyranny of spit and polish is absolute at Cuverville. Everything that can possibly be polished is mirror-bright. Flagstones, tiled floors and parquets are perilous skating rinks. The staircase is the prime example: according to a rite which has been observed in its every detail for at least the last fifty years, housemaids, unhurried, and armed with woolen dusters, inexhaustibly caress every surface, every relief, every nook and cranny--from the red stiles of the steps themselves, and their oaken surrounds, to the lease projection of the wrought-iron banisters. An alluvial deposit, dating from several generations, a thick layer of hardened wax, transparent as varnish and gleaming like a topaz, gives the entire staircase the appearance of being sculptured from some polished, unidentifiable, and certainly costly material: from a block of brown amber.
(I call to mind the way in which Gide bivouacked in the villa at Auteuil, the dust, the unmade bed, the sink full of dirty china....Here is just one of many details of life at Cuverville: Madame Gide has had dust sheets specially made like loose covers, to fit over the bookshelves each morning while the rooms are being cleaned....)
Gide lives above the kitchen, in two communicating rooms, with old boiseries, a delicate grayish-green in color. But he has a genius for discomfort. Wherever he is, he seems to be merely passing through: his room at once takes on the air of a bivouac. Incongruous items of furniture are disposed haphazardly about the room, and put to some purpose remote from that for which they were designed. Access to the window is blocked by an old marble washstand, piled high with books; sheets and towels are crammed into a rosewood secretary; the straight-backed desk chair is used only as a rack for scarves and neckties. When working, he prefers to use a straw-seated stool and a fragile occasional table, which he pushes almost into the ashes of the wretched fire, hardly warm enough to toast his shins. But, behind him, he has opened a large and elaborate tapestry screen. Madame Gide has sent up an armchair for me, and so it is more or less on top of the fire, and sheltered by the big screen, that we talk for days on end-marvelous days, days crowded with affection, and mutual trust, and general agreement-and, of course, with laughter and flights of fancy.
It is there that he read me the book he is working on this autumn-a first beginning of the Faux-Monnayeurs. There are some excellent passages: some of the characters come off very well; there are fragments of stimulating dialogue, and the unsurpassable pages of Edouard's journal. But how much of it is empty and tedious! "Lagoons" is our name for these dullnesses. Gide is disappointed with what he reads: he'd though that, as a whole, the opening chapters were better than they are. But one can't be surprised: he refuses to work according to a prearranged plan. He himself doesn't know where he's going, nor even-with any certainly-- where he wants to go. He writes on impulse, according to the whim of
the moment. In the middle of a chapter, and to strengthen some incident-or sometimes just to find room for a telling scrap of dialogue-he will invent a new character whom he'd never thought of before; a figure suddenly emerges and attracts him, without his knowing anything about it yet, what part it will play in the story, or even whether he can find a role for it.
Of course I can't stand for this. Construction above all things! I quote what Bourdelle says: "Harmonious construction is the secret of everything; faulty proportions can never be redeemed by details! Gide protests and casts about for ways of defending his haphazard methods of composition. The fact is that he likes it because it amuses him. But my case is the stronger: the results leave too much to be desired. He hadn't realized that, but he has to admit that it's true. Not without argument though. We argue gaily, warmly, till we're quite out of breath...I express myself badly, I hesitate, I seem to contradict myself the whole time; but fundamentally I have a pretty strong grasp of what I want to say, and Gide is so clever with his dialectical forceps that he always delivers me in the end. I don't always convince him; but my sincerity is always useful to him, and when he isn't persuaded, he at least emerges with a more conscious understanding of his own point of view.
(I believe that that is one of the secrets, one of the most stable bases of our understanding and our intimacy. Two menof good faith confront each other; the one driven blindly forward by the need to bring out, at whatever cost, the quintessence of his thoughts; the other, prompted by an indescribable modesty (and one which neither age nor fame has been able to modify) who takes pleasure--a slightly masochistic pleasure, perhaps--in allowing himself to be criticized as soon as he recognizes an honesty which he knows to be authentic and disinterested.
An example of Gide's extraordinary emotional sensitivity.
One evening, when the three of us were sitting by the fire, he suggested that he should read to Madame Gide and myself a "remarkable" article by his uncle, Charles Gide. (It was about the unveiling of the war memorials and had appeared in last December's Emancipation. "Uncle Charles" declared among other things that all those pre-1914 politicians, who had been powerless to prevent the disaster, and who now have the effrontery to raise their voices before the graves of our soldiers, should confine themselves to the two words "Forgive us!")
When he read this passage Gide was so moved that he had to interrupt himself time and time again. He was literally suffocated by his fits of weeping. His voice quavered to such an extent that we could hardly make out what he was saying; and the huge childlike tears rolled down his badly shaven cheeks, met under his chin, and dripped onto his tie...
Madame Gide's attitude seemed to me significant. She was moved, admittedly, but she was above all surprised, and it was clear that she was embarrassed. Because of me, perhaps? At once touched by an excess of sensibility, whose sincerity was beyond question, and deeply shocked by the immodesty of so great a failure of restraint, of "self-control,"as the English say.
At nightfall on the day before I left I made a moving pilgrimage with Gide. The air was icy cold and heavy with rain; the garden dripped water everywhere, and was already half hidden in shadow. "Here is the bench," said Gide, and he gripped my arm. "The bench in the Porte etroite....And here is the little gate that leads to the kitchen garden....That wrings my heart, so intensely did I live those minutes with Alissa....She opens the door, and Jerome is waiting there-- there, in the shadows...."Is that you, Jerome?" she asks. Ah, Roger, lovely all that is! And yet it stifles me. I walk here like a ghost, in a past that is gone forever. For now it is elsewhere that I live my life."
He takes me off toward the village, along a grass-grown, sopping wet, slithery path. We bog down in it, but Gide doesn't mind. "It's a little marshy here, but never mind. I'd like to show you ... This part of the country is quite unlike any other, isn't it?" And suddenly he leaves me, springs up the bank, and vanishes for a moment under the trees. A little way off I can see through the foliage, a window with a light in it. Gide is back with me already: "I went to see if the stream had overflowed...Come with me, and I'll show you our village..." But before we get to the first houses he breaks off at right angles and plunges across the fields. "Let's go back this way." He goes on in front, with big strides; I have quite a job to keep up with him. When we get to a sunken path, with hedges on either side, he goes faster still. I'm ankle-deep in the ruts, soaked with rain, running with sweat. In the darkness ahead of me I hear Gide's affectionate voice: "Lovely, isn't it? It's well worth a little wetting." Night has come on, and we can see nothing of our country. Gide is plowing on as usual, and almost at a run, when he stops short. Through a gap in the embankment I can see light among the trees.
"Let's push on to there, shall we?" He turns to the right and plunges headlong up a muddy farm track. Is it the cottage that he wanted to see, a little while ago, from the top of the slope? Is it to come back there that we've made this appalling detour?
It's sort of a barn, with a decrepit thatch roof that stands out against the pallor of the sky. He opened the door. What we saw inside would have made most people shut it again. A spindly child of ten or eleven was seated, reading, by the light of a flickering lamp, at a table covered with potato peel. Opposite him stands a stocky, big-bellied girl, ragged, filthy, with protruding eyes and scraggly hair. She was peeling potatoes in a dazed sort of way, and was at least six months gone with child. How old was she? Fifteen? Twenty? Twenty-five? On the mud floor were two paillases, two heaps of rag, on which three flea-ridden children-the youngest not more than a year old--were climbing about. Gide went straight over to the table and stroked the boy's head, as if he'd been a little dog. "Hello, Barnabe! Working, are you? Let's see. Wait while I get my glasses. Ah, the decimal system! Difficult, isn't it? That's good though. That's very good. We were just passing, my friend and I. We came to pay you a little visit. Your father not back yet? Well, well.
And how are the babies? Still got impetigo, have they?" The boy hadn't looked up; he was watching me from under his lashes, without saying a word. It was his sister who, with an inane smile, brought out a "Yes, m'sieu."
We went out into the wet wind and the night. Gide walked beside me, in silence, at a leisurely pace. "You see," he said at last. "Very interesting, isn't it? The most squalid poverty. He is charming, that little Barnabe, don't you think? But they're all eaten up with lice. The mother died of tuberculosis a long time ago. The father works on a farm. He makes a good living, but he drinks. They never have a penny in the house. My wife gives them something three times a week.
They say that the father sleeps with the daughter--the half-witted one, did you notice her? She stammers. I don't know if my wife realizes. He's charming, that boy, with his poor lined sickly face. Well, that's how things are round here! I know a lot of families like that. My wife takes them some sheets, or a shirt or two, and the next day they're filthy or torn to bits. There's nothing to be done. It's incurable. All the same he's very endearing, that little Barnabe!"
Then he fell silent again, till we reached the house.
When we came to the garden gate he turned to me with a laugh. "Guess what they call me in the village? I found it out-oh, ten years ago, at least. I was bicycling back from Criquetot, at the beginning of the holidays. I passed by the school just when the children were coming out. And I saw all the little girls laughing, and pointing to me, and calling out to one another, "Oh look! Look! Here's the Idiot come back again!" He was chortling with laughter. "Yes, Roger, the whole village has nicknamed me the Idiot! Isn't it enchanting? Straight out of Dostoevski, isn't it?"
1937
These quirks of his, those private obsessions, are becoming altogether too much of a tyranny.
He is forever brooding over himself, entirely preoccupied with his little misfortunes. I don't say that they're not real, and I don't say that he cultivates them; but he exaggerates their importance; he suffers from them more than is necessary, and he makes those around him suffer too. It's quite true that he has insomnia, and that he needs, after luncheon, to have what he calls his "napping"; but does this siesta really require him to try, one after another, all the beds and all the sofas?
And need he exact a silence so complete that the life of the whole house is paralyzed for more than an hour?... It's true that he has to watch his liver; but he uses this, when at table, as a pretext for stopping all other conversation, while he digresses solemnly, subtly, but quite uninterestingly about the quality of each dish: the food has to be at once easy to digest and exquisite in taste -- for Gide when he eats is as fastidious as a cat ... It's true that he's subject to colds and to laryngitis, and that he has to take care to avoid sudden changes of temperature. But these precautions have become a veritable obsession. Gide puts on too many clothes, for fear that it may turn cold, and then takes them off at the wrong moment for fear of breaking out in a sweat; consequently, he never stops putting on, taking off, and putting on again his innumerable waistcoats, pullovers, scarves, gaiters, and mittens; and his legs are constantly wriggling in and out of the rugs and supernumerary overcoats that he drags everywhere with him ... At the cinema it's nothing unusual for him to change his seat three or four times during the film, either to get nearer to the radiators or to edge away from them, or perhaps to avoid some emergency exit which, if by any chance it were to open, would expose him to an insidious draft. I remember how once, when we went to see a film at the Recamier Cinema, he borrowed a handkerchief from me; when the lights went up I was amazed to find that my handkerchief had been knotted at its four corners and transformed into a bonnet, to the great amusement of our neighbors. Another time, at Nice, he whispered to me in the dark that he had been so overcautious as to put on two pairs of underpants, one on top of the other; "If you would be good enough to help me just a very little, my dear Roger, we might just manage, while it's dark, and if we're very careful...." I had to threaten to leave him flat if he persevered a second longer in his weird plan to take off his trousers on the sly.
Unfortunately I am weak enough to care about "what other people think". To go out with Gide, today, is to risk making oneself the object of general curiosity; and that is torture to me. When we are alone, and in his house, I do more than support his eccentricities; they amuse me, I tease him about them, we make jokes of them, and he laughs as much as I do. They have come to form a traditional diversion or hilarious interval in our talks. (I suddenly see him fumbling with his cuffs; he coughs and clears his throat; he stops listening; he looks about him with an air of anxious inquiry. "Lost your mittens? There they are -- they've fallen into the folds of your shawl." I hand them to him; he at once calms down, and we resume our conversation with renewed excitement.)