The Woman Destroyed Read Online Free Page A

prudent, well-behaved flow of days that is never again to be broken by anything unforeseen?
    I said to André, “Why didn’t you help me try to bring Philippe to his senses? You gave way at once. Between us we might perhaps have persuaded him.”
    “People have to be left free. He never terribly wanted to teach.”
    “But he was interested in his thesis.”
    “Up to a point, a very vaguely defined point. I understand him.”
    “You understand everybody.”
    Once André was as uncompromising for others as he was for himself. Nowadays his political attitudes have not weakened, but in private life he keeps his rigor for himself alone: he excuses people, he explains them, he accepts them. To such a pitch that sometimes it maddens me. I went on, “Do you think that making money is an adequate goal in life?”
    “I really scarcely know what our goals were, nor whether they were adequate.”
    Did he really believe what he was saying, or was he amusing himself by teasing me? He does that sometimes, when he thinks me too set in my convictions and my principles. Usually I put up with it very well—I join in the game. But this time I was in no mood for trifling. My voice rose. “Why have we led the kind of life we have led if you think other ways of life just as good?”
    “Because
we
could not have done otherwise.”
    “We could not have done otherwise because it was our way of life that seemed to us valid.”
    “No. As far as I was concerned knowing, discovering,was a mania, a passion, or even a kind of neurosis, without the slightest moral justification. I never thought everybody else should do the same.”
    Deep down I
do
think that everybody else should do the same, but I did not choose to argue the point. I said, “It is not a question of everybody, but of Philippe. He is going to turn into a fellow concerned with dubious money-making deals. That was not what I brought him up for.”
    André reflected. “It is difficult for a young man to have oversuccessful parents. He would think it presumptuous to suppose that he could follow their steps and rival them. He prefers to put his money on another horse.”
    “Philippe was making a very good start.”
    “You helped him: he was working under your shadow. Frankly, without you he would not have got very far and he is clear-sighted enough to realize it.”
    There had always been this underlying disagreement between us about Philippe. Maybe André was chagrined because he chose letters and not science: or maybe it was the classic father-son rivalry at work. He always looked upon Philippe as a mediocre being, and that was one way of guiding him toward mediocrity.
    “I know,” I said. “You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.”
    “Maybe,” said André, in a conciliating tone.
    “In any case, the person who is really responsible is Irène. It is she who is pushing him on. She wants her husband to earn a lot of money. And she’s only too happy to draw him away from me.”
    “Oh, don’t play the mother-in-law! She’s quite as good as the next girl.”
    “What next girl? She said monstrous things.”
    “She does that sometimes. But sometimes she is quite sharp. The monstrosities are a mark of emotional unbalance rather than a lack of intelligence. And then again if she had wanted money more than anything else she would never have married Philippe, who is not rich.”
    “She saw that he could become rich.”
    “At all events she picked him rather than just any pretentious little nobody.”
    “If you like her, so much the better for you.”
    “When you love someone, you must give the people he loves credit for being of some value.”
    “That’s true,” I said. “But I do find Irène disheartening.”
    “You have to consider the background she comes from.”
    “She scarcely comes from it at all, unfortunately. She is still there.”
    Those fat, influential, important