The Immoralist — Chapter 7

Chapter 8 of 14 · Review of The Immoralist

And so, for all action, for all work, I contented myself with physical exercises which certainly implied my changed morals, but which already appeared to me as no more than a training, a means, and no longer satisfied me for their own sake.

One other act, however — ridiculous in your eyes perhaps, but which I shall tell, since in its very childishness it defines the need that tormented me to show outwardly the intimate change in my being: at Amalfi, I had myself shaved.

Until that day I had worn a full beard, with my hair cropped almost to the skin. It had never entered my head that I might just as well have worn it otherwise. And, abruptly, on the day when I lay naked for the first time on the rock, that beard hampered me; it was like a last garment I had not been able to strip off; I felt it to be something stuck on; it was carefully trimmed, not to a point but into a square shape, which struck me at once as most unpleasant and absurd. Back in the hotel room, I looked at myself in the glass and was displeased with what I saw; I had the look of what I had been until then: an archivist-paleographer. Immediately after lunch I went down into Amalfi, my mind made up. The town is very small: I had to content myself with a common little booth on the square. It was market day; the shop was full; I had to wait interminably; but nothing — neither the doubtful razors, the yellow shaving brush, the smell, the barber's talk — could make me draw back. Feeling my beard fall under the scissors, it was as though I were removing a mask. No matter! when, afterward, I appeared to myself, the emotion that filled me, and that I repressed as best I could, was not joy but fear. I do not argue about that feeling; I record it. I found my features handsome enough… No, the fear came from my sense that my thought could now be seen laid bare, and that, all at once, it seemed to me formidable.

My hair, on the other hand, I let grow.

That is all my new being, still unoccupied, could find to do. I believed that acts astonishing even to myself would be born of it; but later; later, I told myself — when the being should be more fully formed. Obliged to live in the meantime, I kept, like Descartes, a provisional way of acting. Marceline could thus be deceived by it. The change in my gaze, it is true, and above all, on the day I appeared without a beard, the new expression of my features, might perhaps have made her uneasy; but she loved me too much already to see me clearly; and then I reassured her as best I could. It was important that she should not trouble my rebirth; to withdraw it from her eyes, I had therefore to dissemble.

Besides, the one Marceline loved, the one she had married, was not my "new being." And I kept telling myself this, to spur myself to hide him. So I surrendered to her nothing of myself but an image which, for being constant and faithful to the past, grew falser day by day.

My relations with Marceline therefore remained, in the meantime, the same — though more exalted from day to day, by an ever greater love. My very dissembling (if one may so call the need to preserve my thought from her judgment), my dissembling increased it. I mean that this game kept me occupied with Marceline without cease. Perhaps this constraint to lie cost me a little at first; but I soon came to understand that the things reputed worst (lying, to cite only that one) are difficult to do only so long as one has never done them; and that each of them becomes, and very quickly, easy, pleasant, sweet to do again, and soon as it were natural. And so, as with every thing for which a first disgust has been overcome, I ended by taking pleasure in that dissembling itself, in lingering over it, as over the play of my unknown faculties. And every day I advanced, into a richer and fuller life, toward a more-savorous happiness.