‘'Well, you must admit it isn’t too badly put,’ he said cheerfully to the young woman over whose shoulder he had just re-read his thesis, which she was still holding in her pointed hands, her fore-arms resting on her hip-bones (half-Egyptian through her mother, she was built like those Egyptian figures one sees on monuments). ‘Infamous race!’ He kissed her head, the very scalp, underneath her hair, which had three different smells – on the crown of her head, on the temples, and where it met her forehead. ‘Yes, you really belong to an infamous sex.’ There was a silence. Then he added: ‘Nevertheless I’m pleased with you for not yet having protested: “Pretty odd to write things you don’t believe.”’
‘I haven’t said it because I don’t think it. But I admit I’m disconcerted…’
‘Everything I’ve written there I profoundly believe, and I’ve believed it since adolescence, since the age when one starts getting to know about people. But sometimes it seems to me that I could maintain with equal sincerity – that is to say with total sincerity – a completely opposite view of the question: a view that would demonstrate the grandeur of woman. Why? Because that maleficence and that absurdity and that grandeur all exist in women. Turn and turn about. Always turn and turn about. Sometimes, too, it seems to me that…
‘Here, I’ll tell you a story. There was once a boy in a boarding-school who was persecuted by one of the masters, who treated him with monstrous unfairness. One day, towards the end of the school year, the master sent for this boy, who appeared before him tense and bristling and said: “I suppose you’re going to give me another wigging.” The master replied: “No, I sent for you because I’m leaving the school for good, and we won’t see each other again. And so I wanted to tell you that if I gave you a rough time it was because I liked you so much. Now give me your hand and go.” They shook hands and parted. And, as he had said, they never saw each other again.’
‘What’s the point of that story?’ asked the young woman, knitting her brows a little.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
She had turned her face towards him, and she searched his eyes (like a real woman) not so much in order to understand as to see if she could find reassurance there.
But he, as always, was smiling at something else.