A Noble Profession Read online

  This book was digitized with the help of optical character recognition software from a scanned copy of the 1960 hardcover edition. E-book corrections, adaptations and formatting by Sorin Cioriciu (ceferistul), September 2017.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  PART TWO

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART THREE

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  PART FOUR

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  

  A NOBLE PROFESSION

  OTHER BOOKS BY PIERRE BOULLE

  The Bridge Over the River Kwai

  Not the Glory

  Face of a Hero

  The Test

  S.O.P.H.I.A.

  The Vanguard Press, Inc. • New York

  A NOBLE PROFESSION

  by Pierre Boulle

  Author of “THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI”

  Translated from the French

  by Xan Fielding

  Third Printing

  Copyright, (C), 1960, by Pierre Boulle

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may wish to quote brief passages in connection with a review for a newspaper or magazine.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 60-15063

  Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff, New York

  . . . Ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades.

  JOSEPH CONRAD

  PART ONE

  1

  The human species—the main stem of this species, at least (certain offshoots that do not contribute to the central growth must be regarded as exceptions)—the human species is in the process of aspiring to a degree of intellectual loyalty beyond which it will be difficult to develop any further; for no progress can be conceived once perfection is attained, and there are countless signs to show that perfection has, in fact, been well-nigh reached in this particular field of morality, as in so many other realms.

  The most striking sign of all, probably, is the feeling of disgust inspired by those stray branches that have not followed us in our constant ascent toward mental probity. We abhor any individual who does not “play the game” in that respect, and particularly anyone who tries to pass himself off as something he is not. The success of such terms as ‘‘charlatan” and “fraud,” which the moralists apply to him, shows the extent of the indignation to which this despicable form of deceit gives rise, and also of the satisfaction we feel at seeing it condemned. This is because we, the normal elements of the main stem, are always true to ourselves, do not practice fraud, never use counterfeit coins, and are nauseated by the mere idea of investing ourselves with merits we do not possess—in short, because we have become intellectually honest in the broadest sense of the word.

  When we are treated to one of those dissertations in which truth and candor triumph over turpitude and falsehood, we thank our lucky stars not only for our own moral rectitude but also for our infallible perspicacity; we feel that in this particular field we now possess such standards of judgment that no impostor can possibly delude us, that no base metal can blind us with its glitter, and that we can recognize at a glance any jackdaw in peacock’s feathers. Since this wisdom of ours is relatively recent (progress during the last few years has been prodigious), our diagnosis has the strictures and lack of fine distinctions that are only to be expected in neophytes. A human being who is not all of one piece is still beyond our conception. We refuse to admit that, not fitting into any particular category, he may oscillate perpetually between duplicity and honesty without even being aware of it, and actually exhaust himself in a vain endeavor to reach a state of equilibrium.

  This was not the opinion held by Dr. Fog. Dr. Fog was a man of science, a man of vast experience who had devoted a great deal of time to the study of the human brain, and who, besides his medical activities, exercised other, secret functions likewise closely connected with the mind. He maintained that this state of uncertainty, this mental instability, was perfectly feasible and, indeed, fairly common. Dr. Fog was a psychiatrist, admittedly, and specialists in this field have often been known to make pronouncements contrary to all common sense.

  Be that as it may, when he met Cousin, alias Arvers, the doctor felt he had discovered a brain that was worth particular attention and that was admirably suited to illustrate his theories. The circumstances that led him to apply himself to this personality were at once as commonplace and exceptional as the war that had engendered them.

  Cousin was an intellectual. Dr. Fog often had to underline this point, which he considered an essential factor. But to him this status did not imply belonging to a particular class of society; nor, in his view, did it necessarily proceed from any special education or distinctive upbringing. He looked upon it as the outcome of an innate, fundamental principle, the imponderable

  presence or absence of which produced in human beings, at birth, a differentiation as emphatic as sex. In Cousin’s case, however, his profession and social background were in keeping with his character.

  The son of a writer, a writer himself, bom in an atmosphere of letters, brought up on a diet of letters, having absorbed at various stages of his life a considerable body of letters, he was a man of letters to his fingertips, a man of letters with his vices, his virtues, his absurdities, his noble or puerile enthusiasms, and his tendency to subordinate facts to the figments of his

  imagination.

  At the age of thirty he had already distinguished himself in most of the fields open to a man of his calling. He had started by writing novels. In these he revealed the supreme qualities of a writer in the most brilliant manner; that is to say, he succeeded with equal felicity in enhancing reality in such a way as to endow it with the glorious hues of artistic fiction and in polishing and martialing the products of his fantasy in such a rational manner that they eventually assumed every appearance of reality.

  At the end of some of his books—those in which he had given the best of himself—when he felt so moved by the final pages that he almost shed tears over certain passages, over certain words he had put into his characters’ mouths, his sense of conviction and emotion were condensed into a brief formula underneath the last line: the geographical locality of his creation and the date of its achievement. Thus, “Paris, the ... of October, 19 . . .” or “Timbuktoo, January 19 . . .” or even “At sea, this month of June 19 . . .” served as an outlet to his inordinate enthusiasm, and his printers never possessed any italics sufficiently forceful to do justice to this state of mind.

  He tried his hand at literary criticism and met with the same success; his analytical mind pared down the works under review until there emerged a simple formula that he acclaimed as the fundamental essence of the text but which was, in fact, in every case, the reflection of his own conceptions. He also made a name for himself in journalism; while adhering faithfully to the material facts, he had an inimitable talent for investing them with some original significance that corresponded, without his being aware of it, to his intuitive conviction, to his anxiety to satisfy some higher authority or simply the require
ments of his art.

  He might have spent his whole life like this, following the destiny common to all men of letters, if the war had not broken out. When it did, the whole course of his existence was abruptly changed.

  Paradoxically, in September, 1939, during the first days of mobilization, he experienced a violent thirst for heroism, and since his desires straightway took the form of intensive mental activity, he began to visualize and imagine himself performing outstanding feats of arms. Is thirty perhaps a critical age in a man’s life, a point at which he feels an imperative need for a change? Or did his mind derive some particular fascination in contemplating himself—him, an inoffensive intellectual—winning his spurs on the field of battle; did his pride experience some subtle pleasure in dreaming that peaceful souls can, in certain circumstances, outdo professional soldiers in audacity? The nobility of this attitude could not in any case be questioned as a principle: it was that of countless Frenchmen. But Cousin’s imagination swept him swiftly to the topmost summits, and in less than no time his halo was all aglow, dazzling everyone who looked at it—for in his dreams there were always a number of witnesses to his valor.

  This new ambition manifested itself in the form of brightly colored visions. He pictured himself, for example, advancing into enemy territory at the head of his platoon, thrusting forward well beyond the front line—and this, furthermore, despite the strictest and most explicit orders of his superiors; for he liked to think of himself as a rather undisciplined character, a bit of a “bad egg” imbued with all sorts of good qualities that drew an indulgent smile from those indispensable witnesses to his daydreams.

  His deliberate disobedience would lead to a striking victory. He would disrupt the enemy’s lines of communication, cause it untold losses, and come back with a mass of prisoners. At this point he had to make up some trivial but extremely precise material details to maintain the enthusiasm of his triumphant return. The C.O. would summon him to H.Q. and address him in his stem disciplinarian's voice.

  “Cousin, you have disobeyed orders. Consider yourself under open arrest.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Cousin would reply, standing stiffly at attention.

  “And you will be mentioned in dispatches for having been so successful,” the C.O. would add, changing his tone.

  This type of conversation—a subconscious recollection of the adventure stories he had read as a child—made his ears ring, and each role was defined with the utmost clarity in his mind. When he came to his senses he realized how childishly hackneyed these characters were, but in less than no time he would once again succumb to their irresistible fascination.

  His intellectual courage, fired by the longing to surpass everyone else, sometimes led him to the point of forcing his hero to the supreme sacrifice. This, however, did not happen very often. His mind would never reach the state of gloomy exaltation that allowed him to envisage his own death, without first indulging in a desperate struggle with itself. To him this was the sublime limit, to which it was almost impossible to aspire, even in the realm of dreams. He could picture himself without too much effort seriously wounded, the blood draining from his body, but he demurred at visualizing the irreparable event, the fatal moment when, losing consciousness at the same time as his life, he would be done out of the paean of praise being sung by the witnesses. The only way he managed to face this ordeal was by cheating a little and, in rare moments of ecstasy, contriving to hear, against all probability, the account of his fabulous exploits, the list of his posthumous citations, and the murmur of veneration that accompanied his coffin.

  2

  Cousin spent the first year of the war in this permanent state of exaltation, and no incident occurred to lessen it. His material self seemed to glide unchecked along the course his ambitious mind had plotted. On being called up, he at once asked to be posted to a fighting unit, even though his personal connections might have enabled him to be employed in a less hazardous position. He went even further: during one of his fits of mysticism, when he felt his possibilities capable of indefinite expansion, he requested and obtained the command of a group of volunteers specializing in hazardous raids. He filled this post for several months, earning the praise and official recognition of his superiors.

  As a matter of fact, by some strange feeling of consideration, fate seemed to spare him the rather more harrowing aspects of violence. Many dangerous missions for which he had volunteered were canceled at the last moment by higher authority. He never failed to show his disappointment quite plainly, and thereby retained all the credit for his zeal. The few nocturnal operations he led came off without a hitch. On two or three occasions, when a shot was sent in the direction of his platoon, there were always enough men around him to prevent his feeling that he himself was the target. The knowledge that his men had their eyes fixed on him, together with the vague feeling that the bullets were not actually seeking him out, endowed him with the reflexes of a brave man. He had never experienced hand-to-hand fighting.

  The debacle of 1940 did nothing to sully the character of the hero who inhabited his mind. His body withstood the ordeal of the large-scale raids, and his conduct at that time earned him further marks of respect. In connection with this attitude of his. Dr. Fog, who later went through every word of his personal file, remarked in parentheses that during a raid on a big town, almost all the inhabitants kept their heads and gave proof of their courage. He added that this clearly argued a peculiar sense of human solidarity in conjunction with a subconscious belief in the law of averages: every individual was convinced that the bombs were far more likely to fall on someone other than himself. But Dr. Fog’s critical acumen frequently expressed itself in cynical and sometimes unjustifiable observations.

  The order to withdraw, one of the last he was to receive, reached Cousin before the enemy launched its final offensive. He obeyed without delay, like a well-disciplined officer, but not before voicing his indignation at the disgrace of such a retreat.

  The withdrawal took him far toward the west along the main roads of France. To begin with, his unit remained intact and he did his best to follow the sporadic and contradictory orders he was given. Then he found himself cut off and out of touch with headquarters, having gradually lost all his men and become attached to a group of deserters and refugees. But he was still convinced that this position had been forced on him against his will by a pusillanimous High Command.

  This long journey, carried out for the most part on foot, actually enabled him to enrich his mind with fresh visions and add a little more to his laurels. While his body toiled along in the midst of the crowd, his mind was busy weaving new dreams about the unusual turn that events had taken. Quite clearly, he imagined himself stopping suddenly in the middle of the road and facing the mob. A hero raised by Providence to put an end to their weakness and despair, he then cried out with the cool resolution born of a daring decision:

  “Halt! This is where we shall check their advance."

  There was a certain amount of opposition. Before facing the enemy, he first had to deal with his own side. He set to work, without any feeling of hate for the stragglers but with the firm determination necessitated by the grave situation. Some of them tried to force their way past him. He then whipped out his revolver —intoxicated by this picture, he even went so far as to reach for his holster and rehearse the gesture—and ordered them back. When this threat proved insufficient, he forthwith shot one or two of the wretches. A solemn silence ensued, but the crowd, realizing at last the feelings that had prompted his action, came to a halt and put themselves under his orders. A nucleus of resistance had been created. It gradually spread to all the other groups wandering aimlessly about the countryside and extended along the highroads until it formed a solid unbroken line, which, under his command and after a series of noteworthy engagements, turned defeat into a striking victory.

  This mental vision of his had such an obsessive quality that he became quite oblivious of his plight and lost all sense of
time and place. It was thus that he found himself one day in Brittany, having inadvertently followed a column that had diverged from the main stream of the exodus.

  Reluctantly emerging from his dream, he peered about him. He noticed he was looked at askance by every group that passed him on the road, and it was not long before he realized why—he had a sort of sixth sense by which he could tell in a flash what others thought about him: he was the only person in uniform. The civilians must have believed he had turned tail in the face of the enemy.

  The revelation of this insulting suspicion made the blood rush to his head. He almost let loose at an old man perched on top of a cart who was looking him up and down with an expression of contempt. He was itching to explain himself, to make the fellow understand that he wasn’t the sort of man to slink away, and that he only happened to be there because of the orders he had been given. But the cart had already gone past. He shrugged his shoulders and moved on, drawing himself up to his full height and deliberately assuming a soldierly bearing. It was then he saw Morvan in front of him, getting to his feet again after a moment’s rest by the side of the road.

  Like Cousin, Morvan was in uniform, and Cousin found himself frowning at the sight of him. On his own, and in a filthy, ragged state, this corporal—Cousin had noticed the man's rank—was in all probability a deserter. Perhaps he was one of those soldiers he had seen throwing down their arms and stealing away under cover of the mob. While Cousin was trying to make up his mind about the man, Morvan turned around, caught sight of Cousin, and came back toward him. He was dressed sloppily and had not shaved for several days. His cheeks were hollow and his eyes betrayed apprehension. Cousin did not like his looks at all.