The Last Supper Read Online Free PDF Page B

road is so potholed, so slow! The woman’s pale, angular cheeks wear a hectic pink flush beneath her spectacles. The man is bearded and severe. Bertrand brings more glasses. We arrange ourselves in the cultured sitting room, with its canvases and totemic masks and abstract sculptural forms. Beyond the large windows the vast, watery, blue-tinged darkness deepens. The other couple reveal that they have been staying at Bertrand’s for the whole week. Tomorrow they return to Lyons. It is their hobby, to take walking holidays. They take several a year. They have walked in every significant part of France, though not, until now, the Ardèche. They have not been disappointed by the Ardèche, though it does not attain the heights of their favourite, the Cévennes. The Cévennes are nearby, as are the Rhône Alps, another favourite of theirs. But this area certainly has its merits.
    Bertrand announces that dinner is ready. We pass through the house, through the circular hall, through a passageway that elides the kitchen and twists and turns, and into a long vaulted stone room with great glass doors all along one side. This, I now see, forms the end of the courtyard that is at right angles to the house. The table is shrouded in white damask, laden with candelabra, silverware and glass. We are served hot asparagus and tissue-thin leaves of smoked ham. We are served pale yellow wine from a crystal decanter, and warm rolls with cold butter. The bearded man and his wife seem to take all this as a matter of course, but we feel an amazement that borders on consternation. What does it signify, all this refinement, this correct and devotional passion for sensual things? At home, certainly, I often felt that our life lacked beauty: I looked for it in music, in poetry and painting, sometimes in the world itself, when a particular evening sky or fall of light, a glimpse of city trees in leaf or of the forms of my children, seemed to become more than itself, to become representational. I would put peonies in a vase, wash the floors, tidy up; but I never found much art in daily things. There was always too much reality, churning just ahead, mixing everything together into a grey, agitated mass. It was only in writing that I could separate them again, and distinguish the bad from the good. But this man Bertrand lives behind a high wall, far from other people. He has asked that only beautiful things come near him. Is this the right way to be? Is it permitted, to turn your back on churning reality?
    We ask the bearded man what he does for a living, and he replies that he is retired. We are surprised: he can barely be more than fifty. What was his trade? He says he was an employee of the French national railway. One retires early there, at fifty, and the pension, a final-salary scheme, is very generous. The bearded man is rather defensive as he relays these facts. Bertrand explains that there are many French people who find the arrangement somewhat unfair, outrageous even, and the bearded man sits erect while the explanation is given. Then heproceeds to cut up his food and place the pieces methodically in his mouth. Bertrand watches him, a glint in his eye. This couple have irritated him, grey and complacent and ungiving as they are. They swallow his food without comment; they weigh up his domain coldly, rationally, indifferent to all but their own preferences. Why does he expose himself to the world in this way? I don’t believe he does it entirely for money: there is no need to treat us as lavishly as he does. He does it, perhaps, for the same reason that artists show their work, for the same reason I choose to publish the books I write rather than lock them in a drawer. Indeed, this couple have their exact equivalent in the field of literary criticism. It doesn’t trouble them at all, that they could never create something beautiful, as Bertrand has. Nonetheless, their presence here indicates that after all Bertrand does need the world, so that