MICHEL TOURNIER
hair. His Mongol's mask of a face with its oblique, prominent,
arching eyebrows, is dotted with a few warts. The features are
distinctive but limp; his colour is greyish, his cheeks hollow, badly
shaven. Thin, tight lips trace a long, sinuous, elastic line. His
eyes shift slyly between their lids with a few evasive flashes,
which are accompanied by a smile that is something of a
grimace, childish and wily, both timid and affected.
Schlumberger brings him up to me. I am amazed. It's
Andre Gide . .
.3
39
The nocturnal look this character has about him in broad daylight is
surpassed in its strangeness by the nightwear that Roger Martin du
Gard finds him in when invited to the Gides' at La Bastide:
I found out that, for sleeping, he dons a sort of white, thick, fluffy
dressing-gown that hangs down to his ankles like a baker's apron;
and around his waist he wraps as tightly as he can, compressing
his diaphragm, a wide shawl three metres long, made of black
silk! He looks like some sort of funereal mama mouchi ...
~
Finally, R. M. G. gives us a detailed description of Gide's laughter:
He never laughs openly or wildly. But when he tells a story
whose pungency or lewdness delights him his voice takes on an
incredible falsetto tone, rises to a shrill pitch, and then suddenly
strangles in a moist gurgle. His cheeks swell with excess saliva.
His bottom lip falls, sticks out and opens like a damp little bowl,
while in the slits of his slanted lids, his laughing eyes, barely visi–
ble, fix on his companion with an expression of intense curiosity
and jubilation.
5
Last of all, here are three sketches by Maria van Rysselberghe,
the "petite dame":
I've already said that he's very sensitive to the cold. In a large
dressing-gown that he wears over his clothes, a soft hat, his big
horn-rimmed glasses, his legs wrapped in an Algerian blanket,
he has a touch of the old actor and the wise old man. He spent
'Roger Martin du Card,
Notes sur Andre Gide
(Editions Callimard).
4Jbid.
%id.
