Les Cloches de Bâle - Luis Aragon
Catherine.
Catherine Simonidzé is one of the three women around whom Louis Aragon1 based his novel The Bells of
Basel2. The work is named after the famous socialist congress which took place on the eve of the First
World War: Catherine is drawn into the anarchist and socialist environments of the time.
Yet she would have liked to dominate men, and not because their shoulders caught her eye, their ease.
She would have liked to have behaved with men in the same way as it is understood that a man is with
women. A man is not defined by the women with whom he has slept.
It was the situation of women in society which outraged Catherine above all. The example of the
mother, that noticeable degeneration which played out before her, those lives finished at an age at
which men are in their primes, the absurd social judgment which excludes women to whom life has not
been straightforward from so many opportunities which did not appeal to Catherine but which were to
her like those dreadful, expensive dresses in shop windows, of which we wonder what kind of delirious
body would dress itself in them, and which nevertheless make you feel your poverty. As a widow,
Catherine already felt herself classed as a tart.
The entirety of the enormous amount of social literature which she had devoured had essentially
brought Catherine to this line of thought. She certainly brushed past pages when her issue, the issue of
the freedom of women, of equality between men and women, was not at least indirectly at stake. The
fundamental opposition in society, the shrieking contradiction, was it not that between man and woman
she had come across? The revolution would at last give women their place in society. The first
revolutionary measures that would be taken would be the abolition of marriage, legal abortion, the right
to vote for women. Yes, even the right to vote, even though we would no longer be voting…
Catherine, at seventeen, covered herself in as much makeup as she could, because to do so was to
flaunt her freedom and her disdain for men, and to provoke them, and to go back to this romantic
atmosphere in which the women of tomorrow rediscovered the memory of yesterday’s heroines, like
Théroïgne de Méricourt3.
What were her thoughts on marriage? This is what the young Devèze, who was at the National Institute
of Eastern Languages and Civilisations4, and with whom she had been three or four times to the Bois de
Boulogne5, asked her. “Do I ask you what you think of the police?” He blushed terribly, and questioned
her bitterly. What did she mean by that? Yet it is always this way when love is at stake… She spoke
bitterly of women’s faithfulness, of marriage, that shame, that market. Devèze, all of a sudden, asked
1
Louis Aragon: French poet -).
Les Cloches de Bâle (1934): The Bells of Basel, a novel by Louis Aragon, translated into English by Haakon
Chevalier in 1961.
3
Théroïgne de Méricourt -): Prominent feminist figure of the 1879 French revolution.
2
4
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales: “Inalco”, the National Institute of Eastern
Languages and Civilasions is an instituion which prioritises the teaching of foreign language, culture and
economics, and which frequently produces diplomats as alumni.
5
Bois de Boulogne : a location in the west of Paris at which lovers commonly arranged to meet.
her to marry him. This was very odd, to Catherine’s mind, to whom as yet no one had ever… but she saw
clearly that light of desire, which she had a kind of passion for igniting, in the eyes of the apprentice
diplomat. Never mind the passers-by! She moved close to him, he dared not move, and as he was a tall
man, she stood on tiptoes so that she could reach his lips… suddenly she stepped back and said, with a
murderous simplicity, “No, my dear, I shall not be your wife because of this tic in your character.”