Vidal Quotes in My Night at Maud's (1969)

Jean-Louis: You come here a lot?

Vidal: Almost never. And you?

Jean-Louis: I've never set foot in here before.

Vidal: And yet our paths cross right here. How strange.

Jean-Louis: On the contrary. Our ordinary paths never cross. Therefore, the point of intersection must be outside those ordinary paths. I've dabbling in mathematics in my spare time. It would be fun to calculate our chances of meeting in a two-month period.

Vidal: Can it be done?

Jean-Louis: It's a matter of data and how you handle it. Provided the data exists. Obivously, if I don't know where a person lives or works I can't work out the odds of running into them.

Jean-Louis: Are you still a Marxist?

Vidal: Absolutely. For a Communist, Pascal's wager is very relevant today. Personally, I very much doubt that history has any meaning. Yet I wager that it has, so I'm in a Pascalian situation. Hypothesis A: Society and politics are meaningless. Hypothesis B: History has meaning. I'm not at all sure B is more likely to be true than A. More likely the reverse. Let's even suppose B has a 10% chance of being true and A has 80%. Nevertheless I have no choice but to opt for B, because only the hypothesis that history has meaning allows me to go on living. Suppose I bet on A, and B was true, despite the lesser odds. I'd have thrown away my life. So I must choose B to justify my life and actions. There's an 80% chance I'm wrong but that doesn't matter.

Jean-Louis: Mathematical hope. Potential gain divided by probability. With your hypothesis B, though the probability is slight, the possible gain is infinite. In your case, a meaning to life. In Pascal's, eternal salvation.

Vidal: It was Gorky, Lenin or maybe Mayakovsky who said about the Russian revolution that the situation forced them to choose the one chance in a thousand. Because hope became infinitely greater if you took that chance than if you didn't take it.

Maud: [Walks out of her closet wearing only a long-sleeved sailor's shirt] I admit they dressed more elegantly for salons.

Vidal: You wanted to show off your legs.

Maud: Precisely. My only means of seduction.

Vidal: Come now, let's say your principal means.

Vidal: I love feeling your toes beneath the bedspread.

Jean-Louis: I shock you, I know. I've had affairs with girls I loved and thought of marrying. But I've never just slept with a girl; that simply doesn't appeal to me.

Vidal: Yes, but let's suppose you met a lovely girl you knew you'd never see again. There are circumstances in which it's difficult to resist.

Jean-Louis: Fate, I won't say God, has kept me from such circumstances. I was never lucky with brief encounters. Remarkably unlucky.

Vidal: Just in that respect I have been lucky. Once in Italy with a Swedish girl. In Poland with an English girl. Those two nights are perhaps the happiest of my life. I'm all for affairs on journeys or at conferences. At least they avoid the clinging, bourgeois element.

Jean-Louis: In principle, I'm against. But since such a thing never happened to me...

Vidal: She's - very beautiful.

Jean-Louis: Marry her.

Vidal: No, we've gone into all that. We don't get on with each other, day in, day out. But we're the best of friends. I asked you to come because otherwise I know she and I will make love.

Jean-Louis: I won't come.

Vidal: But we would only do it to pass the time and that's no solution, for her or me. I'm a puritan, as you know.

Jean-Louis: More than me?

Vidal: Much more.

Jean-Louis: My Christianity and my affairs are different, conflicting matters.

Vidal: Yet they co-exist in you.

Jean-Louis: In a warlike fashion. Now I may shock you once again but pursuing girls does not estrange one from God any more than pursing mathematics, for example.

Vidal: Come to Kogan's recital with me. I've got a spare ticket.

Jean-Louis: I don't feel like listening to music tonight.

Vidal: All Clermont will be there. Lots of pretty girls.

Jean-Louis: Your students?

Vidal: There are plenty of pretty girls here, but they keep out of sight. Come along, you'll ravish them.

Jean-Louis: That I've never done. All right, I'll come to prove you wrong.