Clouds Over Paris, page 3
One time he is together with a “colleague”, a PhD: blond sideburns, dissipated forehead, dry, thin, raked-back hair, dry, translucent skin. They sit beside each other on the ostentatious banquette, the backs of their heads glued to their mirror image. They speak little, in fits and starts, slobbering their soup. The philosopher acts as if he were a cross between Diogenes and Pyrrho, and wears a silk shirt and bow tie. His mouth frozen like a scar from a lightning strike. Curt, awkward gestures. “W-w-w-well?” He has no bottom. The hem of his jacket, which hangs straight down, is a wavy line. Muscular shoulders, a sinewy hand. – Copious amounts of wine make him relax for a few minutes, the veins protruding on his forehead. “He” turns round in his seat, immersing himself in his reflection. Departing Frenchmen remark: “Faux ménage.” – –
The icy ring of alienation and mistrust he has cast about him. He is firmly pinned down within it, his gestures winning no space, his words lacking the air to carry. He is much more restricted talking to Germans, with their specific physical features. A crew cut, pince-nez and a fat neck are much more readily accepted; their appearance only puts a stop to the conversation for a second or two. Whereas for him, that moment of horror stretches out into a small eternity: drawn cheeks, the nostrils stiff, mouths turned to stone. He does everything he can to ease and expedite identification: quickly unfolding a German newspaper, bringing out a Baedeker. He intentionally speaks poor French, orders beer, cold, thin, interminable. Once, absorbed by a French book, he forgot.
Three men sit down at the next table… “Face de la collaboration… les salauds… les pillards… ce n’est pas encore fini” etc. He squirms, clears his throat, looks away, cranes his neck to find the garçon. Only when he is paying do the others notice him, his soldier’s ration card. He saves himself by knocking over his chair, and thinks he hears: “Manque d’éducation, de tact… espèce de fou assez dangereux…” etc.
A couple in the neighbouring séparé, back-to-back with him. Muffled words into each other’s shoulders, the silence of long kisses. The couple leave, eyeing him as they go past, in his empty red mirrored compartment. He returns their gaze: benign, full of admiration, and at the same time veiled, not quite there.
In a student café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. He had been there once before, five, eight years ago, with the Fellowship for Reconciliation. The waiter calls the students “tu”; one of them gets given some money. Little round tables, a hard horsehair sofa. Right next to him are two young students, in coats, belts dangling down, collars turned up; one has a thin moustache, both with long, combed-back hair. They fix their dark, almost childlike eyes on him, unblinking; arched eyebrows. Before them lies a map showing the theatre of war in North Africa. An older student is about to sit down with them, follows their gaze, then stays where she is. Lots of little lines around the eyes, across the forehead, with too much make-up carelessly applied; one strand of hair has gone grey. He pays immediately the consommation arrives, elaborately, with high-denomination Occupation Reichmarks – the coffee is “national”* and scalding hot – turning his bag inside out in search of something to read, to give his eyes something to do. Suddenly gets up, without having had breakfast, almost upsetting the tray in the process, with numerous croaky “pardon”s. He gives the girl an all-encompassing look: sorry… [Blank]
By the door, he thinks he hears her say: “Celui-ci n’était pas si mal.” Was he mistaken?
* Café national was the term used during the war for coffee made from other ingredients, such as acorns or chickpeas.
APRIL 1941
Quartier latin
Rising up from the east – which has been a wall of purple the whole afternoon – a heavy bank of cloud lies stretched across the rooftops. From the west, a harsh light the colour of brass. It just touches the garrets, chimneys, the uppermost storey on one side of the street, with a luminous, furnace-like heat. From the opposite direction there are short, half-choked gusts of cold wind. A pigeon is held, suspended, above the rooftops on air rising up from the narrow street below. It did rain for a moment, the cobbles peppered black, but now only a few parched drops fall from the sky. The heat of summer, bleakly odourless, already covers the streets. A rain-black evening sharpens one’s hearing – but the searing light up on the rooftops, at the windows, deadens the ear. In the depths of the street purple and grey prevail. The surface of the house fronts protrudes, recedes, imperceptibly. Myriads of tall windows contract to slits the width of a line. Most of them with no volets, just bare incisions without any real horizontals to speak of, and yet these houses, as they retreat, seem infinitely alive, familiar, almost human. The many shades of grey, yellow. The occasional little banner, “Hôtel”, slightly bent, loops down a building. Greengrocers’ shops, two metres wide, still open, a couple of bunches of radishes, carrots, left. Tired tulips piled up on top of each other, all the stalks pointing the same way. Books and antiques on display in every other window. Bareheaded despite the threat of rain, “he” has not yet had supper, devouring the shop windows. In one – often they are several rooms deep – a solitary electric light bulb burns on an enormous chandelier dripping with crystal. The proprietor – hunched back, dark suit, grey hair, elegant – in conversation with an elderly couple, falls silent as “his” shadow fixes itself to the outside window. The pavement is so narrow, he is unable to step back to determine the name. On the other side, even more “Antiquités”… he plants himself across the street, before crossing back again, then on up the street in a highly suspicious zigzag – who in this day and age has that much time on their hands, and such fat cheeks? – the street is never-ending. He sees all the chairs – his cheeks mirroring the upholstery – floating on tapering, fluted Empire-style legs, or swaying on the springy, muscular legs of the rococo, with splayed claws. Bluish-pink, pale-green silk damask covers. Engravings, lithographs, of the dix-huitième. The legs of the couple intertwined with those of the chairs: tiny feet, the slow, even swell of a leg – the knees still a way away, shy, concealed humps in the choppy expanses of skirt; his tight silk socks, faultlessly sculptured trousers…
The bergères, divans
They can’t be comfortable: they’ve got that same gilt carved wood everywhere. Chunky, solid little books. He reads the spines… La nuit et le moment – Le Sopha – Mémoires secrètes – Mémoires du comte de Stern Stern Stern. One shop window unfurnished save for some heavy fabric, concertinaed together. He wished he could name them: brocade, satin, soie brochée – what does broché mean? – what’s petit point? The soles of his feet hurt; he would rather like to adjust his belt (his stomach’s rumbling); he can see the reflection of his Adam’s apple going up and down in the window. He’d like to look at two, three knick-knacks at once; if only he had the eyes of a chameleon. The next shop, and the lateness of the hour, pulls him on. Considering things: holding, stroking, pressing them to your stomach, holding them between your legs. – A Buddha’s head made out of a very hard, grey-green stone – granite, syenite? – with a protruding chin. Noh masks with real hair and chubby, smiling cheeks with blushing red circles on them. Or a worm-eaten wooden sculpture from the late Middle Ages, heavily painted: reddish gold, carmine red, dark green. An angel, both arms missing, with bulging cheeks; a pietà. – But there is no way he could go in, even though the shops are largely still open.
He comes out, via the Rue de l’Université, onto the square by Saint-Germain-des-Prés – here the light can reach further down. The chestnut trees – their leaves already the length of your finger, but not yet forming a complete canopy – stand beside each other, breathless, in lines of golden green. The various bits of masonry arrayed in the square – finials, propped-up gargoyles, the rustic brown stone of the tower – baking in a reddish light. The ostinato of pigeons cooing somewhere between the leaves and the wall, and the swish and squawk of caged birds in a window.
Rue de Seine. He meets a “colleague”. The one who wrote that important book on the idea of the state in the late Middle Ages. He appears to be slightly drunk. Grey Tyrolean hat with a middling brim, thick octagonal glasses, no neck, a reddened face – trench coat with a twisted belt, epaulettes. “Am I pleased to see you… I just came across something over there, Rue Bonaparte, I think it was… these great plates, wrought copper, or they could be brass – for my hall – I still have the estate. But the price was scandalous… Come down here, should be just on the left. You know this, I presume, the house where Racine died, in the Rue Visconti. Quite big. Look, there’s another plaque… Adam Mienciewicz*… do you know who he was? Oh no? Polack chap. It’s amazing how steeped in history everything is. Quite wonderful. Ooh, look at those sconces. They would work in the hall, too. What are they called in French? I’ll just pop in…”
At the end of the Rue de Seine, the dome of the institute still in [breaks off]
Evening stroll…
The Panthéon, seen from the Île Saint-Louis, through the wide gap of the rue Jean-du-Bellay. A huge sky, into which a mass of houses and rooftops – the ragged ridges, teeming chimneys, crags of slate – occasionally protrude; superimposed on top is the infinite expanse of the Panthéon with its straight roof, creating an even skyline over which only the dome is permitted to assert itself, inflated with gentle, measured breaths. Into a tall sky made up of large, identical bits of cloud. Only the odd exposed patch where gold and dark blue emerge. It seems to be blowing hard up there. A fine even haze. Sans éclat, the sun has been soaked up by the fine, matt, powdery twilight. To the left, just down the hill, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont seems to be a little less secure on that sea of rooftops than the Panthéon. The houses wash up against the church, which lists slightly. The tower with its pierced lantern, just on the one side; fears for the attached west front, thin as fretwork when viewed side-on. But that elongated pontoon of a slate roof, as if made from sheet iron, with neither seams nor hatches: unsinkable, incombustible. Beyond emerges the broader, horned tower of Sainte-Geneviève(?), tucked into the Lycée Henri-IV. Huddled against the transept façade of Saint-Étienne is the tower stump of the École Polytechnique, as yet unaffected by the elements in a new yellow-green imperméable. – The timeless class of the grey and blue in which the buildings are clad; their pores seem to exude it, imperceptibly, like smoke.
The reflection of the Seine carries the pale brightness of the western sky away to the left, to the east. Approaching frost spices the air, yet the weeping willow which leans out over the river from the Square Notre-Dame is already covered with green. The thick, broad crowns of the chestnut trees, which, neither discoloured nor deformed, have managed to retain all that frost and moisture and hold up the snowy sky, are now seized with white foam, pale bursting stars.
The houses along the Quai de Béthune…
Broad, simple surfaces, one flowing smoothly into the next, taking the course set before modifying it slightly, imperceptibly following the curve of the river. It is difficult for the light to break away; they hold it back. All of them are painted in the same milky white, but each with a different gentle shade in tone: pink, olive green, yellow ochre. No balconies, narrow ledges, decorative trim. Everywhere that elegant design of large, flat windows: hundreds of them, trebled in number by the open shutters and subdivided by the simple knee-high grilles. One never tires of seeing them. The shutters – evenly distributed, genteelly purblind – present a harmonious group of short dashes. There is an austere garland motif, only just visible due to the thick coat of paint, over the windows of one of the houses, repeated countless times and yet not hackneyed. Another is divided up by thin, slender pilasters. They are all very tall, several storeys taller than the mighty old poplars along the embankment. One can count another six, seven garrets in addition, often in two rows. Some are a bit lower than others, the steep front face of the slate roof, from which the dormer windows stick out, coming further down. Simple, wide entranceways, with a faun’s mask at the keystone, or supported by two slightly protruding caryatids. The windows of older narrow frontages with no shutters, only a bare wall with vertically incised rectangles – but the effect is not bleak: the surface curves imperceptibly outwards or gently in, drawing in its coat of whitewash or shedding it in flakes. – One house front near the bridge, every crack blinded with white – blue and purple seem to flow beneath, the window frames, the meagre decoration made of soft grey-green limestone. Travertine? One can read the words Institut polonais, Bibliothèque Mienkiewicz… Past the Pont Sully to the Hôtel Lambert, which belongs to the Czartioriskys.† Its walls, encased in the heavy armour of rustic work, curve around the tip of the island. The large arched windows are piled up with sandbags, right to the top. – As the daylight on them dies away, they begin to glow of themselves, the dry, grainy white turning to glistening mother-of-pearl, a blossoming pink…
The anglers, strangely short-necked with all the windows staring down at their backs, compressed under the height of the buildings. Somewhere the shutters swing closed, with a gentle sigh. A female figure, bare arms against the window grille, from under a shawl. On one of the floors a window closes, smoothly, without any force; a slight tremble of glass. Lazy smoke floats up from a barge.
BAUDELAIRE A MIEUX DIT.
Quai…
The thick white wall of the quai. Soft stone with large pores. North side of the Île Notre-Dame, in shade. Abandoned painters’ easels leaning against the wall. The Seine has fallen hugely, the bridge opposite with its empty niches above the cutwaters looks almost like it is on stilts. By the embankment wall, the section of the collapsed bridge which linked the two islands is in the throes of being knocked off. Groynes in the middle of the river, surrounded by wooden scaffolding, receiving attention. A shallow boat with a red sail sits motionless in the current. The opaque brown-green of the water. The anglers hold their rods vertically down the embankment wall, the water dropping away from them. One can already feel the full thirst of summer. The towers of the Conciergerie pressed close one behind the other, a dull gleam from its cones of slate. Dazzling, towering clouds above. The Hôtel-Dieu, a thousand blue lunettes, their haunches wet, cold and black. Waves of cold air through the gateways, up from the river. Across on the sunny side of the embankment there are people sitting in the sun, opposite Saint-Gervais. Only the steep slate roof, straight and unbroken, and the gable end of the transept rise up over the cluster of tall, thin houses along the embankment. The roof sits high up on the back of the baroque façade affixed to the west front. It drops away steeply over the chancel, only at the last moment revealing [breaks off]
The houses are largely only two to three windows wide, their frontages in a single plane, moving in consort: belly, hips, funnel chest. The roof has difficulty in deciding whether to abandon the vertical, extending into garrets, bulky chimneys, requiring one, two bends to make it to the ridge. Eaves of varying height. The finish: all different kinds of white, ochre, pale green. The shutters, their slats stuffed with paper, another white yet again. The washed out, rough-hewn stone with which the chimneys are edged. All this brightness, in the searing light of a stormy afternoon, against that blue slate which cuts short the pale blue of a spring sky, suffused with fine gleaming dust. Above the roof there is the broad, squat, unassuming tower, two windows next to each other, the view from each of which is directed towards the ground by louvres with three slats. The whole building sparkling, dazzling, and yet in many ways muffled, shrouded in smoke pricked with golden dust; one cannot tell if the air is warm or cold. Smoke from scorched stone. And the damp of the riverbed.
The colours at street level – shops, awnings – cut in half by the embankment wall. The dull yellow trunks of the plane trees, their branches covered in the first signs of spring, submerging into the coloured façade.
Across the river to the north-west, the Tour Saint-Jacques, curiously isolated, like a relic, above the long, tall block of houses on the Quai de la Mégisserie. The corner pillars put one in mind of a withered, woody ornamental thistle; the silvery colour, too. Or one thinks of a weathered, hewn chunk of coral. Crowned on the one side by the great statue of the saint. – The tall houses, girt with common, narrow balconies (on the last floor but one), beneath a common, curved zinc(?) roof, out of which up to three rows of dormer windows have been claimed, in the unobtrusively elegant gold-grey brown of the nineteenth century. The sky draws damp and mist; towering clouds beyond, of which one can only see the caps and crests, their bodies and feet lost in the haze.
In an open window, a well-groomed man with silver hair, in a brown velvet jacket and a panama hat, looks across at the opposing bank, which is inflamed in a white, dusty light. One can feel the cold which still dominates the apartments.
Autre promenade
Rue Tournon towards the Luxembourg Gardens. Rain: take cover. The walls of the buildings the deepest of blacks, setting off the first raindrops which fall slowly, at a strange angle. Behind, above the Gardens, the depths of a restless, glaring world of gathering clouds. Monstrous towers, the yellow of sulphur, pile up in a somewhat uneven sky of insipid blue, mixed with greeny-yellow. A number of these billowing fortresses one behind the other, their shadows purple, brown; more and more grow, rise up, before they are driven under, buried by a low, coursing, shapeless blanket; and with it, the rain.
