Last Times, page 26
What could Oberleutnant von G., and Major General Z., and the amiable ambassador, the learned advisor from the board of directors of the Beaux Arts, and the charming Major Erich-Friedrich Acker, and that other diabetic, automaton, polyglot official who in his Munich office maintained files of suspects so complete that they even recorded the opinions of Bolivian and Iraqi professors—what could all these important personages, directed by circulars from the Ministry of Propaganda, what could all these flexible, incisive personalities, some like keen scalpels, some like heavy oiled shears, do to prevent a gagged literature from dying or to call forth a single authentic poem?
“But they’ve got the cash, old man, they are the masters of the continent—just as Pericles was master of Athens!”
The allusion to Pericles, launched by a young novelist, made the rounds of the literary circles, applauded by some, liquidated for others by a humorist who wrote this commercial advertisement: “For your shoes! Incomparable Black Eagle shoe polish and our Pericles buffing brush.” Pursued by certain gentlemen of Spartan cast, the humorist, it is believed, crossed the line into the Unoccupied Zone. Teachers at the lycées were embarrassed at having to mention the wise tyrant praised by Thucydides.
Catastrophes that cultivated men would have thought inconceivable only a short time before now seemed natural and even irrevocable to them. What they now felt—or so they said—was less sorrow than manly and philosophic resignation.
“Childbirth is always painful,” said the editor of a paper that had been leftist under Léon Blum’s cabinet. “What are we to do, my dear Mûrier? The Third Republic was stricken with total paralysis, the great hereditary disease; think of the Panama scandal, think of the Dreyfus case—about which France understood nothing, its history remains to be written!—the Masonic scandals, the Stavisky scandals! Poor Marianne was limping with both legs, her Phrygian cap, stolen from the September cutthroats, had become a nightcap. It was sitting all crooked on her gray hair. Old demagogic republics must die like old procuresses, Monsieur. Marianne was rejuvenated in 1918 thanks to the Americans, the Russians, the English, the Italians, the Portuguese, she got away with a victory just before the menopause. At that time we had a great military leader who was clear-sighted, the man of Verdun, who drove Poincaré to despair. The Popular Front was the final bit of senile delirium before the end.”
This gentleman and many others spoke of a return to the earth, of old peasant France, of intendants-general, of salvation through the old monarchy made corporative and social and integrated with the New Order!—of repentance, of the hegemony of the cohesive and warlike, industrial and hierarchic nations. Mûrier was looking into his interlocutor’s spectacles for signs of broken bottles. Answer: “Nonetheless, you were flattered to have lunch with Daladier’s cabinet chief? Doesn’t it make you blush to spout all this rubbish?” —But that would have been imprudent. “And don’t you think,” the poet asked, “there is such a thing as the demagogy of the panzers? Between you and me, I prefer the demagogy of paid vacations and free publishers.”
A Nazi orator proclaimed in Berlin that “the New Reich will last a thousand years!” The air became charged with absurdity, futility, baseness, cynicism. If such were the byproducts of power, what was power worth? “Maître, the Parisian styles continue, our mannequins are all the rage. When it comes to dresses and hats, there hasn’t been any European war.” The theaters were reopening. Outside the Folies Bergère and other nude shows, huge buses poured forth battalions of gray-green soldiers—survivors of the battles of Poland, the Meuse, Flanders, the Somme, destined for other battles from which most of them would not return—but tonight they thought, as they beheld the pyramids of flesh, the plumes and the smiles, that they were plumbing the very depths of joy.
The invasion of the British Isles was foreshadowed by the burning of London. Paris-soir wrote: “England is short of gasoline, England expected to win the battle of iron but has lost it.” The Tripartite Pact created “the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo bronze Axis for a new order, for a future of justice and peace” (speech of Count Ciano). Dr. Funk, Reich Minister of Economics, who had been seen on the Champs-Élysées, was preparing “the reconstruction of Europe—” In the Free Zone, the National Revolution seemed ready, if Hitler permitted, to branch out into a monarchist restoration. In Paris, L’Oeuvre commented: “Restoration? In Vichy it is the name of a chic café across the street from the Casino. Nothing more.” Revolution signified reaction, national meant treason, and restoration—a little chic café. Trade unionists who had formerly been revolutionary published France at Work, passed by the military censorship, approved by the Geheime Staatspolizei; a group of old anarchists, grown excessively sad and wise, praised Proudhon and denounced that evil Jew Karl Marx. The underground L’Humanité demonstrated the responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon plutocracies. A worried essayist wrote: “We are conquered, all we have left is wisdom.” Maybe he thought so. Drieu La Rochelle worked on a “Defense of Laughter.” Louis-Ferdinand Céline, lyrical and half-mad, lewd, scatological, and prophetic, foamed at the mouth for a thousand pages on the Jews, the Jew-infected, the sodomized, and the Negroids—in a word, the greatest writer of the century. Montherlant lauded the censorship: “Thanks to the censorship we shall at last cease to be regarded as a drunken helot or a naughty child.” At last! Alphonse de Châteaubriant traced the portrait of the Führer: “His eyes are the deep blue of the waters of the Königsee when the lake, all around Sankt Bartholomäus, reflects the deep furrowed valleys of Tyrol . . . His body vibrates but never for a second departs from its basic rhythm . . . The nape of his neck is warm . . . He is immensely good . . .” Count Wolf Metternich, delegated as protector of the arts in Belgium and France, attached to the Wehrmacht high command, reopened the Louvre in the presence of Field Marshal von Rundstedt and Infantry General Streccius. The Jew Bergson was about to die in utter neglect. A Commission to Deprive Undesirables of French Citizenship was set up. Other commissions studied the application of the Nuremberg racial laws. An old scholar hid the documents of the age of shame in the cellars of the Musée de l’Homme.
Paris preserved unity only in its proud architecture: never would the waters or the skies of the Seine commit treason. Several cities, several different and mutually hostile lives were superimposed, one upon the other. There were the military staffs, the pleasures of the military staffs, the whisperings of governmental intrigues, the surveillances, the subterranean rivers of millions—marks and francs, merchandise, selected flesh, selected consciences, half consciences, quarter, eighth, and hundredth consciences. In the total blackout, music, fine wines, and amorous looks; Napoleonic soirées, where discreet field marshals suddenly appeared, surrounded by décolletés; where champagne bubbles mingled with state secrets; where men soon to be shot displayed great wit. Only a madman, Madame, could doubt in our continental victory. There were swastika flags, parades, uniforms; the member of the Fascist Grand Council at Maxim’s; the aces of the Luftwaffe supping at Fouquet’s with pretty girls from the Bal Tabarin; and the dead Métro stations and the living Métro stations, the resigned queues outside the grocery stores, the rackets in butter, cheese, chicken, cloth, paintings, jewels, authorizations from the military commandant, genealogical researches, cleansed birth records, falsifications of the past, falsifications of blood, great and petty circumventions of the law.
There were espionage, counterespionage, commissions, subcommissions, inspections, secret police in factories, banks, offices, railroad stations, trade unions, newspapers, prisons, apartment houses, brothels; raids on Masonic lodges, the archdiocese, the préfecture; all this produced reports, memoranda, dossiers, classifications, stool pigeons, arrests, flights, disappearances, sudden careers—and registrations, inventories, requisitions, confiscations, planning, Order. There were perilous clandestine traffickings, messages to prisoners, liberations at a price, mail to the other Zone at ten francs a letter. Horse cabs reappeared, woodburning autos appeared, bicycles were registered, great projects for urbanization were in the wind. Trains rolled eastward, loaded with machinery and raw materials, luxury articles, Normandy apples, potatoes, furloughed soldiers invigorated by Paris nights—and in the somber blue light of camouflaged railroad stations, trains full of severe casualties were arriving, disgorged their loads of the badly burned men, blind men, men with their genitals torn, men with their lungs crushed, men with tubes hanging out of their bellies.
And Félicien Mûrier, who had always felt the life of Paris in his veins and his nerves “from the Claridge to the squares of La Chapelle, from the flea market to the institute,” passed in front of the Café de Flore but did not enter. “How sick I am of those faces, those scribes and Pharisees!” He remembered a dealer in wood and coal whom he had met on the dawn of the saddest day: Chabas, Chavas, or Cherras, Augustin. Now that fellow had the look of a man—a man like millions of others no doubt, lucid and silent.
Along the quays Mûrier entered that other Paris, strangely familiar, over which a fine autumn day spread a cloak of white mourning. On the threshold of the Hôtel Marquise a young man in a beret was smoking, his eyes said nothing. Outside Widow Prugnier’s grocery store stood a sign: NO EGGS, NO SUGAR, NO SOAP, NO— But a colored poster pasted on the inside of the windowpane showed fatherly Wehrmacht soldiers surrounded by happy children. The door of Augustin Charras’s shop was closed. Mûrier knocked gently, as though calling on a friend. The emptiness echoed behind the door. Now things began to happen quickly.
“This way, Monsieur,” said the young man in the beret. “This way.”
He had an anonymous but clinging look, pimply cheeks, and a flat mouth. “M. Charras is waiting for you,” he said, leading Félicien Mûrier into the vestibule of the hotel. Bells began to ring violently, pursuing one another, playing leapfrog from one floor to the next, and out jumped figures in civilian clothes and pistol belts; several faces, nocturnal in broad daylight, looked at the poet with dull coldness.
“What’s going on here?” Félicien Mûrier asked heavily. “See here, I’m looking for M. Augustin Charras.”
This statement sent someone running to the telephone. Two burly men looked him over from top to toe; in an instant he felt himself frisked, searched, imprisoned between their mechanical paws. “No resistance, eh, or I’ll make jam out of your face. State Police.”
Lord, here I am right in the middle of a murder film. Someone spoke German on the telephone: “Ja, Herr Leutnant, gleich, Herr Leutnant, Jawohl, Herr Leutnant—” A rat in a trap. Mûrier smiled stupidly at the farce while they slipped the handcuffs on him.
“See here, Messieurs, you’re out of your minds.” The answer was an imperative “Silence!” It was grotesque.
For a long moment he stood leaning against the wall between the toilet stinking of carbolic acid and the storeroom under the stairway, into which an enormous gray motorcycle thrust its giant handlebars like monstrous horns. A few feet away a young bruiser sat in a chair, contemplating his revolver. The rat’s in his trap, toss it into a bucket of water. Ratface. It’s funny. The outward world was growing perceptibly paler. The handcuffs were not uncomfortable but they provoked an itch behind his ears.
He broke the enormous menacing silence to say in his bantering tone, “Look here, young man, couldn’t you take off these burglar’s bracelets? I’d like to scratch behind my ear and have a butt. There’s no harm in that, is there? And besides, that silly gun of yours is beginning to get on my nerves.”
These simple words affected the bruiser with the revolver like a bomb going off in his chair. He leapt to his feet. A flash of frightened anger passed over his expressionless face. “Quiet. State police. You are under arrest.”
“Oh, no,” Mûrier replied calmly, “if there is still a shadow of law in Paris, you may be sure that I am not under arrest but that you soon will be, my boy.”
The bruiser seemed about to leap at him, but nothing happened. Mûrier slouched over, a cold gloom penetrated his bones. A couple of young ruffians like piano movers picked him up and loaded him into a car, which brought him to the neighborhood police station. M. Carpe, acting captain, thrust into the room his gawky frame, his pince-nez, his black bow tie.
“You are the Gaullist? Last name, first name, identity?”
“I am Félicien Mûrier.”
Someone guffawed. “Good name for a cocoon.”*
“Profession, residence? Kike?”
“Man of letters—Rue Jacob. Anyhow this is a ridiculous misunderstanding. I demand that you immediately call the permanent secretary of the academy on the phone, he’ll tell you who I am—or the Préfecture de Police.”
“The old ‘connections’ story,” M. Carpe answered soberly. “For the last eighteen years I’ve been hearing it twice a week. Come on now! You are associated with the bandit Charras?”
“No.”
“You have the impudence to deny it. You’ll get over that. Lock him up.”
A policeman vigorously shoved Mûrier into an empty cell. The poet felt nothing but a nauseous curiosity. A calm detachment from himself gave him two personalities. This fat man, handcuffed, rather ugly, slipping from one compartment to the next in a complicated rattrap—can that be me? It flashed through his mind that his manifest innocence made him invulnerable. What an absurdity! Innocence no longer existed, the laws no longer existed. And what am I innocent of? How am I to guess? The innocent are the guilty. There you have it. These reflections did not frighten him, for if there is no more innocence, there is no more crime, everything is just fine. The cell, ordinarily reserved for drunkards and whores, occasionally for a jealous murderer, a bicycle thief, a rude wino, contained only a bench and a slop jar; its only light came from the corridor through the wicket in the door; it exhaled a moderate but persistent stench of old urine, mold, and cold cigarette smoke. Less somber than it seemed at first glance, it did not give a sensation of absolute solitude. Why? Mûrier deciphered inscriptions on the wall as monotonously delirious as the unmentionable dream haunting the backstreets of Paris or the Boulevard Sébastopol between midnight and three o’clock in the morning. There were couplets, realistic yet stylized by obsession, visions of sodomy, hearts with daggers through them, a guillotine, profiles and eyes of women, and suddenly a transatlantic liner with three stacks giving off smoke which spelled out in a fine hand: “My desperrate love is on her way to Buenos Ayres.” The word “desperate” seemed enriched by the two r’s. The names written under the confidences and notices arranged themselves according to poetic harmony: Florelle, Gazelle, Bebert, l’Albert, Céline, Frangine, l’Astuce, la Luce and Dessalée and la Dragée, Hector from Les Batignolles and Monique-Fesses-Folles. Black constellation! Carnal specters, short but powerful, these beings had Herculean torsos, muscular thighs, enormous sex organs, little faces tinted with burst blood vessels, obscene tongues. The twilight penetrated the cell; with the dusk came a sense of forlornness—because these creatures all had felt it. Mûrier lay down on the bench, which was like the block of a guillotine, but he was facing the blade.
Good evening widow, here’s my head,
—my heavy head without a halo—
I am Félicien the Innocent,
Take oh take my blood.
Officer Landois entered, preceded by a violent clanking of bolts. He brought bread, sausage, a half pint of red wine. He removed the prisoner’s handcuffs. Before Mûrier had said a word he cried out in an angry voice, “You can shove your complaints up your ass! You’re not at the Majestic here!”
And pressing his mouth to Mûrier’s ear: “Augustin Charras has taken a powder. He’s in the Free Zone. What can I do for you?”
“Notify my wife.”
“That has been done.”
Their two faces beamed with complicity. Landois slammed the door as he left. Mûrier knew one of the great joys of his life. Night fell, and he was left in the mutilated shadows; an abject yellow light, coming from the wicket, clung to the dirty wall, bringing out the Atlantic steamer and the long breasts of a Negress drawn with delirious concentration. Several prostitutes were locked into the neighboring cell. Every hour a policeman went psst at them through the wicket and they exchanged strange crotch jokes with him. Mûrier, falling into the torpor which precedes sleep, thought he could see them: they were not women but headless creatures consisting of broad spreading pelvises planted on long legs sheathed in black silk. They had one eye with a mad insolent stare, half-concealed in their pubic hair. “Ah, they are flumales.”
Night spread over Paris. That this filthy prison should be only a few yards from a street where people were taking their evening strolls became hard to believe. Mûrier placed it in the midst of unknown catacombs, full of larvae, decomposed flesh, creeping fears, and disgusting pleasures. The shadowy Seine with its sudden reflections of moonlight passed over it, sweeping along its dead animals, its bluish corpses, its rotten vegetables, its undersized gudgeon. The Métro passed overhead, carrying its human cargoes—inconceivable. At what Alpine heights above him were the benches of the outer boulevards in the shade of moth-eaten trees, the bars, the enigmatic urinals, the numbered, partitioned houses and their commonplace histories, the cafés, the editorial offices, the rotary presses turning out great sheets of print covered with nonsense, lies, baseness—and a few rays of wit like pearly shells beneath the muck, pure fire under the dung. How to conceive the unlimited, multiple extravagance of reality? Mûrier, divided between fright, lyrical semilucidity and the calm of a reassuring despair, sank into an asphyxiating reverie. How could one ever rise from this underworld into what is believed to be “real life”? He was at the bottom of the sea. The men in the lost submarine listen to the fantastic sounds of the depths and discover the sole and ultimate reality, shapeless and nameless, destructive and chaotic, to which they already belong and which reigns in its immensity beneath the sea, beneath the countrysides, beneath the cities, beneath the delirium once taken for reality.
