La Place De L'Étoile

by Patrick Modiano

  VICOMTE CHARLES LÉVY-VENDÔME

  Master of Ceremonies, would like the pleasure of your acquaintance

  He takes a seat opposite me.

  ‘Excuse my rather cavalier manner, but I invariably force an entry into other people’s lives. A face, an expression, can be enough to win my friendship. I was most impressed by your resemblance to Gregory Peck. Aside from that, what do you do for a living?’

  He had a beautiful, deep voice.

  ‘You can tell me your life story somewhere more dusky. What do you say to the Morocco?’

  At the Morocco, the dance floor was utterly deserted despite Noro Morales’ wild guarachas blasting from the loudspeakers. Latin America was decidedly the vogue in Bordeaux that autumn.

  ‘I’ve just been expelled from school,’ I explained, ‘aggravated assault. I’m a young hoodlum, and Jewish to boot. My name is Raphäel Schlemilovitch.’

  ‘Schlemilovitch? Well, well! All the more reason that we should be friends. I myself belong to a long-established Jewish family from the Loiret. My ancestors were jesters to the dukes of Pithiviers for generations. Your life story does not interest me. I wish to know whether or not you are looking for work.’

  ‘I am looking, monsieur le vicomte.’

  ‘Very well then. I am a host. I host . . . I conceive, I develop, I devise . . . I have need of your help. You are a young man of impeccable pedigree. Good presence, come-hither eyes, American smile. Let us speak man to man. What do you think of French girls?’

  ‘Pretty.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They would make first-class whores!’

  ‘Admirable! I like your turn of phrase! Now, cards on table, Schlemilovitch! I work in the white slave trade! As it happens, the French girl is particularly prized in the market. You will supply the merchandise. I am too old to take on such work. In 1925, it required no effort; these days, if I wish to be attractive to women, I have them smoke opium beforehand. Who would have thought the sultry young Lévy-Vendôme would turn into a satyr when he turned fifty? Now, you Schlemilovitch, you have many years ahead of you; make the most of them! Use your natural talents to debauch your Aryan girls. Later, you can write your memoir. It will be called The Rootless: the story of seven French girls who could not resist the charms of Schlemilovitch the Jew only to find themselves, one fine day, working in brothels in the Orient or in South America. The moral of the story: they should not have trusted this Jewish lothario, they should have stayed on the cool mountain slopes, in the verdant groves. You will dedicate your memoir to Maurice Barrès.’

  ‘As your wish, monsieur le vicomte.’

  ‘Now, to work, my boy. You leave immediately for the Haute-Savoie. I have just received an order from Rio de Janeiro: “Young French mountain girl. Brunette. Husky.” From there, you will move on to Normandy. This time the order is from Beirut: “Elegant French girl whose ancestors fought in the crusades. Good provincial landed gentry.” The client is clearly a lecher after our own hearts! An emir who wants to avenge himself for Charles Martel . . .’

  ‘Or the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders . . .’

  ‘If you prefer. In short, I have found what he requires. In the Calvados region . . . A young woman . . . descended from a venerable aristocratic family! Seventeenth-century château! Cross and Lance heads with fleurs-de-lis on a field Azure. Hunting parties! The ball is in your court, Schlemilovitch. There is not a moment to lose. We have our work cut out for us! The abductions must involve no bloodshed. Come, have one last drink at my place, then I will accompany you to the station.’

  Lévy-Vendôme’s apartment is furnished in the Napoleon I style. The vicomte ushers me into his library.

  ‘Have you ever seen such exquisite bindings?’ he says, ‘I am a bibliophile, it is my secret vice. See, if I take down a volume at random: a treatise on aphrodisiacs by René Descartes. Apocrypha, nothing but apocrypha . . . I have single-handedly reinvented the whole history of French literature. Here we have the love letters of Pascal to Mlle de La Vallière. A bawdy saga by Boussuet. An erotic tale by Mme de La Fayette. Not content with debauching the women of this country, I wanted to prostitute French literature in its entirety. To transform the heroines of Racine and Marivaux into whores. Junia willingly copulating with Nero as a horrified Britannicus looks on. Andromache throwing herself into the arms of Pyrrhus at their first meeting. Marivaux’s countesses donning their maids’ uniforms and “borrowing” their lovers for the night. As you can see, Schlemilovitch, being involved in the white slave trade does not preclude being a man of culture. I have spent forty years writing apocrypha, devoting myself to dishonouring the most illustrious writers of France. Take a leaf out of my book, Schlemilovitch! Vengeance, Schlemilovitch, vengeance!’

  Later, he introduces me to his henchmen, Mouloud and Mustapha.

  ‘They are at your disposal,’ he says, ‘I shall send them to you the moment you ask. One never can tell with Aryan women. Sometimes one has to make a show of brute force. Mouloud and Mustapha are peerless when it comes to taming even the most unruly spirits – they’re former Waffen SS from the Légion nord-africaine. I met them at Bonny and Laffont’s place on Rue Lauriston back when I was secretary to Joanovici. Marvellous fellows. You’ll see!’

  Mouloud and Mustapha are so alike they could be twins. The same scarred face, the same broken nose, the same disturbing rictus. They immediately show me the greatest kindness.

  Lévy-Vendôme accompanies me to the gare Saint-Jean. On the station platform, he hands me three bundles of banknotes.

  ‘For personal expenses. Telephone to keep me up to date. Vengeance, Schlemilovitch! Vengeance! Be ruthless, Schlemilovitch! Vengeance! Ven . . .’

  ‘As you say, monsieur le vicomte.’

  * * *

  * Latin grammar

  III

  Lake Annecy is romantic, but a young man working in the white slave trade must put such thoughts from his mind.

  I catch the first bus for T., a market town I have chosen at random on the Michelin map. The road rises steeply, the hairpin bends make me nauseous. I feel ready to abandon my fine plans. But before long, my taste for the exotic and the desire to air my lungs in the Savoie win out over my despondency. Behind me, a few soldiers start singing ‘Les montagnards sont là,’ and I immediately join in. Then I stroke my wide-rib corduroy trousers, stare down at my clumpy shoes and the alpenstock bought second-hand in a little shop in old Annecy. The tactic I propose to adopt is as follows: in T., I will pass myself off as a young, inexperienced climber who knows of the mountains only from the novels of Frison-Roche. With a little skill, I should quickly ingratiate myself. I can introduce myself to the locals and furtively scout out a young girl worth shipping off to Brazil. For greater security, I have decided to take on the unassailably French identity of my friend Des Essarts. The name Schlemilovitch sounds dubious. The local savages doubtless heard about Jews back when the Milice were overrunning the area. The most important thing is not to arouse their suspicions. Suppress my Lévi-Straussian ethnological curiosity. Refrain from staring at their daughter like a horse trader, otherwise they will sniff out my oriental ancestry.

  The bus pulls up in front of the church. I sling my rucksack over my shoulder, make my alpenstock ring against the cobbles and stride confidently to the Hôtel des Trois Glaciers. I am immediately captivated by the copper bedstead and the wallpaper in room 13. I telephone Bordeaux to inform Lévy-Vendôme of my arrival and whistle a minuet.

  At first, I noticed an unease among the natives. They were unsettled by my tall stature. I knew from experience that one day this would work to my advantage. The first time I crossed the threshold of the Café Municipal, alpenstock in hand, crampons on my shoes, I felt all eyes turn to size me up. Six foot four, five, six, seven? The bets were on. M. Gruffaz, the baker, guessed correctly and scooped the pot and immediately struck up a keen friendship with me. Did M. Gruffaz have a daughter? I would find out soon enough. He introduced me to his friends, the l
awyer Forclaz-Manigot and the pharmacist Petit-Savarin. The three men offered me an apple brandy that had me coughing and spluttering. They told me they were waiting for their friend Aravis, a retired colonel, for a game of belote. I asked permission to join them, feeling grateful that Lévy-Vendôme had taught me belote just before I left. I remembered his pertinent remark: ‘I should warn you now that working in the white slave trade is not exactly exciting, especially when one is trading in young French girls from the provinces. You must cultivate the interests of a commercial traveller: belote, billiards and aperitifs are the best means of infiltrating these groups.’ The three men asked the reason for my stay in T. I explained, as planned, that I was a young French aristocrat with a keen interest in mountaineering.

  ‘Colonel Aravis will like you,’ Forclaz-Manigot confided. ‘Stout fellow, Aravis, used to be a mountain infantryman. Loves the peaks. Obsessed with climbers. He’ll advise you.’

  Colonel Aravis arrives and looks me up and down, considering my future as an alpine chasseur. I give him a hearty handshake and click my heels.

  ‘Jean-François Des Essarts! Pleased to meet you, sir!’

  ‘Strapping lad!’ he says to the others, ‘perfect for the force!’

  He becomes paternal:

  ‘I fear, young man, that we don’t have time to put you through the rock-climbing exercise that would have given me a better sense of your talents. Never mind, another time. But I guarantee I’ll make a seasoned climber out of you. You seem hale and willing and that’s the important part!’

  My four new friends settle down to playing cards. Outside, it is snowing. I engross myself in reading L’Écho-Liberté, the local newspaper. I discover there is a Marx Brothers film playing at the cinema in T. There are six of us, then, six brothers exiled in the Savoie. I feel a little less alone.

  On reflection I found the Savoie as charming as I had Guyenne. Was this not the homeland of Henry Bordeaux? When I was about sixteen, I read Les Roquevillard, La Chartreuse du reposoir and Le Calvaire du Cimiez with devotion. A stateless Jew, I hungrily drank in the rustic redolence of these masterpieces. I cannot understand why Henry Bordeaux has fallen from favour in recent years. He had a decisive influence on me and I will be forever loyal to him.

  Luckily, I discovered my new-found friends had tastes identical to mine. Aravis read the works of Capitaine Danrit, Petit-Savarin had a weakness for René Bazin and Gruffaz, the baker, set great store by Édouard Estaunié. He had nothing to teach me about the virtues of that particular writer. In What is literature?, Des Essarts described the author as follows: ‘I consider Édouard Estaunié to be the most deviant author I have ever read. At first glance, Estaunié’s characters seem reassuring: paymasters, postmistresses, provincial seminarians, but do not be deceived by appearances: the paymaster has the soul of an anarchist bomber, the postmistress works as a prostitute after her shift at the PTT, the young seminarian is as bloodthirsty as Gilles de Rais . . . Estaunié chose to camouflage vice beneath black frockcoats, mantillas, even soutanes: he is de Sade as petty clerk, he is Genet dragged up as Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.’ I read this passage to Forclaz-Manigot, telling him that I had written it. He congratulated me and invited me to dinner. During the meal, I surreptitiously studied his wife. She seemed a little mature, but, if I found nothing better, I decided I would not be choosy. And so, we were living out a novel by Estaunié: the young French aristocrat, so keen on mountaineering, was really a Jew working in the white slave trade; the lawyer’s wife, so reserved, so provincial, would all too soon find herself in a Brazilian brothel if I so decided.

  Beloved Savoie! To my dying day I will have fond memories of Colonel Aravis. Every little French boy has a grandfather just like him somewhere in the depths of the provinces. He is ashamed of him. Our friend Sartre would like to forget his great uncle Doctor Schweitzer. When I visit Gide in his ancestral home at Cuverville, he mutters over and over, ‘Families, I despise you! Families, I despise you!’ Only Aragon, my childhood friend, has not spurned his origins. I am grateful to him for that. When Stalin was alive, he would proudly tell me, ‘The Aragons have been cops, father and son, for generations!’ One point in his favour. The other two are nothing more than wayward children.

  I, Raphäel Schlemilovitch, listened respectfully to my grandfather, Colonel Aravis, as once I had listened to my great-uncle Adrien Debigorre.

  ‘Become a mountain infantryman, Des Essarts, goddammit! You’ll be a heartthrob with the ladies. A strapping fellow like you! In uniform, you would turn heads.’

  Unfortunately, the uniform of the chasseurs alpins reminded me of the Milice uniform I had died in twenty years earlier.

  ‘My love of uniforms has never brought me luck,’ I explained to the colonel. ‘Back in 1894, it got me a notorious trial and several years imprisoned on Devil’s Island. The Schlemilovitch Affair, remember?’

  The colonel was not listening. He stared me straight in the eye and bellowed:

  ‘Head up, dear boy, please! A strong handshake. Above all don’t snigger. We have had enough of seeing the French race denigrated. What we want now is purity.’

  I felt very moved. This was just the sort of advice Jo Darnand used to give me when we were battling the Résistance.

  Every night, I report back to Lévy-Vendôme. I talk to him about Mme Forclaz-Manigot, the lawyer’s wife. He tells me his client in Rio is not interested in mature women. This left me doomed to spending quite some time in the lonely heights of T. I am champing at the bit. Colonel Aravis will be no help, he lives alone. Neither Petit-Savarin nor Gruffaz has daughters. On the other hand, Lévy-Vendôme has specifically forbidden me from meeting young village girls other than through their parents or their husbands: a reputation for being a skirt-chaser would close all doors to me.

  IN WHICH THE ABBÉ PERRACHE

  GETS ME OUT OF A SCRAPE

  I run into this clergyman while in the course of a leisurely stroll around T. Leaning against a tree, he is studying nature, a typical Savoyard parish priest. I am struck by the goodness etched into his face. We strike up a conversation. He talks to me about the Jew Jesus Christ. I talk to him about another Jew named Judas of whom Jesus Christ said ‘Good were it for that man if he had never been born!’ Our theological discussion continues all the way to the village square. Father Perrache is saddened by my preoccupation with Judas. ‘You are a desperate soul,’ he tells me gravely, ‘despair is the worst sin of all.’ I tell this saintly man that my family have sent me to T. to get some fresh air into my lungs and some order into my thoughts. I tell him about my all-too-brief time studying in Bordeaux, explaining that I hated the radical socialist atmosphere of the lycée. He rebukes me for my intransigence. ‘Think of Péguy,’ he says, ‘he divided his time between Chartres cathedral and the Ligue des insituteurs. He did his best to teach Jean Jaurès about the glories of Saint Louis and Joan of Arc. One tries not to be too elitist, my son! I tell him I prefer Monsignor Mayol de Lupé: a Catholic should take Christ’s interests seriously, even if it means enlisting in the LVF. A Catholic should wield a sword, should declare, like Simon de Montfort, ‘God will know His own!’ In fact, the Inquisition, in my opinion, was a public health measure. I think it was compassionate of Torquemada and Ximénes to want to cure these people who complacently wallowed in their sickness, in their Jewry; it was kind-hearted of them to offer them a surgical solution rather than leaving them to die of their consumption.’ After that, I sing the praises of Joseph de Maistre and Édouard Drumont and inform him that God has no time for the mealy-mouthed.

  ‘Neither for the mealy-mouthed nor for the proud,’ he tells me, ‘and you are committing the sin of Pride, which is just as grave as the sin of Despair. Here, let me set you a little task. You can consider it a penance, an act of contrition. The bishop of this diocese will be visiting the school here in T. a week from now: you will write a welcoming speech which I will pass on to the headmaster. It will be read to His Grace by a young pupil on behalf of the whole community. I
n it, you will show level-headedness, compassion and humility. Let us pray this exercise brings you back to the path of righteousness! I know you are a lost sheep who wants only to return to the flock. Each man in his darkness goes towards his Light! I have faith in you.’ (Sighs.)

  A young blonde girl in the garden of the presbytery. She stares at me curiously: Fr. Perrache introduces me to his niece Loïtia. She is wearing the navy blue uniform of a boarding school girl.

  Loïtia lights a paraffin lamp. The Savoyard furniture smells of wax polish. I like the chromolithograph on the left-hand wall. The priest gently lays a hand on my shoulder:

  ‘Schlemilovitch, you can write and tell your family that you are now in good hands. I shall see to your spiritual health. The mountain air will do the rest. And now, my boy, you are going to write the welcoming speech for the bishop. Loïtia, could you please bring us tea and some brioches? This man needs to build up his strength.’

  I look at Loïtia’s pretty face. The nuns at Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs insist that she wear her blonde hair in plaits but, thanks to me, soon she will let it tumble over her shoulders. Having decided to introduce her to the wonders of Brazil, I step into her uncle’s study and pen a welcoming speech for His Grace Nuits-Saint-Georges:

  ‘Your Grace,

  ‘In every parish of the noble diocese that it has pleased Providence to entrust to him, the Bishop Nuit-Saint-Georges is welcome, bringing as he does the comfort of his presence and the precious blessings of his ministry.

  ‘But he is particularly welcome here in the picturesque valley of T., renowned for its many-hued mantle of meadows and forests . . .

  ‘This same valley which a historian of recent memory called “a land of priests fondly attached to their spiritual leaders”. Here in this school built through magnanimous, sometimes heroic gestures . . . Your Grace is at home here . . . and an eddy of joyous impetuousness, stirring our little universe, has anticipated and solemnized your arrival.