La Place De L'Étoile

by Patrick Modiano

  This evening, they did not converse in front of the hearth as usual. The Marquise ushered him into a large boudoir papered in blue and adjoining her chamber. A candelabra cast a flickering glow. The floor was strewn with crimson cushions. On the walls hung bawdy prints by Moreau le Jeune, Girard and Binet, a painting in an austere style that might have been the work of Hyacinthe Rigaud depicted Eleanor of Aquitaine about to give herself to Saladin, the leader of the Saracens.

  The door opened. The Marquise was dressed in a gauze dress that left her breasts free.

  ‘You name is Schlemilovitch, isn’t it?’ she asked in a coarse accent he had never heard her use. ‘Born in Boulogne-Billancourt? I read it on your identity card! A Jew? I love it! My great-great-uncle Palamède de Jusquiames said nasty things about Jews but he admired Marcel Proust! The Fougeire-Jusquiames, or at least the women in the family, are not prejudiced against Orientals. My ancestor, Eleanor, took advantage of the Second Crusade to cavort with Saracens while the miserable Louis VI was sacking Damascus! In 1720, another of my ancestors, the Marquise de Jusquiames, found the Turkish ambassador’s son very much to her taste! On that subject, I notice you have compiled a whole Fougeire-Jusquiames dossier! I am flattered by the interest you take in our family! I even read the charming little passage, no doubt inspired by your stay at the château: ‘It was, this “Fougeire-Jusquiames”, like the setting of a novel, an imaginary landscape . . .’ Do you take yourself for Marcel Proust, Schlemilovitch? That seems ominous! Surely you’re not going to waste your youth copying out In Search of Lost Time? I warn you now, I’m not some fairy from your childhood! Sleeping Beauty! The Duchesse de Guermantes! La femme-fleur. You’re wasting your time! Treat me like some whore from the Rue des Lombards, stop drooling over my aristocratic titles! My field Azure with fleurs-de-lis. Villehardouin, Froissart, Saint-Simon and all that lot! Snobbish little Jewish socialite! Enough of the quavering, the bowing and scraping! I find those gigolo good looks of yours devilishly arousing! Electrifying! Handsome thug! Charming pimp! Pretty boy! Catamite! Do you really think Fougeire-Jusquiames is “like the setting of a novel, an imaginary landscape”? It’s a brothel, don’t you see? The château has always been a high-class brothel. Very popular during the German occupation. My late father, Charles de Fougeire-Jusquiames, pimped for French intellectual collaborators. Statues by Arno Breker, young Luftwaffe pilots, SS Officers, Hitlerjugend, everything was arranged for the pleasure of these gentlemen! My father understood that sex often determines one’s political fortunes. Now, let’s talk about you, Schlemilovitch! Let’s not waste time! You’re a Jew? I suppose you’d like to rape a queen of France. I have various costumes up in the attic. Would you like me to dress as Anne of Austria, my angel? Blanche de Navarre? Marie Leszczyńska? Or would you rather fuck Adélaïde de Savoie? Marguerite de Provence? Jeanne d’Albret? Choose! I’ll dress up a thousand different ways. Tonight, all the queens of France will be your whores . . .’

  The week that ensued was truly idyllic: the Marquise constantly changed her costume to rekindle his desires. Together with the queens of France, he ravished Mme de Chevreuse, the Duchesse de Berry, the Chevalier d’Éon, Bossuet, Saint Louis, Bayard, Du Guesclin, Joan of Arc, the Comte de Toulouse and Général Boulanger.

  He spent the rest of his time getting better acquainted with Gérard.

  ‘My chauffeur enjoys an excellent reputation in the underworld,’ confided Véronique. ‘The gangsters call him The Undertaker or Gérard the Gestapo. Gérard was one of the Rue Lauriston gang. He was my late father’s secretary, his henchman . . .’

  His own father had also encountered Gérard the Gestapo. He had mentioned him during their time in Bordeaux. On 16 July 1942 Gérard had bundled Schlemilovitch père into a black truck: ‘What do you say to an identity check at the Rue Lauriston and a little spell in Drancy?’ Schlemilovitch fils no longer remembered by what miracle Schlemilovitch père escaped the clutches of this good man.

  One night, leaving the Marquise, you surprised Gérard leaning on the balustrade of the veranda.

  ‘You like the moonlight? The still pale moonlight, sad and fair? A romantic, Gérard?’

  He did not have time to answer you. You grabbed his throat. The cervical vertebrae cracked slightly. You have a distasteful penchant for desecrating corpses. With the blade of a Gillette Extra-Blue, you slice away the ears. Then the eyelids. Then you gouge the eyes from their sockets. All that remained was to smash the teeth. Three heel kicks were enough.

  Before burying Gérard, you considered having him stuffed and sent to your poor father, but you could no longer remember the address of Schlemilovitch Ltd., New York.

  All loves are short-lived. The Marquise, dressed as Eleanor of Aquitaine, will succumb, but the sound of a car will interrupt our frolics. The brakes will shriek. I will be surprised to hear a gypsy melody. The drawing room door will be suddenly flung open. A man in a red turban will appear. Despite his fakir outfit, I will recognise the vicomte Charles Lévy-Vendôme.

  Three fiddle players will appear behind him and launch into a second czardas. Mouloud and Mustapha will bring up the rear.

  ‘What is going on, Schlemilovitch?’ the vicomte will ask. ‘We have had no news from you in days!’

  He will wave to Mouloud and Mustapha.

  ‘Take this woman to the Buick and keep a close eye on her. My apologies, madame, for bursting in unannounced, but we have no time to lose! You see, you were expected in Beirut a week ago!’

  A few power slaps from Mouloud will snuff out any vague inclination to resist. Mustapha will gag and bind my companion.

  ‘It’s in the bag!’ Lévy-Vendôme will quip as his henchmen drag Véronique away.

  The vicomte will adjust his monocle.

  ‘You mission has been a fiasco. I expected you to deliver the Marquise to Paris, instead of which I was personally forced to come to Fougeire-Jusquiames. You are fired, Schlemilovitch! Now, let us talk of something else. Enough melodrama for one evening. I propose we take a tour of this magnificent house in the company of our musicians. We are the new lords of Fougeire-Jusquiames. The Marquise is about to bequeath us all her worldly goods. Whether she wishes to or not!’

  I can still picture that curious character with his turban and his monocle exploring the château, candelabra in hand, while the violinists played gypsy airs. He spent some time studying the portrait of cardinal de Fougeire-Jusquiames, stroked a suit of armour that had belonged to an ancestor, Jourdain, a natural son of Eleanor of Aquitaine. I showed him my bedrooms, the Watteau, the Claude Lorrain, the Philippe de Champaigne and the bed in which Louis XIV and Mlle de La Vallière had slept. He read the short passage I had written on the emblazoned paper: ‘It was, this “Fougeire-Jusquiames” . . .’ etc. He gave me a spiteful look. At that moment, the musicians were playing Wiezenleid, a Yiddish lullaby.

  ‘Decidedly, Schlemilovitch, your time here at Fougeire-Jusquiames did not do you much good! The scents of old France have quite turned your head. When is the christening? Planning to be a 100 per cent pureblood Frenchman? I have to put a stop to your ridiculous daydreams. Read the Talmud instead of poring over histories of the Crusades. Stop slavering over the heraldic almanacs . . . Take my word for it, the star of David is worth more than all these “chevrons à sinoples” or “Gules, two lion passants”, or “Azure, three fleurs-de-lis d’or”. You don’t imagine you’re Charles Swann, do you? You’re not planning to apply for membership of the Jockey Club? To join the social whirl of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. You may remember that Charles Swann himself, that idol of duchesses, arbiter of elegance, darling of the Guermantes, remembered his origins when he grew old. If I might be permitted, Schlemilovitch?’

  The vicomte gestured to the violinists to interrupt their playing and, in a stentorian voice, declaimed:

  ‘Perhaps too, in these last days, the physical type that characterises his race was becoming more pronounced in him, at the same time as a sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solid
arity which Swann seemed to have forgotten throughout his life, and which, one after another, his mortal illness, the Dreyfus case and the anti-Semitic propaganda had revived . . .’

  ‘We always return to our own people, Schlemilovitch! Even after long years of straying!’

  In a monotone he recited:

  ‘The Jew is the substance of God; non-Jews are but cattle seed; non-Jews are created to serve Jews. We order that every Jew, three times each day, should curse the Christian peoples and call upon God to exterminate them with their kings and princes. The Jew who rapes or despoils a non-Jewish woman or even kills her must be absolved in justice for he has wronged only a mare.’

  He removed his turban and put on a false, preposterously hooked nose.

  ‘You’ve never seen me play the role of Süss the Jew? Picture it, Schlemilovitch! I have just killed the Marquise, I have drunk her blood like a self-respecting vampire. The blood of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her valiant knights! Now I unfold my vulture’s wings. I grimace. I contort myself. Musicians, please, play your wildest czardas. See my hands, Schlemilovitch! The nails like talons! Louder, musicians, louder! I cast a venomous glance at the Watteau, the Philippe de Champaigne, I will rip up the Savonnerie carpet with my claws! Slash the old master paintings! In a short while, I will run about the château howling in a terrifying manner. I will overturn the crusaders’ suits of armour! When I have sated my rage, I will sell this ancestral home. Preferably to a South American magnate. The king of guano, for example. With the money I shall buy sixty pairs of crocodile-skin moccasins, emerald green alpaca suits, panther-skin coats, ribbed shirts with orange stripes. I shall have thirty mistresses, Yemenites, Ethiopians, Circassians. What do you think, Schlemilovitch? Don’t be afraid, my boy, all this hides a deep sentimental streak.’

  There was a moment of silence. Lévy-Vendôme gestured for me to follow him. Outside on the steps of the château, he whispered.

  ‘Let me be alone, please. Leave immediately. Travel forms the young mind. Go east, Schlemilovitch, go east! A pilgrimage to the source: Vienna, Constantinople, the banks of the Jordan. I am almost tempted to go with you. Leave France as soon as possible! Go! This country has wronged you. You have taken root here. Never forget that we are the international association of fakirs and prophets. Have no fear, you will see me again. I am needed in Constantinople to engineer the gradual halt to the cycle. Gradually the seasons will change, first the spring, then the summer. Astronomers and meteorologists know nothing, take my word for this, Schlemilovitch. I shall disappear from Europe towards the end of the century and go the Himalayas. I will rest. I will reappear here eighty-five years to the day from now, sporting the sidelocks and beard of a rabbi. Goodbye for now. I love you.’

  IV

  Vienna. The last tramways glided into the night. On Mariahilfer Straße, we felt fear overcoming us. A few more steps and we would find ourselves on the Place de la Concorde. Take the métro, count off the reassuring rosary: Tuileries, Palais-Royal, Louvre, Châtelet. Our mother would be waiting for us, Quai Conti. We would drink lime-blossom and mint tisane and watch the shadows cast on the walls of our bedroom by the passing river boats. Never had we loved Paris more, nor France. A winter’s night, a Jewish painter, our cousin, staggering around Montparnasse, muttering as he died ‘Cara, cara Italia’. By chance he had been born in Livorno, he might have been born in Paris, in London, in Warsaw, anywhere. We were born in Boulogne-sur-Seine, Île-de-France. Far from here, Tuileries. Palais-Royal, Châtelet. The exquisite Mme de La Fayette. Choderlos de Laclos. Benjamin Constant, dear old Stendhal. Fate had played us a cruel trick. We would not see our country again. Die on Mariahilfer Straße like stray dogs. No one could protect us. Our mother was dead or mad. We did not know our father’s New York address. Nor that of Maurice Sachs. Or Adrien Debigorre. As for Charles Lévy-Vendôme, there was no point calling on him. Tania Arcisewska was dead because she had taken our advice. Des Essarts was dead. Loïtia was probably slowly becoming accustomed used to far-flung brothels. We made no effort to clasp them to us, these faces that passed through our lives, to cling to them, to love them. Incapable of the slightest act.

  We arrived at the Burggarten and sat on one of the benches. Suddenly we heard the sound of a wooden leg striking the ground. A man was walking towards us, a monstrous cripple . . . His eyes were luminous, his sweeping fringe and his stubby moustache glistened in the darkness. His lips were set in a rictus that made our hearts pound. His left arm, which he extended, tapered to a hook. We had expected to run into him in Vienna. Inevitably. He was wearing the uniform of an Austrian corporal the better to terrify us. He threatened us, bellowing: ‘Sechs Millionen Juden! Sechs Millionen Juden!’ Shrapnel from his booming laugh pierced our chests. He tried to gouge our eyes out with his hook. We ran away. He followed us, shrieking: ‘Sechs Millionen Juden! Sechs Millionen Juden!’ For a long time we ran through the dead city, this drowned city washed up on the shore. Hofburg, Palais Kinsky, Palais Lobkowitz, Palais Pallavicini, Palais Porcia, Palais Wilczek . . . Behind us, in a rasping voice Captain Hook sang ‘Hitlerleute’, thumping the pavement with his wooden leg. It seemed to us we were the only people in the city. After killing us, our enemy would wander these empty streets like a ghost until the end of time.

  The streetlights along the Graben help me see things more clearly. Three American tourists persuade me that Hitler is long since dead. I follow them, trailing a few metres behind. They turn onto Dorotheergasse and go into the nearest café. I take a table at the back. I don’t have a schilling and I tell the waiter I am waiting for someone. With a smile, he brings me a newspaper. I discover that last night, at midnight, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach left Spandau prison in a big black Mercedes. At a press conference in the Hilton Hotel in Berlin, Schirach declared: ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting so long.’ In the photo, he is wearing a turtleneck sweater. Cashmere, probably. Made in Scotland. Gentleman. Former Gauleiter of Vienna. Fifty thousand Jews.

  A young, dark-haired woman, chin resting on her open palm. I wonder what she is doing here, alone, so forlorn among the beer drinkers. Surely she belongs to that race of humans I have chosen above all other: their features are harsh and yet delicate, in their faces you can see their enduring loyalty to grief. Anyone but Raphäel Schlemilovitch would take these anaemics by the hand and beg them to make their peace with life. As for me, those I love, I kill. And so I choose those who are weak, defenceless. To take an example, I killed my mother with grief. She demonstrated exceptional meekness. She would beg me to have my tuberculosis treated. I would gruffly snap: ‘You don’t treat tuberculosis, you nurture it, you cherish it like a dancehall girl.’ My mother would hang her head. Later, Tania asks me to protect her. I hand her a razor blade, a Gillette Extra-Blue. In the end, I anticipated her wishes: she would have been bored living with a fat man. Slyly suicided while he was singing the praises of nature in springtime. As for Des Essarts, my brother, my only friend, was it not I who tampered with the brakes of the car so he could safely shatter his skull?

  The young woman looks at me with astonished eyes. I remember something Lévy-Vendôme said: force an entry into other people’s lives. I take a seat at her table. She gives a faint smile of a melancholy I find ravishing. I immediately decide to trust her. And besides, she is dark. Blond hair, pink complexions, porcelain eyes get on my nerves. Everything that radiates health and happiness turns my stomach. Racist after my fashion. Such prejudices are forgivable in a young consumptive Jew.

  ‘Are you coming?’ she says.

  There is such gentleness in her voice that I resolve to write a beautiful novel and dedicate it to her: ‘Schlemilovitch in the Land of Women.’ In it, I will show how a little Jew seeks refuge among women in moments of distress. Without women, the world would be unbearable. Men are too serious. Too absorbed in their elegant abstractions, their vocations: politics, art, the textile business. They have to respect you before they will help you. Incapable of an unselfish action. Sensible. Dismal. Miserly
. Pretentious. Men would leave me to starve to death.

  We leave the Dorotheergasse. After this point, my memories are hazy. We walk back along the Graben and turn left. We go into a café much larger than the first. I drink, I eat, I recover my health while Hilda – that is her name – gazes at me fondly. Around us, every table is occupied by several woman. Whores. Hilda is a whore. In the person of Raphäel Schlemilovitch, she has just found her pimp. In future, I will call her Marizibill: when Apollinaire wrote about the ‘Jewish pimp, red-haired and ruddy-faced’ he was thinking of me. I own this place: the waiter who brings me my alcools looks like Lévy-Vendôme. German soldiers come to my establishment to console themselves before setting off for the Eastern Front. Heydrich himself sometimes visits. He has a soft spot for Tania, Loïtia and Hilda, my prettiest whores. He feels no revulsion when he straddles Tania, the Jewess. Besides, Heydrich himself is a Mischling. Given his lieutenant’s zeal, Hitler turned a blind eye. I have similarly been spared, Raphäel Schlemilovitch, the biggest pimp of the Third Reich. My girls have been my shield. Thanks to them I will not know Auschwitz. If, by chance, the Gauleiter of Vienna should change his mind about me, in a day Tania, Loïtia and Hilda could collect the money for my ransom. I imagine five hundred thousand Reichsmarks would suffice, given that a Jew is not worth the rope required to hang him. The Gestapo will look the other way and let me disappear to South America. No point dwelling on such things: thanks to Tania, Loïtia and Hilda I have considerable influence over Heydrich. From him, they can get a document countersigned by Himmler certifying that I am an honorary citizen of the Third Reich. The Indispensable Jew. When you have women to protect you, everything falls into place. Since 1935, I have been the lover of Eva Braun. Chancellor Hitler was always leaving her alone at the Berchtesgaden. I immediately begin to think how I might turn this situation to my advantage.