The Petitpaon Era

by Henri Austruy

  Bernard Petitpaon was incapable of obedience to simple verbal attractions, however. He had wanted a grandiose centerpiece to heighten the glamour of the ceremony; that centerpiece he had found in the obelisk. The giant monolith, brother—perhaps elder—to the pyramids, which, in a fit of lyricism, Bonaparte had attributed to gazes forty centuries old in order to contemplate his unripe Grande Armée, had seduced Petitpaon as much by virtue of its so gloriously distant past as its twenty-three meter height. It was the pivot demanded by Bernard Petitpaon about which the entirety of France, in the person of her official and legal representatives, would rotate.

  An extract of the people, the first magistrate of the Republic claimed for the people the right to the best possible view of the elect and the men invested by him with public functions. Putting his principles into action, he had, therefore, ordered the execution of a plan in which imagined the Obelisk serving as an axis for a series of circular steps on which, in protocolary order, the ministers, senators, députés would first take their places, and then the great State bodies, all fully constituted and reciprocally animated by a ferocious jealousy, eager to fill relative to one another the allegedly benevolent role of phagocytes, passionate devourers of their microbial relatives in the cause of the salvation of animal organisms.

  It only remained to endow the symbolic installation with the soul constitutive of modern France. Of that soul, Bernard Petitpaon had penetrated all the arcana in their utmost and tenebrously democratic depths; hoisted to a supreme degree of initiation, he knew that mobility is the very essence of a free government veritably fond of equality and fraternity.

  Without the slightest nuance of irreverence, he translated that by the formula dear to disabused lovers: Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse; and, freighting the Parisian ship with a hint of pessimism, he Latinized: Fluctuat at mergitor, with a smile of serene satisfaction.10 How could that soul be better expressed than by giving movement to the steps occupied by the representatives—varying in status but similarly tyrannical—of inconstant and perfidious universal suffrage, while the places reserved for the functionaries would be as immutable as them?

  In consequence, a kind of conical stage had been constructed around the Obelisk, which it joined at about three meters from its summit. At that level there was a platform that an electric motor could turn in either direction; eleven armchairs destined for the ministers were installed there. The part of the cone fitted with the senatorial seats only rotated in one direction and with a velocity slightly less than half of that which animated the portion curulized by the députés, whose mandate, as everyone knows, lasts four years while in the Upper Assembly the unity of the legislature is nine years, for the security and tranquility of the conscripted fathers, whose status as aged parents does not always prevent them from being big babies.

  “But where will Monsieur le Président sit?” Petitpaon’s first confidant enquired, respectfully.

  “Not on the bitumen or the wooden paving, for sure! The President ought to be highly placed, and he will be: the point of ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’ will be my seat. However, as I don’t deem it indispensable to give my contemporaries the spectacle of a presidential impalement, and, on the other hand, it would be as ridiculous as it would be dangerous to risk possible vertigo, you’ll install a small round pulpit on that porphyry axis, similar to those that preachers employ in churches.”

  “Don’t you fear, Monsieur le Président, that such a device might offend the clergy?” the political intimate objected.

  “Drape it with red—that’ll do the trick!” said Petitpaon, dismissively. “Oh, I forgot the essential symbol. It’s necessary that the people of France see that I’m her servant, the slave of France. You will, therefore, establish immediately beneath me, and consequentially above the ministerial platform, a circular cage—immobile, of course, for it’s destined for the trinity representative of the social synthesis: a priest, a soldier and a representative of finance. Those three men can impart to my pulpit whatever movement of rotation they see fit!”

  The presidential plan was carried out in its most minute details. The platforms had been tested with a load of sandbags twice as heavy as the total weight of the ministers, senators and députés. No accident was therefore to be feared, and each stage obeyed its motor without hesitation.

  The day before the ceremony, Bernard Petitpaon, equipped with a false nose and make-up in order to be utterly unrecognizable, had come to see a rehearsal. He had taken his place in the minuscule elevator that climbed the length of the Obelisk as briskly as possible. Ramses II was so bewildered by the spectacle that, in order to follow the stupefying ascension of the President of the French Republic, he forgot his homage to the god of Thebes.

  From seven o’clock in the morning onwards, the expeditionary corps occupied the broad avenues opening on to the Place de l’Étoile. Before coming to stand with his staff under the vault of the Arc de Triomphe, where the landau of the dead and the brake of the wounded were waiting, as well as a horseman clad in an ample gray cloak who was none other than the fractionally defunct Alexandre Sylphe, General Marquis de Foiraubilles reviewed the troops placed under his command.

  At ten o’clock, the first official carriages arrived in the Place de la Concorde, disembarking their picturesque contents: togas in garish colors, variegated uniforms, complicated accoutrements doubtless imagined in the joyous days of yore by court jesters and now gravely worn by all the administrative employees of various social causes prospering or vegetating in the world under the titles of empires, monarchies or republics.

  In Paris more than anywhere else, a simultaneous influx of men, women and children to any point at the city merits the name of a crowd. A crowd, in fact, is not an indeterminate number of curiosity-seekers attracted toward a common goal; it is not a swarming populace running toward some ephemeral gratuity of bread and circuses; it is a gathering of human beings, rich or poor, of all ages and all conditions rubbing shoulders, at whim or hazard, without embarrassment or shame. A crowd sees, hears and thinks—which is to say that it is conscious. Certainly, like all seas, it has its tempests, which seem inexplicable; sometimes, terrible deep waves, whose sources escape observers at the surface, raise it up in titanic convulsions; but calm does not take long to be reborn, and all the heads soon reappear above the foam of the waves.

  On this occasion, it was a matter of acclaiming the colors of France.

  The Parisian crowd, augmented by an invasion of provincials and foreigners—moths attracted by the radiance of the City of Light—blocked the Champs-Élysées and the neighboring streets. Triple and quadruple cordons of troops and police hemmed in that buzzing multitude, pierced here and there by the shrill cries of women succumbing to sexual promiscuities.

  Ministers, senators and députés installed themselves in accordance with protocol on the mobile steps above the great State bodies massed in a fan around the Obelisk on benches riveted to the ground.

  Several hundred cannon shots announced that Bernard Petitpaon was leaving his house in the Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. In the eddies of the heavy surge of the cuirassiers of his escort, the presidential landau was perceived—or, rather, divined—by the thousands of eyes aimed at the gaping void of the roadway.

  A few minutes later, a tricolor flag fluttered at the top of the Obelisk, over the red barrel from which protruded a black torso with a white shirt-front, surmounted by an ebony-haired head.

  An immense acclamation greeted Bernard Petitpaon, who looked, in his French costume, like a magpie perching on the rim of its nest.

  From the Concorde to the Étoile a continuous hedge of bugles sounded the rallying call.

  On his chestnut thoroughbred, Captain Alexandre Sylphe, provisionally defunct for a fraction of his person, civilian as well as military, emerged from the immense arch raised to the glory of victorious French armies. His rank as an officer entitled him to the honor of appearing on horseback in front of the uncovered landau carrying the zouave and the brigadier
of dragoons, the rest of his uniform as well as the body of his mount disappearing under the gray dust-cover that he could not take off in public without violating the treaties.

  A large artillery brake followed, carrying the ten invalids, all in uniform, each having covered in white cloth the part of his person theoretically damaged on the African battlefield.

  Next came the army. Preceding a classic staff, brilliantly composed, General Marquis de Foiraubilles, his bicorn hat decked with an impeccable ostrich feather, was astride a spirited but docile charger with a snowy mane and flanks.

  Enthusiasm fraternized with delirium. To avoid the most timid false note capable of wounding, as in Marseilles, the harmony of the day, the authorities had imprisoned, for a lapse of time too short for it to be considered an infringement of individual liberty, the relatives and friends of the six thousand unfortunates whom disease and accidents had transported from the banks of the Niger to those of the Styx.

  From all sides, crowns of laurels were thrown at the victorious general; a few fell under the feet of his horse, which sketched elegant avoiding steps, as if to excuse the impassivity of his master, eager to protect Republican susceptibilities obsessed by the specter of Caesar.

  The cortege descended the Champs-Élysées and arrived at the border of the corridor leading to the space preserved between the base of the moving steps and the compact ranks of functionaries.

  An immense clamor resounded. Bernard Petitpaon detached the tricolor flag fluttering above his head and waved it frantically, more than half of his body leaning out of his aerial pulpit. The ministers, who were rotating on their platform at top speed, heard him demand the Marseillaise several times over. The order to attack Rouget de l’Isle’s work was given by General Croppeton, and, via the intermediary of several hundred parliamentary throats, reached the leader of the military bands massed between the members of the Institut and those of the Court of Cassation.

  All a-quiver, with his brazen voice, which rendered the patriotic emotion gripping him even more vibrant, President Petitpaon intoned the famous hymn.

  At a signal from General Foiraubilles, the wounded put their hands to their temples militarily, and the dead, including Captain Sylphe, made a gesture in the direction of the President of the Republic which signified that those who had just died for France were saluting him.

  The senators and députés accomplished their rotations at their respective constitutional speeds, and when, among the crowd, a few groups recognized one of their chiefs in passing, there were cries of joy, renewed at each revolution.

  Doubtless by virtue of timidity, the trio figuring, between the ministerial platform and the Executive tribune, the essential substratum of every social estate had not yet imparted the slightest movement to the presidential barrel. The priest, the soldier and the financier in the green-and-gold livery of the Maison Coffre, were mutually convincing one another of the value of their rights, and demonstrating to one another the absolute necessity of showing France that her Representative was nothing but a puerile plaything in their hands, at their entire discretion.

  Their combined hands began to cause Bernard Petitpaon’s station to rotate, and all three of them took a malign pleasure in abruptly stopping the barrel in its gyratory movement in order to launch it in the inverse direction—and the crowd applauded every time. Petitpaon, glued by centrifugal force to the rim of his pulpit, defended himself heroically against seasickness.

  Infantrymen, artillerymen, cavalrymen and other services in full dress uniform—the entire army—filed around the Obelisk in order to reach the Jardin des Tuileries, where sumptuously-laid tables awaited them under gigantic tents.

  On that day of rejoicing, the Government of the Republic could not forget those who had endured the same sufferings as its children, and run the same dangers; the horses and mules found hundreds of baskets filled with first-rate hay for their consumption. A dog of war, which had not quit the commanding general, any more than his shadow, for the entire duration of the expedition, took a place under the table of honor, and even gave Bernard Petitpaon a great fright by coming to sniff the presidential legs, stretched out opposite those of the Marquis de Foiraubilles, at overly close range.

  As in any self-respecting banquet, a great deal was eaten and even more was drunk. There were allocutions and speeches, and so many toasts were drunk to the presidential health, that even by granting each of them an effect of a few minutes, Bernard Petitpaon would have remained free of the slightest illness until his dying day.

  The official personages withdrew in order to leave the martial joy to manifest itself without restraint. Drunkenness did not take long to overtake the majority of the guests. Outside, women gathered along the railings, attracted by an obscure force toward the soldiers. The latter, under the complicit eyes of their leaders, opened the gates; cries of hysterical fright resounded. Brutally seized by the soldiers in rut, of whom they were afraid as well as desirous, the women pleaded and howled, convulsively hugged to the breasts of men who carried them away at a crazy pace until the common collapse on to a bench, a table, a heap of straw, where an embrace left the couples momentarily inanimate.

  With nightfall, the orgy took on the proportions of an antique bacchanal, It was Paris entire that was taking part in the celebration, in an unleashing of carnal madness and lust, amid the multicolored blaze of illuminations.

  IV

  In France, as elsewhere, one easily puts off serious matters until tomorrow, and when they assume the rank and title of public affairs, they are ordinarily postponed until a date that is purely and simply ulterior.

  Thus, the Chambres did not resume their work until five days after the closure of the festivities.

  The case of Captain Sylphe presented itself, threatening internal and external complications.

  Two theses were put forward. The first, adopted by the military party and patriots conscious of the power of France, held that the young and brilliant officer was well and truly alive, the reason being that he preserved more than half his person intact. The second, defended by universal diplomacy and by French intellectuals committed by the letter of the treaty, was obstinate in making Alexandre Sylphe a definitive cadaver, alleging that a man deprived of two thousand two hundred and twenty-two ten-thousandths of his person—not to take the recurrence of the fraction any further—could not claim present existence, in that the partial substance held sway over the rest.

  Personally, Captain Sylphe was quite indecisive and would have been placed in a cruel embarrassment if made responsible to taking the decision himself.

  If he were declared dead, his brother, the sole close relative that remained to him, would become the definitive title-holder of the general treasury that the Government had granted him; deducting in advance half of what it produced, that was an income of twenty thousand francs for him, which, along with the heart of Madame Coffre and the little sweeteners afferent therefrom, might suffice amply for a man’s happiness.

  Reintegrated into the ranks of the living, he would, for matters of war, immediately be promoted to the rank of squadron-leader; he would marry Mademoiselle Hermine de Foiraubilles, for whom he was burning with a lukewarm conjugal flame, but whose hand would enable him to rise to the highest summits of the military hierarchy.

  Those two alternatives rendered him as perplexed as Buridan’s ass, immobilized, as everyone knows, by the equal attraction of two identical bales of hay—and if, aloud, he proclaimed his ardent desire to have General Foiraubilles for a father-in-law, he also confided to Madame Coffre his secret thirst to remain entirely hers.

  Even when their hearts are not excited, all women like to hear about the passion they inspire, so Madame Coffre was delighted by the sighs of Captain Sylphe.

  With her twenty years glorified by a perfect beauty, Emma Pulcelette, born of honorable but almost poor parents, had, in the course of an official soirée, made the conquest of the rich banker Hermann Coffre. The man in question, who could no longer count
his millions, and whose fortune was linked to that of France, had passed forty without pausing in the presence of a woman for longer than the time necessary to extract from his wallet the talisman that opened the most virtuous doors to him, which he closed again immediately with the same discreet and rapid gesture. The encounter with the young woman had been a revelation to him, the hatching in his being of something he had never experienced. With all the precautions, delicacies and anguishes of a vulgar amorous individual, in the eyes of a family too dazzled to manifest any sentiment whatsoever, before God and men, he had taken Emma Pulcelette for his wife.

  Wise demoiselles do not estimate gold as a chimera devoid of attraction; the enormous ingot of precious metal that Monsieur Coffre represented had produced on young Emma an effect analogous to that of Jupiter descending upon Danae in a cataract of nuggets. At first, the poor girl lost her senses therein; then, gradually, as her eyes became accustomed to the glare of wealth, she had perceived vague shadows in the picture of her happiness.

  She wondered whether he was really a husband, that man who, after having himself announced, came into her bedroom with his hands full of flowers and jewelry, stammering excuses and returning swiftly to his business affairs. Was there, in consequence, something of which she was deprived and to which she had a right?

  Adulated both for her beauty and her fortune, she incessantly trailed after her an inexhaustible procession of courtiers; the homages she received were those of a queen; she required a king. She selected an actor whom poets and dramaturges sought out in order to secure the triumph of love in the theater, as the target of various terrestrial and metaphysical relativities.