Homo-Deus

by Félicien Champsaur

  “Yes,” Antoine hastened to say.

  “And you, Maman, do you consent to take for your husband Monsieur Antoine Aubert?”

  “That requires reflection,” said the seductive widow, laughing.

  The sentiments of a widower in the process of wanting to marry again were there on the evening when Josette Coutan reminded her husband’s associate, her paternal lover, of his lack of urgency in soliciting kisses.

  III. An Adorable Octopus

  Meanwhile, Josette returned by automobile to the conjugal domicile. She was thinking and calculating, in her minuscule head framed with black hair, cut short over the nape, which covered her forehead and descended flatly to either side, advancing over each cheek with an enticing curl, while blowing out large opaline puffs of smoke, tomboyishly, from an Egyptian cigarette.

  Four million! Four million! That’s surely better than continuing this stupid life. When I think about all the fuss I had to make this year in order to go to Deauville with the Marchands, those show-offs and braggarts, ready for anything, who probably only have a hundred thousand francs to their name and spend twice that per year by running a bluff that brings in big rewards! My husband isn’t stupid; with four million, he could roll them all over. But I need to convince him. And then, Antoine might change his mind. What a softy with his workers! Instead to making them use my method of a big stick…Aubert’s got the wind up, that’s obvious. All the more reason to let go... Four million! Oh, with that I could make them dance…and then again, I’ve had my fill of Antoine. Less amusing than a telegraph pole, he’s getting old…I’ve noticed that several times... As for his son Etienne, oh, I was forgetting him. He keeps me waiting, but attacks hard, him, solid as a post…and then, I’ll always have, via him, a hand in the house. Oh, Père Antoine, if you’re playing the pig with me, you’ll pay me for it...

  She broke into song: “Etienne, Etienne, Prends le mien! Rendre la tienne!”

  Four million! Twenty seven years old and good teeth! It’ll be a laugh…provided that my husband doesn’t resist! Go on—has he ever wanted anything other than to give me pleasure? And then, he’ll work; it’s necessary that he work, otherwise, I’d always be on the go or on my…Froutt! Get a move on, old man, it’s your age and your sex. Do Business, with a capital B, big Business! It’s in schemes, slippery operations of luxury and bluff that one fishes up millions as easily as lobsters... Four million! Four million! Four million! A big blowout!

  They lived in the Rue Mozart, in a kind of town house with three tenants.

  On the ground floor was Georges Moudy, the author of a volume of blank, amorphous and colorless verses, Silences, and a surrealist novel, La Lueur du Diable, winner of the Prix Goncourt. After those two births, he was resting, like God after having created the world, on the laurels that were heaped upon him in the newspapers and magazines by columnists, critics and other runts of letters. Prematurely balding, meticulously clean-shaven and thin, he had an annual income of thirty thousand francs, which, in these times of inflation and the high cost of living, permitted him to live modestly and pay at the Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse for the consumption of his incense-bearers and to let himself be tapped for a fifty-franc note for every printed eulogy.

  On the first floor lived Comtesse du Rouvre de Molkoët, born Anaïs Roupiot. After having been a sub-Prefect in Brittany, his province, her husband had recently died as a senior administrator at the Ministry of Public Education and Religion. Her legs open all her life, having been able to underpin her gallant adventures with the fortune and salary of the functionary, at sixty-nine she had pretentions to fresh flesh and subsidized a young actress at the Odéon. A Voltairean and revolutionary, she allowed it to be seen occasionally, but she remained alert, tidy and well-made, youthful in her mannerisms but full of nobility.

  The second floor was the Coutans’. Sixte, a man of taste, had furnished it in the modernist style, with a flair for harmony and comfort: an ensemble of bright tones, agreeable to behold, in a spectrum sympathizing with Josette’s beauty, of which she took full advantage.

  The entrance to the small building did not permit the introduction of an automobile. The car was kept in a garage nearby.

  Josette Coutan found her husband sunk in a vast and comfortable English armchair. He was reading Le Temps and yawning over an article by Paul Souday.38 Getting up and coming to meet his wife, he said: “There you are, Jo. Finally! I was beginning to get worried. The wild beasts of the factory haven’t devoured you?”

  “You know that I’m a good lion-tamer. All the same, another time, you can run your own errands. It’s noxious, that odor of a mixture of oil and soap. I still feel like retching.”

  “And Antoine?”

  “He was in conference with Lafon. Nothing to be done—he’s making a deal with him. It’ll be necessary to give in…unless...”

  “Unless what?”

  “You know, my darling, this scrap iron is too dirty; it smells too bad.”

  “But I never set foot in the workshops.”

  “That’s not the point, my dear. You’re too elegant, too fine and delicate, the object of my adoration, so active and rapid in your intelligence, to live in that environment. The Comtesse du Rouvre de Moëlkoët, who I met the other day in a dance hall where she was giving tea to her lovely protégée, said to me: ‘Your husband’s aristocratic face clashes with his factory in Grenelle.’”

  “Do I really have the honor of pleasing that old camel?”

  “The old camel has good connections. That might be useful. But that’s not the point. I think the role of factory owner—half-owner—is beneath you.”

  “I’d certainly rather be a Minister. It doesn’t last as long, but it pays much better.”

  “Why not? Later…who knows?”

  While talking, she had taken off her dainty hat and coat, and sat down on her husband’s knee, seductively.

  “My darling, you ought to give up the scrap iron and do business. It would be more in your line, and you’d earn far more. Look at the Bidards, the Marchands and even Toto—you can see they have plenty of free time, seem never to have any worries, and yet they make a lot of money along the way.”

  “The Bidards yes—not Toto, who’s always broke.”

  “Because he hasn’t got the initial funds—but you, with your cash?”

  “I’ve invested in a factory. It’s necessary to carry on.”

  “But what if Aubert wanted to dissolve the partnership?”

  “That would be different—in fact, I’d like to do something else.”

  “Aubert’s offering us four million for our share. Are we going to accept it?”

  Nestling against her husband, with her two rosy buttocks, of whose charm she was very well aware, in the hollow of her husband’s lap, exteriorizing the fluid of her sex, interiorizing the awakening and the frisson of the male, she captured him, winding her bare arms around him To an observer entering without being perceived, some invisible satyr penetrating on a whim without betraying his presence, she would have been reminiscent of an adorable octopus.

  We retain in our bodies a little of all the animals of which we are the most perfect mixture and result—our nose, for example, is a bird’s beak. Don’t some individuals evoke a wolf or a jackal, Clemenceau a tiger, others a dog, a beast of burden or a lion?

  Josette, like any pretty woman, awoke the idea of a voracious octopus, the attractive chasm of which is hidden in the center, served by the snare of the navel, the forward bastions of the breast and those of the rear; for tentacles, the bewitching arms and the magical legs. The octopus has only one orifice, and the woman has three. The octopus is horrible with its suckers, which such the blood and the life out of you; Eve is molded of lilies and roses, of ideal flesh. Adam, enchanted, always goes toward her, toward amour, ruination and sometimes death, captured by the smile and the snares of the eternal seductress.

  Josette, on Sixte’s knees, as if naked beneath her short, light dress, her hairy and perfu
med flower hidden between her Tanagrean thighs, drawing desire magnetically toward it, with one arm around her husband’s shoulder and the other hand caressing his cheek, advanced an amorous mouth toward her husband’s, momentarily calm and indifferent: Sangsue and Delilah.39

  The adorable octopus repeated: “Aubert’s offering us four million for our share. Tell me, big man, are we going to take it?”

  Tranquilly, Sixte Coutan replied: “It’s eight o’clock, my dear. I’m hungry.”

  “Me, too—but I thought you’d invited Toto.”

  “We can’t wait for him indefinitely. To the table, Josette! We’ll talk about the four million later.”

  They went into the dining room. Standing up, the valet waited to read out the menu. He made the newspaper disappear immediately.

  “Serve, René,” said Josette. “If Monsieur Thomas Keysar comes, he’ll catch up.”

  The door opened. Two young men came in, both with red ribbons in their buttonholes.

  “One setting more!” cried Thomas Keysar, joyfully. “I met Etienne and I’ve brought him along. I’ve got a box at the Casino de Paris. We’ll go after dinner, all right?”

  The belated guest was a fellow of medium height and impressive physique, Thomas Keysar. Very well-versed in the practices of occultism, graphology and palm-reading, he had written a small book, pillaging ideas that were not new, but skillful pastiches of Péladan, Stanislas de Guaita and others. His visage served him well in those occult practices: a Mephistophelean mask illuminated by magnificent yellow eyes—at the Café de la Rotonde he was known as the golden-eyed Caesar. A juvenile tone occasionally contradicted his infernal laughter.

  He was correctly dressed, his shoes always polished, his linen impeccable, but an artful eye would have been able to discern in the detail of his costume the artifice inspired by penury. He had slipped into a daily paper as a literary critic, and that gave him a platform, an alibi and the prestige of a façade, the appearance of making his living with his pen, when he was nothing but the envoy of the books that he resold.

  A dozen satirical portraits of ancient celebrities in an ephemeral periodical, the Canard Sans Nom, had made him briefly fashionable in a vague microcosm of arts and letters. It was entitled Les Morts de Demain. Almost everyone, beginning with Hercules, who had not accomplished his famous labors, Homer, who had never written the epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Shakespeare, who acted in and appropriated Bacon’s or Rutland’s dramas, had stolen their fame, having merely signed the works of genius bought from poor devils for a few sous. Others had made their way by marrying rich courtesans.

  It was unproductive blackmail. For artists, everything is advertising. Poets are only known and slightly esteemed because they are thought to be pederasts. All that blackening of character, Bohemian life and ink composed for Thomas Keysar a shady notoriety, and earned him, along with the books sent by editors and sold on for twenty sous apiece, the dedications erased or the page torn out, to a local second-hand book dealer, or the occasional box at the theater or the cinema.

  That effortful existence was nothing but a continual seesaw between embarrassment and strokes of luck, blackmail or publicity. There were dupes, too, on occasion: a superstitious or weak-minded woman on whom he cast a spell and exploited to the best of his ability, and the profits of chiromancy.

  That was only slightly the case with the Coutans, however; Thomas Keysar, very cheerful and lively, in addition to his magic tracks, pleased Sixte and Josette, who treated him as a friend. He did not take too much advantage of them, knowing how to remain moderate, and, no matter how much difficulty he was in, he never borrowed more than a paper louis from Coutan. He thus avoided the appearance of a social parasite. Furthermore, the fellow was one of the eight hundred Chevaliers de la Légion d’honneur.

  His companion, invited by a fluke, was Etienne Aubert—yes, the son of the factory owner, who, naturally, by virtue of that fact, experienced no embarrassment in the home of his father’s associate. And Josette was their mistress.

  Tall and strong, Etienne had something hard and brutal in the expression in his gray eyes that contrasted with his father’s, which were sympathetic and benevolent. He had acquired authoritarian habits in the war and in the Air Force, and an absolute disregard for social conventions.

  “We have a hare sent by Bidard today,” said Josette

  “I knew that,” said Thomas Keysar. “He’s been hunting in the Poitou, and the bag was so heavy that the guests carried away fifty kilos of venison each. There hasn’t been a shoot at Sauvageac for eight years and the game is pullulating.”

  “That reminds me of a night in the trenches,” Etienne said. “I believe it was...”

  “You’ve already told us that one. You mistook rabbits for the enemy and ordered blanket fire; all your barbed wire was cut up by bullets.”

  “That’s right,” said Etienne, ill-humoredly. “But why cut me off in order to appropriate it?”

  “Your heroic actions? To replace mine?”

  “That’s true,” said Josette. What did you do in the war, Toto? You never talk about it.”

  “For good reason. There’s nothing bellicose about me, you see, and I didn’t have the slightest motive to hate anyone foreign, so there was nothing to tell me to get myself stupidly killed for reasons far beyond my comprehension. My thinness and pale complexion served me well. I played the invalid and avoided the abattoir until 1917. Then it was necessary to march—but not far. I employed influences so well that I was dismissed definitively as unfit.”

  “You ought to say dishonest,” snorted Etienne.

  “If you wish. I have no vanity.”

  Coutan and Aubert looked at one another.

  They remembered the suffering they had endured, and those former heroes by obligation could not help admiring, disdainfully, the man who had found the means to escape it.

  “I couldn’t do that,” said Etienne, swelling his chest, “with an athletic torso like mine.”

  “And Sixte’s.” said Josette proudly. “It’s agreeable all the same not to be a shirker.”

  “Oh well,” sniggered Keysar. “I’ve failed often enough since.”

  “By the way, Etienne,” said Coutan, to change the subject, which had acquired a certain chill, “Have you heard your dear father talking about wanting to break our partnership?”

  “Oh, that’s what it’s about? For some time, the Old Man’s had a funny look. I wondered what he was ruminating.”

  “Yes,” said Coutan. “He wants to give the workers a share of the profits, and there’s also Lafon’s invention. I think all that’s idiotic.”

  “If I were running things,” Etienne said, clenching his fists, “If I were the boss, the workers would be tamed. Those swine were earning enormous wages while we, the combatants, were risking our lives at every minute. I’d teach them to take an interest in the profits.”

  “So, to avoid falling out and quarreling,” Coutan went on, “I’ll gladly agree to take out my share. And after that, I’ll do business.”

  “There, at least, you’ll have elbow room, my dear,” said Josette. “What about you, Etienne, do you like the life of a factory owner?”

  “Yes,” said the young man, dryly. “I love the factory. I have the temperament of a leader of men—but softness, oh no! Look out! as the poilus used to say, and if the workers go on strike, bring out the machine guns...”

  “Bravo, Etienne!” said Josette, blowing him a kiss. “I like masterful men.”

  “Unfortunately,” sighed Thomas Keysar, insidiously, “Etienne isn’t the master, and his father’s still young, as stout as an oak. You aren’t anywhere near to being the master at the Quai de Javel. Give me your hand, Etienne, and I’ll read your future.”

  “Go to the Devil with your foolery” he retorted—although his l had a suggestion of a c about it.

  “You’re wrong, Etienne,” said Josette gravely. “In that regard, Toto’s a marvel.”

  “Yes, I know: he�
�ll tell me: Macbeth, you shall be king. When, though? In forty years?”

  “For my part,” said Coutan, who believed that he was making a decision that his wife had actually suggested to him, “I’ll go to tomorrow to have things out with your father, and if he persists in his ideas. I’ll take out my share: four million.”

  “Four million!” repeated Thomas Keysar—and a wild gleam lit up his golden eyes. “Zut! Four million. That’s also your father’s share, Etienne.”

  “Yes, plus the factory and the machinery.”

  Thomas Keysar, the magician, leaned toward the young man’s ear. “Etienne Macbeth, it’s necessary to want it.”

  “Well,” said Coutan, “it’s necessary to get a move on if we’re going to the Casino de Paris. The show is idiotic, it’s said, but in the splendid décor there are a hundred naked women...”

  “Completely,” concluded Keysar. “Apart from little cache-sexes of roses or feathers, which, according to the dances and the poses, expose a few of the hairs of all those nests of pleasure.”

  “Nude or lewd, we’re on our way,” said Josette, laughing.

  IV. The Brain of Montparnasse and the World

  On emerging from the Casino de Paris, the quartet—Coutan and his wife, Etienne Aubert and Thomas Keysar—consulted one another. Where should they finish off the evening? Josette, excited even more than the males by all the feminine nudes, wanted to continue the party.

  “I’d like nothing better,” said Etienne. “Montmartre’s run out of imagination somewhat—always the same songs and the same singers. Anyway, it’s midnight; there’s no longer anything but cellars and dives where one can be bored to death with champagne at a hundred francs a bottle and ten francs for roasted nuts.

  “Well, the time has come,” said Sixte. “Toto’s always boasting about his Rotonde. Show it to us, my dear Keysar.”

  They piled into the Coutans’ auto, bound for Montparno.