In the same way that certain quarters seem reserved for certain industries, there are certain points in the brain of Paris where the spirituality of the capital seem to be concentrated. In 1923, that was still Montparnasse. The mind of Paris has evolved, along with its morality and everything else; it has amalgamated, among so many brutalities and so much foreign intelligence that it has become global without progressing.
Where are the snows of yesteryear, the mind that reigned in 1880 from the faubourg Montmarte to the Opéra, the brilliant epoch of Aurélian Scholl, the Tortoni, Le Brébant, the Café Anglais and the Maison Dorée? The “brain of the world” moved to the Butte, by courtesy of Rodolphe Salis, to Montmartre, to the theater and cabaret of the Chat Noir, to the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, into the lofty studios perched in the wilderness, and on the far side of the butte, into a den with the appearance of a little country chapel, the Lapin Agile—because of its sign, painted by the caricaturist André Gill…but time effaces all glories.
Today, the Mind of Paris has no domicile, sparse premises, undiscoverable apartments, always running in the streets, tracked by boors. For want of a dwelling worthy of it, there are still a few talking-shops where tongue-lashings are handed out, to give the illusion of wit. One of those evil artistic and literary spots, the most fashionable—until when?—is the Café de la Rotonde, at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail.
It did not have for its founder an ironist like Salis, the charlatan of the Chat Noir, but a worthy kind of liquor merchant, debonair and benevolent. Libion, without the truculent verve of the Montmartrean cabaretier, welcoming and obliging, had the skill to retain a few gangs of young men pregnant with novelties. Before 1912 Lenin and Trotsky often dreamed sitting at its tables, editing some minuscule Bolshevik newspaper there, which they printed themselves on cigarette paper and sent to Russia inside plaster casts of Tsar Nicholas II, in order to set fire to the old edifice. And they did it. The painters who were regulars at the establishment exhibited ludicrous canvases at the Rotonde. If Libion had had any inkling of the future fashionability of decadent daubs, the imbecile would have made a fortune.40
During the Great War, the Rotonde was a refuge for the cosmopolitan youth who came to France to study arts, letters or the law. There were police raids on suspicion of espionage, and poor old Libion was obliged on several occasions to see his establishment closed by order, and almost always, in addition, labored under the threat of consignment to the army. Since then, the Rotonde, considerably enlarged, has become primarily a restaurant and dance hall. In expectation of the vogue moving elsewhere, the clientele has already changed. Some have emigrated to the Café du Dôme opposite, others to the Café de Parnasse.
In the car, the quartet talked about the show they had just seen, the plastic and decorative revue, and Thomas Keysar said that one could still pick flowers from living gardens in the corners of the Folies-Bergères, the Casino de Paris and the Moulin Rouge: supine young women with their legs in the air, the stems of whose blossoms were plunged into two natural vases; original bouquets for the buttonhole or the corsage. There was loud laughter in the auto.
When the Coutans, Etienne Aubert and Thomas Keysar went into the café, the Rotonde was packed on the ground floor and the first, the booths and the dance floor alike. They went back down and found seats with great difficulty. There were extraordinary Japanese faces there, with hooded eyes, the savage masks of Sioux Indians, Malays, Egyptians and Russians, specimens of the humanity of all lands, the most picturesque types and the most emphatic.
Thomas Keysar called out to a pretty negress: “You’re still here, so late, Aïcha?”41
“I’m waiting for Rinaldo. He owes me for fifteen posing sessions, and promised to have the money for me this evening.”
“If you pose as a rabbit,” Etienne put in, “would you like me to go home with you, on payment of the fee?”
“Is this Monsieur a friend of yours, Thomas? Doubtless he doesn’t know who he’s talking to. Inform him, if you please.”
Keysar leaned toward Aubert. “A gaffe, my dear. Aïcha’s not what you think. A model only, and a virgin.”
“That’s a joke!” said the young decorated boor, brutally, while Josette Coutan laughed at his setback. “If it’s necessary to be a painter to see her pubic hair, as frizzy as hard wool, I can do as well as that.” His gesture designated the canvases stuck on the walls, from the wainscot to the ceiling.
“I don’t doubt it. Did you know that someone exhibited here a picture splattered by a donkey’s tail?”
Josette cackled joyfully with affectation, in order to attract attention to herself, thinking that Etienne was neglecting her.
“By a donkey? And did it sell?”
“For a lot of money, my dear. It was signed Cézanne.”
“The Master!” cried a voice. Some people stood up, greeting the new arrival. The individual in question, full of conceit, clad in an artist’s smock that was brand new, and yet speckled with patches of every possible shade of blue and splashes of blood red, advanced negligently between the tables and shook the hands extended toward him. He stopped in front of the pretty negress.
“Are you waiting for Rinaldo, my beauty?” he said. “Don’t waste your time here. He’s not coming. I took him to Saint-Anne this afternoon.”42
“He’s mad,” said the young negress. “That doesn’t astonish me. He painted me with green hair and orange breasts.”
“That’s not a reason,” Picasso said. “I’ve done you with a green Veronese cat, but I’m not mad.”
“Perhaps,” she said, showing her exceedingly white teeth in her brown mouth, “but you drive others mad.”
Laughing like a gong, Picasso said: “So what? If no one can overtake me, it’s stupid to follow me.”
“Indeed!” cried Someone—at least, he had the attitude of being Someone—of about sixty: Guilleret, a member of the Institut, insulting the celebrated cubist. “What do you hope to get out of your challenges to common sense, Art and Beauty?”
“First of all, common sense has nothing to do with Art, and we’ve seen too much of Beauty. I want to rehabilitate ugliness. And if I made beauty, I’d die of starvation like you.”
“I’m not dying of starvation—that’s obvious from my appearance. There are still art-lovers whose heads retain intelligence, fortunately. If you wanted to, Picasso, you could be a great painter. Why depict horrors? Because you find people madder than you are to buy them, avid to run after innovators. Look what’s happened to your pupil Rinaldo. Never mind, let your conscience rest. Sit down here, old man, and let’s chat.”
“My conscience, old fellow—for you’re the old man—is a mad cow. If I leave her tranquil, she lets my painting alone. When Cubism has had it day, I’ll invent Conism. In art, as in amour, the cone comes after the cube.”43
“Bravo!” cried one of Guilleret’s and Picasso’s neighbors. “Keep up to date. Enough of the old game, Guilleret. Novelty, even idiotic! We’ve had enough of style, nature, beauty and women. We’ve had a bellyful of old masters.”
“Yes,” said the eccentric genius Picasso to Guilleret, laughing, not even sparing his partisans. “That’s obvious from the old queer’s backside.”
“Down with the old!” cried another. “They’re cluttering up the world. It’s not enough to have kissed our chicks during the war—they don’t have the decency to make way for us now, we who did the fighting in the meantime. It’s the turn of those who saved the world, but the old men are still running it. They’re the dirty swine who wanted the war, in order to get rid of the young men. We need the government of youth. We need to kill the old, to enjoy—not in our turn, but right away.”
“He’s right, you know,” whispered Thomas Keysar in Etienne Aubert’s ear, who shuddered.
The other went on: “After thirty, the mind and the body diminish more than they’re augmented, and retreat more than they advance. The old occupy all the elevated situations, all th
e superior posts, all the highest stages, and youth, which wants enjoyment after having suffered in the trenches and the sky, remains an immense unemployed force.
“On all sides, the old contains us, dominates us and cuts our throats. Cambronne, get down from your horse, you old fraud, to say the word.44 Already, one ace, Paul Raynal, in a sublime piece, Le Tombeau sous l’arc de Triomphe,45 has put a father on his knees before his son, who has come home on leave from the front—yes, on his knees—to beg his pardon. Young people can’t always regard their parents, stupidly, as demigods, as they did when they were small, or with the gaze of a dog looking at its master. The war and the victory have emancipated us; we’ve grown up. We are the masters of the war! Us!”
“Death to the old!” howled Keysar, standing up. “To suppress them, quietly, let’s put a glacial silence around the old, the night and the tomb in advance. It’s up to us, friends, to use the intense advertisement, the you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours, untiringly, of all the newspapers and all the magazines that we’ve invaded, as a swarm of ants falls upon a rich treasure. Unlimited publicity for us, the claps on the back of all the comrades for all. It’s necessary to bring down the gerontocracy, to annihilate it, to destroy it. We’ve won the right to live, to live well, and to enjoy all that we’ve protected for five years with our breasts. It’s necessary that the old don’t get in our way, eating, breathing, living and fucking away our right to happiness, to wealth, to love—our right to everything.”
“No more!” said Guilleret, the member of the Institut, getting up in his turn, brave and alert, his white moustache twitching.
Another group had just come in: the Painter of the Sun, Fabio Canti,46 and another man, accompanied by a very pretty girl.
“They bore us, the old! Down with Guilleret!” howled twenty voices. “What’s he coming here for, the immortal? Under the cupola! Into his cellar! Hang him! Throw him out! Out the door!”
Guilleret stood his ground in mettlesome fashion. “You want to throw me out! You know how to bark, but that’s all.”
“Calm down. Messieurs, calm down!” said two waiters, intervening. “What can we get you?”
“Reason and beauty!” cried Fabio Canti, on the threshold of the big room, raising his right arm like a Prophet
“Fabio Canti!” shouted Guilleret. “Fabio Canti! You’ve arrived in a timely fashion, my dear. At least there’ll be two of us to stand up to these lunatics.”
“We’ll be three!” That was Picasso, surging forth in his turn, radiant in his multicolored smock, like some Olympian Jupiter come to calm the storm—and it calmed.
“Damnation!” said Etienne Aubert. “There’s one who could replace the negress advantageously. What an adorable face, with her long black tresses! The face of a Madonna!”
“Etienne’s decidedly amorous this evening. There’s nothing extraordinary about that woman except that she’s behind the times. She’s a Botticelli. In any case, my dear, you could dissimulate your desires a little more when you’re in society.”
“Bah!” said the husband. “Pardon me, Josette, but Etienne has no need to be reticent with us. He’s a bachelor. It’s quite natural at his age.”
“He’s a boor,” said Josette, dryly.
“I’m giving my opinion,” replied Etienne, shrugging his shoulders.
The truth is that the hundred naked women at the Casino de Paris had excited him considerably, and he had drunk a little too much.
Meanwhile, peace having been reestablished, Picasso shook hands with Fabio Canti and Guilleret, and the man to whom he had just been introduced—“Monsieur Raynaud, the Commissaire de Police of the Grenelle quarter”—bowed to the pretty lady with the Botticelliesque hair, to whom he had also just been introduced—“Madame Jousselin”—ceded his place at the table to her, and went away triumphantly.
While a waiter hastened to ask the newcomers what they wanted to drink, the smiling Madame Jousselin said to Guilleret and Fabio Canti: “Messieurs Righters of Wrongs and Stupidities, you’ll have a great deal to do in this evil place; the society seems a little too mixed to me.”
“That’s why I brought you here, my dear Madame,” said Fabio Canti, “to satisfy your curiosity.”
“What I’ve seen and heard,” she replied, “justifies the idea that our friend the Commissaire has given me of artistic and social anarchy.”
“Listen” said the Painter of the Sun. “There’s a young poet I know. He’s going to recite one of his productions for us.”
In fact, at one of the nearby tables, a clean-shaven young man with shiny, pomaded, slicked back hair and a cold American expression—in order to appear very up-to-date—stood up and announced a modern poem: Tall Factory Chimneys.
“Good,” said Guilleret. “He’s going to pour smoke over us.”
The poet coughed, cleared his throat, and with majesty of an oyster—which is to say, of a mouth from which a pearl is about to emerge—began, using long pauses to mark the end of each line of his amorphous work, with assonances here and there for rhymes.
Recklessly looming up beneath the autumnal cloud
They are
Three, and more further away, black, rigid and mute as
Mountains;
Intestinal tubes of the turgescent lair.
Just as, untiringly, their plumes extend, curving and thinning,
So, I, in my inclusive mind,
Pour out recklessly an impure sexual dream,
Colorless, with the reek of gum and eau de Javel,47
Fecund.
“Like you,” put in a joker.
The poet, without blinking, continued more loudly:
Oh! you who, like me, dream of being,
By day or by night, perhaps—
No matter!—let’s ejaculate!
I want no more of love, the orchid, the banana,
Nothing. And yet,
No matter! Still,
They are three, superb, black, rigid, and mute as
Sounds,
Or telegraph poles.
The poet sat down in the midst of bellows of enthusiasm from the cenacles.
“Well, Madame Jousselin, what do you think of the Rotonde?”
“It’s a madhouse.”
Meanwhile, at the quartet’s table, Josette sighed. “I’ve had enough. It’s worth the trouble of being seen, but that’s all.”
“The only interesting thing I’ve caught,” said Etienne Aubert, becoming boorish again, sincerely and to annoy Josette, “is the pretty lady with the long black hair over there, with the little girl eyes. It’s a pity she’s not alone.”
“What? Really!” exclaimed Madame Coutan, whose crystalline laughter rang out. “A hero like Etienne can’t carry off his beauty in competition with two old monsters?”
At that moment, a customer who was dozing at a nearby table sat up straight and called the waiter. “Has Gottfried arrived?” The latter leaned over and winked in the direction of the table where Guilleret, Fabio Canti, Madame Jousselin and Monsieur Raynaud the Commissaire were. The customer got up immediately and the waiter went out behind him.
“A lover of narcotics,” said the Commissaire de Police. “I’ll point him out to my colleague. These drug dealers lead us in the devil of a dance. The more we arrest, the more there are.”
“Business must be booming.”
“I know that at least half the regulars here are habitual users of cocaine, morphine addicts, etheromaniacs or opium smokers. I can make verses, too:
Smokingrooms are very much in fashion
But coke dealers are those who really cash in.”
Madame Jousselin was listening to the conversations going on around her.
A dreamer with bulging eyes was saying: “I’m working on a symphony in which I want to put the present soul of the Globe. The sounds of the overture mingle with the cacophonies of a jazz band, evoking the United States preaching the disarmament of its neighbors, respect for the Bible and the Dollar, the mewling of Japane
se kotos and the moaning of shamisens singing the horror of volcanoes and earthquakes, Italian accordions attributing Fiume to Italy, and German violins, under the thrusts of Wagnerian bows, sighing after universal peace. And then, for you know that by means of a microphone enclosed in a steel box and then dropped to the bed of the ocean, after having linked it to a telephone place in a launch, one can collect the noises, and even the language, of fish, recognizing their species and quantity, I’ll add the maritime symphony to the terrestrial symphony, the pip-pip of herring, the coo-coo of cod and the light whistling of mackerel. Throughout my symphony, I also want to make audible, mingled with all those noises, all the souls of the world, the flapping at the top of the Eiffel Tower of the starry flag of the United States of the Earth.”
An aged artist was there with his daughter, exquisite and spring-like, her hair cut in the page boy style, smoking a cigarette. Thomas Keysar pointed out the father amorously gazing at his green fruit, and said to his friends: “He practices incest.”
Etienne looked intently at the pretty sixteen-year-old. “He’s lucky.”
Josette stood up. “That’s the third time, my dear Etienne. Saint Peter was no more boorish denying his master. Let’s go.”
“I ought to have gone home when we left the Odéon,” said Madame Jousselin to Fabio Canti and the Commissaire—Guilleret had already gone. “Bizet’s Arlésienne was a lot healthier than what one can see and hear here—and I’m only listening to the conversations going on around us.”
“It’s necessary to know all to appreciate the best,” pronounced Fabio Canti. “Here there are failures, the envious, liars, slanderers, calves and cows, a viler humanity than anywhere else, but I’m certain that there are future great artists, poets whose verses will remain in human memory, perhaps a great novelist of tomorrow.”
“It’s possible, but what do you expect? In my estimation, this society isn’t tolerable. Don’t look at me with so much surprise. I’m simply a good Christian and an honest woman, perhaps a little too bourgeois, but without affectation, I beg you to believe, in spite of the declaration I’ve just made. Look, I shall only ever belong to a man who’ll take me in marriage. My own art is knowing how to run a house, to be thoroughly versed in French cuisine—and I can make at least thirty different dishes. Above all, I have respect for my person, my body as well as my soul.”
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