Pressured by the order to stay with Ninette, the Vestal worked quickly. The revitalized flame showed me her shoulders, seemingly bearing a cross, her emaciated face, her beautiful eyes more profoundly framed by lassitude and chagrin.
Lucienne must have gone out, for she did not reappear in my room, but she had delegated Madame Godsill to stay at my bedside, to receive visitors. The latter came in, carrying my Dawn Songs, the first of my volumes of verse, which she had doubtless decided to open.
She had had a good lunch. She switched on the ceiling light, installed herself heavily in an armchair and started reading. After two minutes she was already yawning prodigiously. Digestion or reading? Reading. But I was scarcely aggrieved. Those accents were not for her. A frenetic divorcee, she only vibrated to the cacophony of dance music, the xylophone or the accordion. She abandoned my work and walked around the room.
“Damn! The tapestry’s no longer here!” she remarked, aloud.
That was true—my fourteenth-century piece. I was no longer thinking about it.
Finally, another diversion: visitors. They would flood in on that first day. They would be introduced into the drawing rooms, then into my study. They would withdraw via the corridor.
First came…my tailor. I had assured him of the commission for my green jacket. He was certainly deploring my death, firstly because of the loss of earnings, and then because I had tacitly promised him my portrait, which he would have framed in his dressing-room. It is perfectly legitimate for a tradesman to be afflicted by the loss of an illustrious client. He meditated for some time. I divined that he was criticizing the cut of my smoking jacket, which was not his work.
“He had so much talent!” he finished up abandoning.
“Oh, yes…so much talent,” agreed Madame Godsill, languorously. She took it for a criticism—and the appreciation was about to be useful to her.
My tailor only left me after having saluted me with a few drops of holy water. He was a careful man; in order not to stain my garment, he only sprinkled the parquet.
He was succeeded by a kind of gorilla, Baron Blumayer. It was at the sale of his collection that I had acquired the tapestry that was on excursion around my father-in-law’s waist. He had regretted it bitterly. He often asked to buy it back at double the price. He knew where I had placed it. He came to see it from time to time, devotedly, as if by way of a pilgrimage, as one goes to the cemetery.
His first glance was at the empty panel. He became excited.
“What! The tapestry’s no longer there! Do you know where it is?”
“I don’t know,” Madame Godsill replied.
“I’d pay a good commission to see it again...”
She nodded her head. Then he redirected his attention to me. Intoxicated by hope or rancor, he seized the sprig of box-wood and inundated me copiously. It was hot; that dew was not unpleasant.
“I’m delighted to have seen him.”
“He had so much talent!”
Then came one of the pall-bearers, my publisher: an overflow of fat gathered on short rounded legs. I had delivered all of my poetic production to him. From the point of view of sales, my loss did not affect him greatly, but he had counted on my title as an Academician to add luster to his company. He did not give Madame Godsill time to affirm that I had talent; he was the one who murmured it first. He departed without sprinkling me. That was in accordance with his habits.
Then came a second pall-bearer. Oh, if only he could divine all that my heart delegated to him of profound and affectionate gratitude, that Hector Lentrain, my future colleague under the Cupola! His name was an entire program. I possessed no more fervent propagandist than him. He had opened the Duchesse de Belleray’s salon to me, which was—the same was said of the Duchesse herself, but it was pure calumny—an Academic trampoline. In order to assure me of votes, he had even used veritable parliamentary ruses, in confiding to my electors on the right that I had been received by the pope, which was true, and to those of the left that I was related to the president of the Loge de Perpignan, which was also true.49 It was an excellent system, which had served him better personally than thirty mediocre novels. But in all things, alas, it is necessary to consider the small details, and I would not have sworn that an economic reason did not sustain his preference for me over Firmin Tardurand, whose novels enjoyed large print runs while his own only sold a few thousand. Nevertheless, I had benefited from it and I would have risked damnation for him.
Of Hector Lentrain, Madame Godsill could not be ignorant. His portrait inundated the newspapers; he had an opinion on every topic and attended all the première performances. She therefore saluted him with the title of Master and told him how much she admired his works, which she had not read.
By way of conclusion she indicated me and said: “And he too had so much talent.”
“The Académie will miss him!” my best incense-burner amplified, with a shake of the head.
After Hector Lentrain—one might have thought that all the pall-bearers had formed a queue to follow him—came Louis de Saint-Clary, the president of the Société Esotérique, to which I had been allied since my early verses: a monocled coxcomb, sweating conceit and jealousy, as denuded of ideas as he was rich in pride. He was imposing by virtue of his silent disdain, the majority of men imagining that lofty conceptions must be inhabiting taciturn heads, but he redeemed his mutism by seizing every opportunity to recite speeches forged with the thoughts of others.
He looked me up and down briefly, and then accorded: “I shall speak over his grave.”
“He had so much talent!” Madame Godsill leitmotived.
“You don’t say.”
You, my president, when I wake up…!
Then others, and yet others: a Montmartean singer who surveyed my “gala outfit” with his ferocious gaze; the theater director who paid his company-members in droits de seigneur; together, two women of letters, poor things—translators of my works into foreign languages, on a fatalistic Spaniard the other a seborrheic Norwegian; then a pedantic dentist who pestered me with questions of orthography while massacring my jaws.
And others, and yet others...
The end of the day hastened them. They scarcely paused, just long enough to collect the opinion of their introductrice regarding my talent, sometimes outbidding it, sprinkling me and passing on. They couldn’t have cared less; their indifference was cruel. It proved to me the slightness of the trace that I was about to leave in literature.
The procession was closed by a general who pestered the Muses. He had published a little and wrote to me on the appearance of each of my volumes. I had never seen him; our relationship had been purely epistolary; but I recognized him from his description, which Tornada had given me after having removed three of his ribs. “An anchovy preserved in brine…now a graduate of that school,” he had depicted him, in his picturesque language, and then had added: “Also fervent for heliotherapy, he lives in a hovel with a garden in Neuilly, and exposes himself to the sun clad only in a loincloth, and sometimes only in his hair. The police are on his trail.” I had laughed. Now I criticized my friend’s sarcasms, on hearing the warrior voice his regrets, alone among all the visitors in really feeling my death. I swore to get him a Prix Montyon.
“Oof!” exhaled Madame Godsill, as soon as Lucienne came back, at about eight o’clock, elegant in her undulated crêpe.
All that time to dress herself up, I reflected—must she not have undressed herself a little too, at Ségur 102-90?
But Madame Godsill questioned her: “Where’s the tapestry?”
Lucienne turned green. “The tapestry? Oh, damn it!” And, instantly certain: “It’s Papa. Just wait—he’s going to get caught!”
She bounded into my study, and searched the directory for the number of a bistro in which the author of her days might be downing his last aperitif. She had hit the nail on the head. I convinced myself, by the vivacity of the observations launched at my distant pillager, that the word engueulade
ought not to be neglected by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie.50
“You’re nothing but a thief, and an idiot into the bargain, for the piece is known and catalogued... For me? Get away—it’s for selling, so you can roll in filth! I know you! Poor Mama!... Bring it back, you hear, and at the trot! If it’s not back soon I’ll have you locked up.”
And click! After hanging up the apparatus, my wife, relieved, went into the dining room with her inseparable friend.
Oh my God! My beautiful poem of love, in what gutter!
But Tornada is right. Everything down here is compensated, everything equilibrates. After the mud, the clear spring. Here’s Ninette. Here’s the Vestal, the latter bringing the former to adore Papa, still asleep. They kneel down; they put their hands together. I drink their prayer like a philter.
The orison finished, Mademoiselle puts a pair of scissors into Ninette’s hands.
“Go on! Go on, my child; you can’t do him any harm.”
And the child approaches. She is just tall enough. Gravely, heroically, she cuts a lock of hair. Of that sacred relic, Mademoiselle makes two parts, one that she puts into an envelope for herself, the other that she slips into a golden locket. She fits it to a chain, which she places around my little girl’s neck.
“You can carry that with you all your life. All your life, to keep you pure.”
And my divine phantoms vanish.
Life is displayed before my rigid being as on a cinema screen. The characters surge forth and dissipate with astonishing alacrity. In the dim light, they take on a relief that is perhaps given to them by my taut senses. Nowhere was such cynicism ever displayed, nowhere such splendor of soul. It’s true that they are exceptional individuals, the former in their ugliness and the later in their beauty.
I placed Tornada in a separate category, which surpassed comprehension, when he reappeared. He had changed his face. He was going through one of those periods of overexcitement in which, I knew, he retained his reason, but of which his enemies took advantage to doubt it. His little birdlike eyes were blinking; tics displaced the corners of his lips, waves ran through his Neptunian beard.
What extravagances, what puns, was I about to hear?
“Just a bonsoir, my antique. I’m passing through. I’m a meteor. I’m something else as well: a gigolo!”
He wriggled. “Can you imagine? I’ve having an adventure, with a Callipygian Venus. Yes, my antique. I’ve only just made her acquaintance. My auto crashed into her taxi. As I pulled her out of the wreckage, I felt her marmoreal contours. There’s something on which to operate. In this coffer, I said to myself. Indeed, she told me about a cyst…so it’s arranged for tonight.”
He did not hide his escapades from me. They were always the prelude to or the conclusion of some surgical adventure. Possession was duplicate in him. He could only love those on whom he operated. Moreover, although scantly haunted by the instinct of the species, he only sacrificed himself to it with an entirely Napoléonic impetuosity and instantaneity. Like that of the great strategist, his mind was on other conquests, combats against nature, readjustments of lives...
“To be fair, my Callipygian is more bottle-shaped: about forty-five, perhaps! But offal, my antique, to enthuse the old and new worlds! Pardon me! Let’s not talk about continence; it might give you ideas. I’m so content with you! You’re admirable dressed, you know. You’ve retained the Academic tone: dignity, gravity, pretentiousness. The Cupola would be proud of you. You have everything required to duplicate your patron, the fortunate Hector Lentrain, whom I would willingly call Lentrain de derrière because of his retrograde ideas.51 You still have the ideas of the avant garde. For the moment, I only have the ideas of the old guard…one of those who always surrenders and never dies. The word is as old as the ruts, and I won’t go on.
“You only have one more night to be patient. When I emerge from the arms of my cocotte I’ll come running to extract you from your three. A gram of 444 and ping! I return your metabolism, after having suppressed it. I’m counting on it, your metamaboulism!52 You’ll start making calories right away; you’ll get up and you’ll say: ‘Here I am!’ Wonderful, isn’t it? And what a fuss, in the Landerneau of quacks! So unenlightening, moreover, that lanterneau.53 While I…oh, I…am quite something! As your wife was saying to me just now...
“But that’s true, you don’t know that I’ve just dined with your wife and la Godsill! I arrived just as they were sitting down at table, so they invited me. It was charming. La Godsill played footsie with me. She adores me, that darling, since she no longer has her milk cartons. ‘They no longer carry anything; I don’t want them anymore,’ she told me—so I took them out and transformed them into Tornada carburant. Yes, my antique, I’ve gone fifty kilometers and hour on la Godsill’s boobs! That’s another way of making progress! She doesn’t suspect it, though, and I won’t be the one to tell her. She’d want gasoline in return.
“In brief, the meal was charming. We talked about you. A menu, my antique and solemn, to make one lick one’s fingers! Red mullet tartare, jellied chicken, Russian salad and maraschino iceberg. Nothing cold, you see, in consideration of your condition. Your wife might be a slut, but she can certainly put it away!”
And he would have continued that semi-divagation for some time, if his hostesses had not arrived. As he had not concealed is good fortune from them, they were surprised to find him still there.
“I’d forgot a pious offering,” he said, by way of excuse. He went into the antechamber and came back carrying a monumental wreath of yellow immortelles, which he deposited at the foot of the wall, directly beneath Lucienne’s portrait.
“It’s to put on his catafalque tomorrow,” he moaned. And added, to my wife, who forgot to thank him: “You understand why I’ve chosen immortelles. I searched in vain for another shade, but I couldn’t find the dark green of ivy, which symbolizes your love for the worthy fellow.”
“I had more than love for him, Doctor.”
“Really?”
She adopted her Conservatoire tone: “Affection, Doctor, is more durable. So I am, indeed, like ivy!”
“Which dies where it’s attached? Don’t be silly. Be patient for a few more lustrums—the lustrums that illuminate the life of a pretty woman. And look after yourself, in the meantime. Who’s going to keep vigil tonight?”
“Me.”
“But I forbid it!”
“Only until midnight, Doctor…Mademoiselle Robin can take over from me.”
“Oh, it’s her? She’s the one who will take over from you. Perfect, then! Perfect!”
Noises became audible from the direction of the drawing room. Lucienne’s face expressed apprehension. She feared that the people she had summoned to take away the furniture were arriving before time, but the faithful Anna came to reassure her, announcing: “Monsieur and Madame Tardurand.”
“The competitor! The fourth bearer of the mobile pall!” exclaimed Tornada, delightedly.
“One doesn’t present oneself at this undue hour!” Lucienne protested.
“It’s necessary to receive him. Send him in!” the surgeon ordered, adding, as Lucienne and her companion were about to stepped forward: “Stay there. We’ll have some fun. You have to see this couple. Callipyge me that!”
He welcomed them with excessive curtseys. The Tardurands lent themselves, from the start, to the gaiety. One would never have believed that the strains of Polyhymnia vibrated in two beings of such vulgar appearance—more those of Erato.54 For the wife also worked in letters. A former schoolmistress, after writing lewd verses under a pseudonym, she now borrowed her husband’s name to exalt, in Alexandrines of unequal scansion, the altar and the Republic. The man was as bloated, as swollen and as bursting with apoplectic health as his companion was thin, pinched and colorless.
In order to help me appreciate this final interview to the full, Tornada had switched on the ceiling light. I was able to discover in my competitor’s eye the total joy of seeing me vanquished. My imm
inent revenge was no less intoxicating for me. And the entertainment went on, impeded, for me by the anxiety that Tardurand caused me. The heat was overwhelming him, causing him to become congested and choking him. He forbade himself to weaken, however. He took a manuscript from his pocket and announced: “The Death of the Poet!”
He read, mezza voce, a passionate lucubration, a sort of poem in the antique manner, for which his wife provided the responses. They reminded me of the already-distant era when, on the school benches, the flock of schoolboys recited the frogs’ chorus. Tornada soon began to accompany the good lady, with an ophicleidean voice. Homeric laughter could have shaken me.
The reading concluded, Tardurand passed triumphantly on to a calculation of probabilities.
“We presented ourselves against one another for the Titon chair, and there was a rare animosity. Now, all that is forgotten. I shall be one of the pall-bearers. Piquantly, it will be at the moment that the votes are being cast for me. I would have carried the vote anyway, of course. Think about it: in the first round, out of twenty-eight votes cast, eleven were for Montabert, seven for Givers and ten for me. In the second round, Givers lost two, one of which went to Montabert and the other to me. In the third round, we each held our positions. In the fourth round, ah, it began to swing in favor of yours truly. Montabert kept twelve and I rose to thirteen. In the fifth round...”
“I know,” Tornada cut in. “In the twentieth round, you were in.”
“Oh, before…well before! About the tenth round.”
“Anyway, now, you think you’re home and dry?”
“Alas!”
“And if he weren’t dead?”
“Who, Titon?”
“No—him.”
“I couldn’t swear to Titon, not having seen him on his death-bed, but as to him, I’d put my hand in the fire. Miracles don’t happen nowadays, Doctor.”
“Ha ha! Who knows?”
“You won’t worry me, my dear Doctor.”
Tardurand smiled—but he no longer had the same assurance. The professor’s ironic and mysterious attitude disturbed and irritated him. One cannot be sure of anything, in the stirring of organisms. The couple looked at me more attentively. The wife said a prayer, but I’m not sure that it was to implore Heaven in favor of Tornada’s suggestion. As for the husband...
The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2) Page 21