XX
Since I left Saint Augustine's, taking away my last prize for excellence under my arm, I have visited our dear old school on two occasions. My first visit took place in the spring of 1902, several years after the institution had closed for good; and the second was more recently when I had written a large part of this tale. Saint Augustine's had just been expropriated for I don't know what reason, and it could not be entered without the administration's special authorization.
"It's not even worth the trouble to go and ask them for it, they don't grant it to anybody," the caretaker told me through a narrow grille built into the main door.
So I had to content myself with a look at the outer walls and, from the tramway platform, the tops of the trees in the grounds towards Bagneux. A few minutes later, I found myself on the place du Theatre-Franc,ais, which was practically deserted because it was Sunday morning. This visit had barely taken me more than an hour. My childhood and youth strike me as being already so far away as in reality they are near to the place du Theatre-Franc,ais which I go past almost every day.
It is of my first visit in 1902 that I wish to speak at length.
At first sight, you could not tell that anything had changed. The entrance was that same bare hall, with a great, black cross nailed up in the middle of the yellowish wall. And on the right was the caretaker's lodge with a grille and a high, openwork barrier. And in the lodge was the same caretaker as in our day, grown a little old - notably his imperial which had turned grey; and his decorations, instead of being spread out on his blue livery dolman with its silver buttons, were condensed into one single but enormous rosette which adorned the buttonhole of his rather ordinary jacket. He undoubtedly missed the sumptuous and sober livery of Saint Augustine's.
He recognized me almost at once and greeted me gaily with an oath in Spanish.
"Forgive me, sir; but I am so pleased when I see one of my old pupils again. And really all of you are my pupils a little bit: I brought you up. You were so small when you were sent here. You French boys, that was one thing; but I don't understand those South Americans who used to send their children here at such a young age with half the world separating them. Those poor abandoned mites. I've fought in wars, sir; I'm a hard man; well sometimes I've wept, yes wept, seeing them unable to get used to this place. And as for those who used to die! The Negroes, you know. More died in that sick bay than you were told about. "Their parents have taken them away," was the way they used to explain it. Sure, their parents took them away in a box . . . That poor little fellow who was so good at his work and so gentle, Delavache from Haiti, well, he died in my arms upstairs; that's the truth. Ah! When I think back on it! ...
"Sure there were some amongst them who were not up to much; madcaps who would do things which shouldn't be done. But the folk from those tropical countries, they're like the natives in the colonies; they're precocious, too warm blooded. But what the heck! Most of them were in good health and kind hearted, real gentlemen who respected the good Lord and had no fear of anything. Yes, for a fine generation, that's all I need say.
"Look, let's go and sit on the steps of the visiting room. I've put a bench there and that's where I smoke my pipe after lunch. You've got the time, haven't you?
"When the school was sold, as somebody was required to look after the buildings and the grounds, I was appointed the caretaker with a small salary. I could've found a more lucrative post. But I know nobody any more. And I was set in my ways here. I like the open air; I could never get used to those flats in Paris, they're so small. Remember I have the whole of these grounds to walk about in ...
"And so you said to yourself, just like that: 'That's an idea, I'll go and take a stroll round Saint Augustine's; that was kind of you. I felt sure you'd come back some day. I still see quite a few old pupils. It's easy for those living in Paris to come. Through them, I get news of the others. Many have died, sir, many have died. Some of them were just too rich, you see; that was their undoing. No sooner were they let out than they started to live it up. Those foul women are capable of anything. Besides, you have only to see where they come from; anyway, try as you will, what's bred in the bone will out in the flesh. Some lost everything gambling or on the stockmarket and killed themselves; others quite simply caroused to theif deaths. What can one do? Well, too bad for them: you reap what you sow. What's sad is the death of that poor, little chap who was so clever, Leniot, Leniot (Joanny). You didn't know about it? It was his poor father who told me about it in tears, on this very spot. Well here it is: he died in his barracks during an epidemic four months after he was enlisted. Those garrisons in the east are tough for recruits, above all the blockhouses. Anyway he has died. A young chap who had started out so well. It appears that he had already obtained two degrees and a prize at the Faculty of Law in Paris before he was twenty-one.
I also get occasional visits from South America. They come to spend a year with us in Europe. So Marti minor is in Paris at this moment. He came to see me a fortnight or eighteen days ago. Mr Montemayor from Valparaiso, I saw him as well; about a year ago now. He brought along one of his brothers whom I didn't know, who wasn't raised here . . . It's strange about those South Americans: of two brothers (it's an observation I've often made), of two brothers, the elder one is always more — how should I put it? — more European: a pink-and-white complexion, chestnut hair and sometimes blue eyes as well; in a word, you would swear he was a Frenchman. The younger one, by contrast, has a dark colouring and the hair of a black man! In short, he's a real Indian. You know, just like the two Iturrias; do you remember them well?
"And now that I think about it, he came too, Iturria major. Santos, as you all used to call him. He came, hang on, two years ago in 1900; of course, the year of the Fair. He even spent two afternoons with me here. The first time he brought his wife. A lovely-looking person he married, Mr Iturria (Santos), a blonde lady, a German I think. Because after leaving Saint Augustine's, the two Iturria boys went to study in Germany ... A lovely-looking person, my word! And the two of them together made a handsome couple ... He told me that their father had become minister of war in their country, in Mexico. That doesn't surprise me: they were such fine people, those Iturrias, and so intelligent! We need men like that today in France. It's not that there aren't any. But people no longer pay any attention to merit; it's money that determines everything these days. So you can be honest or not as you like, seeing that you have the readies . . . What you used to learn in this school of Saint Augustine was precisely not to attach any importance to money. For us, it was just a means to succeed in turning out a decent person. That was why you were brought up the hard way. And there was even too much strictness; they could easily have let you come and go as you pleased in these grounds. It's true you wouldn't really be put off going there for a smoke without permission, you and your gang of old daredevils! . . . You know when all's said and done, there's nothing like discipline to form men and real men like those of my day. All those bourgeois nowadays look like workers who have won first prize in the lottery and think only of pampering themselves ..."
I listened to the old boy fairly absent-mindedly. I looked at the playground before us. It was nothing more than a field of tall grasses, whose long, delicate tips swayed in the wind. Slender stalks had grown in between the pebbles, those pretty, smooth pebbles of the Seine valley, all veined with delightful colours. Beyond, the grounds drew my gaze; doubtless, nature had blurred their outline; but to what extent? I would have liked to go and see straight away. "Well now, sir, I can see that I've bored you enough with my chatter. I'll leave you to look round on your own: it's better: I would get in the way. Everything is open and you can stay for as long as you like. When you leave, I'll be in my lodge."
I rather took to the sentimental tone of the old soldier. He understood what a visit to the school meant to one of his old pupils; and the elegiac turn to his words was not wholly unintentional. Above all, I admired the delicacy of feeling conveyed at the end: "I woul
d get in the way."
And in truth, I had really no idea where to start my visit. I saw everything higgeldy-piggeldy, without method, endlessly retracing my steps. The stones of the terrace's central staircase were loose. The branches of the mighty trees which had no longer been pruned for years, grew in every direction. Grass overran the avenues. In front of the visiting room, purslane, which doubtless had broken out of the large orange-tree pots where it had been planted, crept and bloomed between the paving stones.
I sat down in my old place at prep. What a fantastic thing time is! Nothing had changed; there was a little more dust on the desks; that was all. And here was I, grown to manhood. If, by dint of listening to this silence, I were suddenly to make out a faraway murmuring of both voices and footsteps beyond the passage of the years . . . And if all the pupils of my day were suddenly to come back into this prep room and if, waking to the noise, I were to find myself facing my texts and schoolboy exercise books again . . . "Many have died, sir, many have died."
I returned to the grounds, to the sunshine. The village lads had succeeded in smashing a few of the chapel's stained-glass windows with stones. The house in which the prefect of studies used to live was completely ruined. The statue of Saint Augustine on the terrace had almost entirely lost its gilt. I took a long time to rediscover the site where the tennis court had been installed in Fermina Marquez' day — I had to go through a thicket which certainly used not to exist then. I caught myself saying out loud: "What about Fermina Marquez?" Yes, what had happened to her? I presumed she was married now! And I liked to think she was happy.
I went back to the terrace. Over yonder lay Paris where I would be in a little while, so removed from all that. Above me, the birds made their innocent voices heard; indifferent to the changes of regime, they continued to celebrate the glory of the kingdom of France from one summer to the next and perhaps, like the caretaker, to extol the education we received at the school of Saint Augustine as well.
Over the visiting room — the Louis XV part of the buildings — I saw a bull's eye window with all its sumptuous mouldings stained by the rain. The panes had been broken, the frame pulled out and so it stayed, wide open to today's sunshine, to the sky's blue: this Parisian sky, so astir with activity, with mists, vapours, halo of lights, balloons and Sundays. The bull's eye no longer reflected anything of all that! The bull's eye was pierced on the outside of the deserted attics which nobody went to see any more.
What else was missing in this inventory of fixtures? Ah! Yes: on the wall of the main courtyard, the marble plaque on which were engraved the names of the PUPILS WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY AND THEIR FAITH
was cracked.
INTRODUCTION
It is rare for a writer to be born extremely rich. In many cases great wealth might prove a handicap to the development of a literary gift but Valery Larbaud (1&81-1957) succeeded in turning his financial assets to artistically creative advantage. The source of his money was the Saint Yorre mineral spring at Vichy, which he inherited from his father at the age of eight: it could be said that, throughout the belle epoque and the years between the wars, whenever a glass of Vichy water was drunk anywhere in the world a centime or so was added to Larbaud's fortune. The image thus evoked is wholly appropriate, for Larbaud was to become the poet of first-class travel, exploiting a sensibility perfectly attuned to the melancholy glamour of sleeping-cars, ocean liners and Ritz hotels.
I felt all the sweetness of life for the first time in a compartment . of the Nord express between Wirballen and Pskov. We were slipping through grasslands where shepherds, at the foot of clumps of big trees like hills, were dressed in dirty, raw sheepskins . . .
Lend me your vast noise, your vast gentle speed, your nightly slipping through a lighted Europe, O luxury train! And the agonizing music that sounds the length of your gilt corridors, while behind the japanned doors with heavy copper latches sleep the millionaires . . .
Throughout his childhood and adolescence Larbaud was dominated by his formidable widowed mother, whose vigilance extended into his young manhood and under whose oppressive chaperonage he voyaged round Europe (but escaping her for long enough to enjoy discreet love affairs with young women in every country visited) while he wrote poetry, fiction and travel essays. His best-known work, A.O. Barnabooth, is a combination of all these genres, describing the spiritual, aesthetic and erotic adventures of a young South American millionaire as he fastidiously journeys along the same privileged, exotic routes that Larbaud had explored for himself. This was published in 1913; still not quite free of Madame Larbaud's influence, he was by then himself an influential figure on the French literary scene, a friend of Andre Gide and a prominent member of the group of intellectuals associated with the Nouvelle Revue Francaise.
Larbaud was a highly civilized example of everything that is understood by the phrase 'man of letters'. His sympathies, expressed in a vast output of literary criticism (including two collections with the overall tile Reading - That Unpunished Vice), were generous and wide. An authority on Hispanic, English and American literature, he translated several Spanish and Portuguese writers into French as well as poems by Coleridge and Walt Whitman, prose by Sir Thomas Browne and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novel by Arnold Bennett and almost the entire work of Samuel Butler. He also collaborated with James Joyce (and others) on the French version of Ulysses.
Larbaud had met Joyce in Paris in 1920 and had been excited by the parts of Ulysses that had so far appeared. The following year he published a long story called Amants, Heureux Amants . . . which was told as an interior monologue, and acknowledged its influence in the dedication: 'To James Joyce, my friend and the only begetter of the form I have adopted in this piece of writing.' Joyce immediately corrected him, pointing out that the true originator (and his own inspiration) was Edouard Dujardin, whose Les Lauriers Sont Coupes had been written as long ago as 1887: Larbaud, believing that he was introducing the stream-of-consciousness technique into French literature, was in fact merely reviving it. He made amends in 1923 by dedicating his next exercise in the genre, Mon Plus Secret Conseil, to Dujardin himself.
A passionate Anglophile, Larbaud paid several visits to England between 1907 and 1914, vaguely researching a projected biography of Walter Savage Landor. His lyrical treatment of places which English readers may take rather prosaically for granted can sometimes be a cause of amused delight - in such poems, for example, as 'Madame Tussaud's', 'Matin de Novembre Pres d'Abingdon' and 'Londres' ('Les facades de Scott's, du Criterion, du London Pavilion/Sont eclairees comme par un soleil de 1'Ocean Indien') or in the story Gwenny-Toute-Seule which is set in Florence Villa, Stafford Road, Weston-super-Mare. In the charming novella Beaute, Mon Beau Souci . . ., which takes place for the most part in Chelsea, Queenie the heroine explains that she lives in 'Harlesden. Apres Kensal Rise, dans cette direction.' In her mouth, these names take on for the enamoured hero the melodious magic of enchanted groves . . . The humour here is intentional -Larbaud can be very funny. A group of poems attributed to his alter ego, Barnabooth the rich amateur, are subtitled Les Borborygmes — stomach rumbles, 'the only human voice that does not lie'.
In 1935, Valery Larbaud suffered a severe heart attack which tragically incapacitated him for the remaining twenty-two years of his life.
Fermina Marquez, his first novel, was published in 1911, when he was thirty. It is set in Saint Augustine's, a boys' school just outside Paris - Roman Catholic and traditional but also cosmopolitan and rather dashing. Fermina herself is a young South American beauty who comes to visit her brother, a pupil at the school. The story examines the disturbing effect of her presence on some of the older boys - in particular on Joanny Leniot, the school swat, who identifies with Julius Caesar and makes a stern resolution to seduce her. But she is more successfully pursued by the handsome, sophisticated Santos Iturria from Monterey.
The model for Saint Augustine's was Sainte-Barbe-des-Champs, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, where Larbaud spent the happiest years of his chi
ldhood as a brilliant pupil from 1891 to 1894 - that is to say, between the ages of ten and thirteen. Here the seeds were nurtured of that cosmopolitisme which the adult Larbaud, in his life and work, was so fruitfully to epitomize. He put some of his own characteristics (his industry, his timidity, his Roman self-discipline, his pride in scholastic achievement) into the figure of Leniot and others perhaps into that of poor little Camille Moutier, but Larbaud and his friends at the college were in fact some years younger than the boys described in the novel.
Larbaud in his later books was to write more smoothly than he does in this one, which if judged by the highest standards is not without flaws. The design is somewhat formless, and the spontaneous ardours of post-pubertal emotion are occasionally expressed in a 'poetic' style which only narrowly avoids embarrassing us. But as a psychological study of male adolescence it is on the whole delicate, touching and unsentimental, while the faintly sinister atmosphere of this unusually glamorous school is evoked with a nostalgic vivacity that has proved powerful enough to establish Fermina Mdrquez in France as a minor classic. It seems to me one of those personal, intense, romantic books which, if one responds to them at all, are likely to haunt one with a peculiar poignancy for the rest of one's life.
Fermina Marquez (1911) Page 10