Willame, H.
Tremblay 33-44
Magnant, L.
Tremblay 22-65
Dothée alias Henley and the two above-mentioned persons lived in the part of the island that belongs to Nogent-sur-Marne; these others lived in the eastern part, in Le Perreux:
Hevelle
Tremblay 11-97
Verchère, E. L., Les Heures Tranquilles, Ile des Loups (May to Oct.)
Tremblay 09-25
Kisseloff, P.
Tremblay 09-25
Korsak (de)
Tremblay 27-19
Ryan (Jean E.), La Pergola, Ile des Loups
Tremblay 06-69
The Société d’Encouragement du Sport Nautique (Tremblay 00-80) was in the part belonging to Nogent-sur-Marne. I believe Claude Bernard’s house, for its part, was located in the eastern sector, part of Le Perreux. In short, the Ile des Loups called to mind that island in the Caribbean split between two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic—the difference being that it hadn’t won its independence, since it was under the sovereignty of Nogent and Le Perreux. The viaduct crossed through it, and this was what marked the boundary of the two zones.
Clumps of trees lining the banks concealed Claude Bernard’s house. He came to get us at the Quai de l’Artois in a small boat. The neglected garden was surrounded by a white fence. On the ground floor, a huge space that opened onto the veranda acted as the living room: a sofa, two leather armchairs, a coffee table, and a large brick fireplace. Claude Bernard was always alone in that house and gave the impression of camping out in it. When he invited us to dinner, he did the cooking himself. He had told me he was tired of living in Paris and that he couldn’t sleep without country air, and water nearby.
I suppose there’s no trace of countryside left in Le Perreux and on the Ile des Loups. They’ve no doubt razed Claude Bernard’s house. The trees and pontoon boats have disappeared from along the banks.
At the time of our first meeting, in his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, the day when I offered him the twenty-volume set of Balzac’s complete works—the Veuve Houssiaux edition—and he had bought it from me for three thousand francs, we talked literature. He’d confided that his favorite writer was Buffon.
The works of Buffon bound in green morocco leather on the brick mantelpiece of his living room were the only books I noticed at his house. Naturally, that house on the Ile des Loups seemed strange to me, and I found Claude Bernard’s occupation as a dealer in “secondhand goods” intriguing. But most often we talked about film or literature, and that’s what he liked about me.
I remember the heavy wood paneling on the living room walls, the ironwork, but especially the elevator lined with red velvet—it no longer worked—that Claude Bernard, one day, laughingly told us had been installed by the former owner for the sole purpose of going up to his bedroom on the next floor.
That elevator was the only remaining clue to the night in April 1933 when the T.’s had ended up in Le Perreux with the two other couples. Afterward, they had returned to their sober quarters on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, but it no longer mattered. It was too late. Their fate had been sealed in Le Perreux and in the house on the Ile des Loups.
At the time, I didn’t really care about the whys and wherefores of “the tragic orgy,” or about the role of the red velvet elevator that Claude Bernard had shown us at the back of the living room. To us, the Ile des Loups and its environs were just one more suburb. On the route we took from the station to the Quai de l’Artois, where Claude Bernard was waiting for us in his boat, I was thinking that we’d soon be going away, thanks to the money from the Balzacs and the old music box I’d sold him. Before long, Jacqueline and I would be far away from the Marne and Le Perreux—in Vienna, where I’d turn twenty.
I’d like to linger on the Left Bank a while longer, being a child of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I attended the public school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi and studied catechism with Father Pachaud on Rue de l’Abbaye and Place Furstenberg. Since then, however, I’ve avoided my former village, which I no longer recognize. This evening, the Carrefour de l’Odéon seems as desolate to me as the Breton port of Montparnasse in the drizzle.
One of my last memories of Saint-Germain-des-Prés goes back to Monday, January 18, 1960. I was fourteen and a half and I had run away from school. I had walked all the way to La Croix de Berny, skirting the hangars of the Villacoublay airfield. Then I’d taken a bus to the Porte d’Orléans, and then the metro. I had gotten off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I ended up in a café, Chez Malafosse, at the end of Rue Bonaparte where it meets the quay. At least, Chez Malafosse is what my father used to call it. After lunch, we’d be in his office with his friends and he’d say to me:
“Go get us some Partagas at Malafosse.”
That afternoon, at Chez Malafosse, a group of people my mother knew, who were always hanging about in that neighborhood, were standing at the bar. Among them was a pretty Danish girl with short blond hair and periwinkle eyes. She used slang words that clashed with her soft, childlike accent. Slang that was often outmoded. When she saw me come in, she said:
“What the fuck are you doing here, old top?”
I confessed that I was playing hooky. There was an embarrassed silence. I was on the verge of bursting into tears. Suddenly, she said, with her Danish accent:
“What the fuck does that matter, old top?”
Then she slammed the palm of her hand down on the counter:
“A whiskey for Old Top here …”
I recall the billiards players upstairs at the Café de Cluny. I happened to be there, one Saturday afternoon in January, the day of Churchill’s funeral. It was in 1966 that they renovated all the cafés on Place Saint-Michel and the boulevard; in recent years, some became McDonald’s, like the Mahieu, where the off-track bettors used to gather, and where one could hear the crackling of the machine as it spewed out the racing results.
Until the late sixties, the neighborhood had remained unchanged. The events of May ’68, which it hosted, left only black-and-white news images, which at a quarter-century’s remove seem as distant as the ones filmed during the Liberation of Paris.
Boulevard Saint-Michel is engulfed in a December-like fog this Sunday evening, and the image of a street resurfaces in my memory, one of the few streets in the Latin Quarter—the only one, I think—that often figures in my dreams. I finally identified it. It slopes gently down to the boulevard, and the contagion of dreams into reality ensures that Rue Cujas will always remain frozen for me in the light of the early sixties, a soft, limpid light that I associate with two films from that time: Lola and Adieu Philippine.
Toward the bottom of the street, on the ground floor of a hotel, there used to be a movie theater, the Studio Cujas. One July afternoon I entered the cool and darkness of that theater, out of idleness, and I was the only spectator.
A bit farther up, on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, I used to meet a girl I knew who acted in New Wave films—as we called them then.
I thought about her yesterday afternoon, when I crossed paths by the gates of the Jardins du Luxembourg with a man wearing a ratty Shetland pullover, whose brown hair and hawk nose seemed familiar. Yes, of course, I often used to see him in the café where that girl and I would meet. A certain François, nicknamed “the Philosopher,” probably because he gave private lessons in philosophy.
He didn’t recognize me. He was holding a book and he looked like an overripe student. I had returned to that neighborhood by chance, after a quarter of a century, and now here was that unchanged man, forever faithful to the sixties. I could have said something to him, but the amount of time since our last meeting made him inaccessible, like someone I’d left on the beach of a faraway island. I had set sail.
I saw him again today, on the other side of the gardens, in the company of a young blonde. He lingered for a moment, talking to her at the entrance to the RER station that replaced the old Luxembourg stop. Then she went down the steps and
left him on his own.
He walked with quick steps on the sidewalk of Boulevard Saint-Michel toward Port-Royal. He was still holding his book. I tried to follow him, keeping an eye on his Shetland pullover with its greenish stain, until I lost sight of it around Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée.
I crossed through the gardens. Was it because of meeting that ghost? Or the alleys of the Luxembourg, where I hadn’t walked in ages? In the late-afternoon light, it seemed to me that the years had become conflated and time transparent. One day, I had accompanied that girl who acted in movies, in her convertible, from the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève to the Saint-Maurice film studios. We followed the river to the outskirts of Paris and the plane trees formed a canopy of foliage. It was in the spring of 1963 or 1964.
The snow that turns into mud on the sidewalks, the railings around the Cluny thermal baths where unlicensed street hawkers had their stalls, the bare trees, all those tones of gray and black that I still recall put me in mind of Violette Nozière. She used to meet her dates in a hotel on Rue Victor-Cousin, near the Sorbonne, and at the Palais du Café on Boulevard Saint-Michel.
Violette was a pale-skinned brunette whom the tabloids of the time compared to a venomous flower and whom they nicknamed the “poison girl.” She struck up acquaintances at the Palais du Café with ersatz students wearing jackets that were too tight at the waist and tortoiseshell glasses. She convinced them she was expecting a large inheritance and promised them the moon: exotic trips, a Bugatti … She had probably crossed paths on the boulevard with the T. couple, who had just moved into their small apartment on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques.
A bit farther down the street from the Palais du Café, on the opposite side, a twenty-year-old girl, Sylviane, played billiards upstairs at the Cluny. She wasn’t a pale brunette like Violette, but auburn-haired, with the kind of coloring you might call Irish. She wouldn’t remain long in the grayness of the Latin Quarter. Soon she would be spotted in the Faubourg Montmartre, at the Fantasio, and in the billiards parlors on Boulevard des Capucines. Then she’d frequent the Cercle Haussmann on Rue de la Michodière, where she’d meet some patrons. Gifts, jewelry, the easy life, the riding club in Neuilly … At the start of the Occupation, she would marry a penniless suitor who nonetheless bore the title marquis of the empire. She would spend long sojourns in the Free Zone, on the Côte d’Azur, and the president of the Société des Bains de Mer in Monaco would count among her admirers. Her return to the Occupied Zone … Her meeting with a certain Eddy Pagnon in dubious circumstances … But, in that spring of 1933, she was still living with her mother, in Chelles, in the Seine-et-Marne region, and she commuted to Paris on a Meaux line train that dropped her off at the Gare de l’Est. According to a witness questioned by the detectives, one of the two women who brought the T. couple to Le Perreux had auburn hair and didn’t seem older than twenty. She lived in the eastern suburbs. But was her name Sylviane?
She crops up again eleven years later, in the spring of 1944, in a small hotel on the Quai d’Austerlitz. She’s waiting for that Eddy Pagnon who, since the month of May, has been bootlegging wine from Bordeaux to Paris.
On evenings when he has to drive from Paris to Bordeaux, he stops the truck across from the hotel, on the sidewalk next to the river, in the shadow of two rows of plane trees. He goes to meet her in her room. Soon it will be curfew. The distant rumbling of the metro over the Pont de Bercy occasionally breaks the silence. Through the window of the hall that leads to her room, one can still see, in the twilight, the tracks of the Gare d’Austerlitz; but they’re deserted and one wonders if the station has been abandoned.
They have dinner downstairs, in the café. The door and windows have their curtains drawn because of the blackout. They are the only diners. They get served food from the black market, and the hotel manager, who was on the phone behind the counter, comes to sit with them. Pagnon makes his trips between Bordeaux and Paris on behalf of this man, who owns a warehouse nearby, on the Quai Saint-Bernard, at the Halle aux Vins, the central wine market. After dinner, the manager gives Pagnon a few final instructions. Sylviane then walks him to the truck on the Quai d’Austerlitz. The engine rumbles for a long while, then the truck disappears into the dark. She returns to her hotel room and lies down on the unmade bed. A bed with brass bars. Walls covered in old wallpaper with pink roses. A pause. She has known hotel rooms like this, when she was much younger, on nights when she didn’t go home to Chelles to sleep in her mother’s minuscule cottage.
She will wait for him until the following evening. He’ll drive the truck to the warehouse in the Halle aux Vins so they can unload his cargo and then he’ll go on foot from the Quai Saint-Bernard to the hotel. In that fleabag, she reconnects with the décor of her youth. As for me, I recall a childhood memory: fat Lucien P. sprawled on one of the leather armchairs in my father’s office. I had heard them talking one day about a certain Sylviane with auburn hair. Was it Fat Lucien who introduced her to my father or the other way around? From what he confided to me, my father had also frequented the Latin Quarter in the early thirties, in the same period and at the same age as Violette Nozière and Sylviane. Perhaps he had first met her in the billiards room of the Café de Cluny.
A little past the Quai d’Austerlitz, near the Pont de Bercy, do the warehouses known as the Magasins Généraux still exist? In the winter of ’43, my father had been interned in that annex of the Drancy transit camp. One evening, someone came and had him released: was it Eddy Pagnon, who was then part of what they later called the Rue Lauriston gang? Too many coincidences make me think so: Sylviane, Fat Lucien … I tried to find the garage where Pagnon worked before the war and, among the new scraps of information that I’ve managed to gather on him, there is this: arrested by the Germans in November 1941 for having double-crossed them in a black market affair involving raincoats. Detained at La Santé. Freed by Chamberlin, alias “Henri.” Goes to work for him on Rue Lauriston. Leaves the Rue Lauriston gang three months before the Liberation. Retires to Barbizon with his mistress, the marquise d’A. He owned a racehorse and an automobile. Gets himself a job as driver of a truck transporting wines from Bordeaux to Paris.
When my father left the Magasins Généraux, I wonder what route he took in the blackout. He must have felt dumbfounded at having been spared.
Of all the neighborhoods on the Left Bank, the area that stretches from the Pont de Bercy to the fences around the Jardin des Plantes remains the most crepuscular for me. One arrives by night at the Gare d’Austerlitz. And night, around here, smells like wine and coal. I leave behind the train station and those dark masses along the Seine that were referred to as the “Port of Austerlitz warehouses.” The automobile headlights or the flashlight illuminate a few feet of the Quai Saint-Bernard, just in front. The smells of wine and coal now mix with the scent of leaves from the botanical gardens, and I hear the cry of a peacock and the roar of a jaguar and a tiger from the zoo. The plane trees and the silence of the Halle aux Vins. I am enveloped by a cellarlike chill. Somewhere someone is rolling a barrel, and that doleful sound slowly fades into the distance. It seems that in place of the old wine market they’ve now erected tall concrete buildings, but wide as I might open my eyes in the dark, I can’t see them.
To reach the south, one needed to go through tunnels: Tombe-Issoire, Glacière, Rue de la Santé, lit at intervals by a blue bulb. And one emerged onto the sundrenched avenues and fields of Montsouris.
The Porte d’Italie marked the eastern border of that territory. Boulevard Kellermann led west, up to the Poterne des Peupliers. To the right, the SNECMA plant looked like a huge cargo ship run aground on the edge of the boulevard, especially on nights when the moon was reflected in its windows. A bit farther on, to the left, was the Charléty stadium. Weeds grew through cracks in the concrete.
I went to that neighborhood for the first time on a Sunday, because of a friend who had dragged me to Charléty. Despite being only seventeen, he had snagged a low-level job on a sports newspaper. They s
ent him to cover a footrace, and he wanted me to help him write his article.
There weren’t many of us in the stands. I remember the name of one of the runners: Piquemal. We asked him a few questions at the end of the race to flesh out the article. At around five, we waited for the number 21 bus, but it never showed. We then decided to walk to the center of Paris. The streets were empty in the bright sun. I could pinpoint the exact date: at the first newsstand we came across—not really a newsstand, more like one of those green canvas stalls that crop up on Sundays—I saw the photo and large headlines announcing the death of Marilyn Monroe.
After Charléty, the Cité Universitaire, and to the left, the Parc Montsouris. At the beginning of the street that skirted the park was an apartment building with large picture windows, where the aviator Jean Mermoz had lived. The shadows of Mermoz and SNECMA—a factory that made airplane engines—have linked that neighborhood in my mind with Orly airport, right nearby, and with the airfields of Villacoublay, Buc, and Toussus-le-Noble.
Restaurants that were almost rustic. Opposite the building where Mermoz would come home between two airmail runs was the Chalet du Lac. Its terrace opened onto the Parc Montsouris. And lower down, at the corner of Avenue Reille, a small restaurant whose garden was covered in gravel. In the summer, they set out tables and one could dine beneath the arbor.
For me, with the passage of time, that entire neighborhood has become gently detached from Paris. In one of the two cafés at the end of Rue de l’Amiral-Mouchez, near the Charléty stadium, a jukebox played Italian songs. The owner was a swarthy woman with a Roman profile. Summer light bathes Boulevard Kellermann and Boulevard Jourdan, deserted in midday. In my dreams, I see shadows on the sidewalks and the ochre façades of buildings that hide slivers of countryside, and from now on they belong to the outskirts of Rome. I walk the length of the Parc Montsouris. The foliage protects me from the sun. Farther on is the Cité Universitaire metro stop. I’ll reenter the coolness of the small station. Trains come at regular intervals and carry us to the beaches at Ostia.
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