Princesse Mathilde was rather more given to doing than to sighing. But she did so now. If only all those years ago, other choices had been possible. She fingered the many strands of pearls which she had recently taken to wearing, put another cigarette into her long holder and decided on her tack. ‘Are you playing the piano again, Sylvie and singing those wonderful songs of yours?’
Before Sylvie could stir in response, Suzanne announced a new arrival.
Jacques Brenner strode into the room with all the loquacious vitality which made of him one of Paris’s most charming men. His long loose limbs clothed with a dandy’s flair kept pace with his vivid tongue. In a thrice, he had raised Sylvie from her couch, kissed her hand, paid tribute to the Princesse, asked after Jacob and the children, and told them that they shouldn’t be sitting here but out in the Place de la Bastille where a magnificent demonstration was in full swing.
The Princesse saw Sylvie transformed. In answer to Brenner’s rush of whimsy and compliments, she was metamorphosed into an excited adolescent. She pouted and preened, held his gaze and when it strayed from her offered one of those outlandish comments which had once been her distinguishing mark, so that his attention returned to her.
‘Yes, yes, Jacques, off we go to join the thick-skinned pachyderm trumpeting their protest. I’m tired of my private zoo.’
‘But where is that genius of a husband of yours. He can’t miss this.’
‘Right behind you, you old troublemaker,’ Jacob shook the other man’s hand warmly. Jacques was his closest and oldest friend. ‘We’ve missed you here.’
‘And now that I’m here, I’m going to waft you all, and I mean all, straight out again. That’s an order, oh most bohemian of Princesses,’ he smiled broadly at Princesse Mathilde. And those beautiful children. Where have they got to?’
‘They’re playing in Katherine’s room, Sylvie said as if nothing was amiss.
‘Right, On with your coats and I’m off to get them.’
They all piled into Princesse Mathilde’s mammoth Daimler and drove smoothly along the Boulevard St. Germain. They crossed the stone-grey waters of the Seine at the Pont St. Michel flanked on the left by the grandly buttressed Notre Dame and made their way regally towards the Place de la Bastille.
Katherine loved the big car with its smell of leather, the sight of the Paris streets moving slowly before her eyes. It was nice to be perched on her father’s knee. She snuggled against him. It had been a trying day, but a happy one too, what with Pappy and Leo and Violette and Princesse Mat, all there, all with presents for her.
And now they were off for an adventure. The car came to a smooth stop. They all piled out and walked. Katherine held on tightly to Pappy and Leo’s hands, one on each side. She felt safe between them, despite the sea of people they suddenly found themselves amidst. Legs, legs everywhere. Katherine tugged on Pappy’s hand and he lifted her on to his shoulders. Now she could see over the heads, hundreds of them bobbing in this direction and that. In the distance there was a platform, a man’s voice boomed out. It seemed to be coming from all directions. ‘Français,’ he said, and then something she didn’t understand. Someone pulled the microphone away from him. A policeman came up on the platform. There was a tussle and then a woman’s voice sang. ‘Allons enfants de la patrie ie e…’ A deep raucous voice. She knew that song. Her mother knew it, too. She could hear her singing just behind her. That was the nicest thing about maman. Her voice and the sounds she made the piano make. Katherine couldn’t do that and she liked it when Maman sang. But she didn’t like the way Maman’s body squirmed. Just the voice. If only Maman was just a voice singing.
She felt herself being lifted and suddenly there she was on Uncle Jacques’ shoulders. He had blond hair like her mothers. Hers was dark, like Pappy’s. She was glad of that. Though Leo had blond hair. Where was he? She called, ‘Leo.’ No one could hear her except Uncle Jacques and he pointed to where Leo stood. Then the crowd started to move and push. Uncle Jacques was being propelled away from the others. She couldn’t see them anymore. Maybe if she were lost, Maman would miss her and cry.
But no, she wasn’t lost. There was the Princesse’s car. The others were already there. All except Pappy. Where was he? Katherine clambered down from Jacques’ shoulders and clutched at Leo’s hand. Pappy. In the swirl of legs none were his. Katherine was afraid. What would she do without Pappy? She shouted, ‘Pappy, Pappy, Pappy.’
There he was at last. She held on to him tightly.
The big car started its gentle motion and Katherine leaned back against her father. They were all together again. She relaxed. She felt sleepy now. She would have to show Kazou all her lovely presents before going to bed. Suddenly Katherine felt something sharp pressing against her stockinged leg. Her gaze focussed on her mother’s hand. ‘Oh maman, you’ve found your ring.’ The diamonds sparkled around the deeper glow of the emerald. ‘I’m so glad,’ Katherine said. Now she could no longer be blamed for something that wasn’t her fault. What a relief.
‘Yes, found it where you hid it, you little thief,’ her mother rasped. She pressed the ring harder into Katherine’s thigh. The little girl flinched away and muffled the cry that rose to her lips.
PART TWO
∞
Chapter
Two
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∞
Some marriages are made by life. Others are made by ideas. In later years, Jacob Jardine would recognize his as the latter. Like a Madame Bovary infected by penny romances which told of glorious love affairs between simple girls and wealthy noblemen, Jacob Jardine had been infected by that constellation of ideas and art known as surrealism. It was this which had led him to his bond with Sylvie Kowalska.
Despite the impressions left by artists’ and writers’ memoirs, France in the 1930s was still a deeply conventional society. The family was a sacred unit. Parents, particularly fathers, were figures of authority, demanding respect and obedience. Girls of good family went unsullied from the parental to the marital home. Thus, in the autumn of 1933, when the case of Violette Nozière erupted upon the public consciousness, it sent shock waves into all corners of the nation.
On the evening of the 21 August, Violette Nozière, eighteen-year old daughter of a railway engineer poisoned her parents with a drug of her own concoction. Her father, Baptiste, died instantly; her mother, Germaine, possibly wary of her daughter’s intentions, had only consumed half of the proffered potion, and survived. For some time, it transpired, Violette Nozière had been living a double life. With her parents, she was prim, studious, the perfect daughter. Freed of their presence, she made herself up, dressed in slinky black, cavorted round the Latin Quarter, and took lovers with the ease of a professional courtesan. It was thus that she met and fell passionately in love with the student Jean Dabin; for him, possibly, that she prostituted herself. For him, too that she stole, one day offering him the ring she had taken from her father.
When Violette Nozière developed syphilis, she managed to convince her parents, that the fault was theirs - the disease, hereditary. Every night she prepared a medication for them, purportedly on doctor’s orders. On the night of the murder, her father had grown suspicious. He had rushed to the chemists to find out what the contents of the potion he was being given was. It was too late. The shop was closed. The fatal dose was swallowed.
In court, Violette Nozière testified that she had never intended to kill her mother, only her father, who she claimed, had been raping her for months. Until she had met Jean Dabin, she had been frigid.
France was in uproar. Family values, the stability of the nation, seemed to be at stake. Fuelled by the press, sides were taken, heatedly argued in every café and on every street corner. The majority, conservative, patriotic, saw in Baptiste Nozière, the flower of innocent French manhood, a kind paterfamilias, cruelly murdered by a vile, ungrateful daughter. They railed against the depraved Violette, this scandal of a daughter. Popular songs invoked her satanic figure and called for
torture, hanging, the most brutal forms of punishment.
Jacob Jardine had just qualified as a psychiatrist. Daily he went to the Hôpital Sainte-Anne and daily he grew more exasperated with the existing practice of psychiatry, its oft sadistic methods, its endless incarcerations. So much more needed to be understood, investigated about sexuality, about what was too easily seen as criminal behaviour. His interest in psychoanalysis, the talking cure, was already well in place. He had had several years of a training analysis and though he often found himself at loggerheads with the traditionalists in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, he had the year before travelled to Vienna and met the famous Dr. Freud.
Increasingly he found his friends amongst rebellious artists, poets, writers, members of an avant-garde who wanted to rid the world of prevailing hypocrisies. It was they who were exploring the territory which interested him. And they were doing it with far more prescience than his fellow doctors. At the Dôme, he would sit amidst André Breton, self-proclaimed head of the surrealist movement, the poets René Char and Paul Eluard and artists like Max Ernst, Giacometti, and Dali. They would all heatedly argue the case of Violette Nozière.
For them, Violette was a heroine, a modern Electra who had lived out the deepest and most terrifying aspects of the unconscious. Her sexuality and savagery provided a clue to the modern mind. She made visible the anarchic forces, the hidden desires at play beneath the thin layer of everyday respectability. A parricide, she was the woman revolutionary incarnate. She had killed off the dead order of hypocrisy. The elaborate and contradictory stories about herself which Violette told only enhanced her interest. They tried to penetrate their source, crack the code of their fictional logic. While all of France attempted to hunt down a certain M. Emile, who drove a blue Talbot and whom Violet named as the lover who supported her, they prepared a booklet containing poems and drawings in her honour. Picasso dedicated a painting to the girl.
Violette Nozière came to trial in October 1934, just at the time when French suffragettes demonstrated for equality on the Champs Elysées. It was Violette’s mother who brought the public prosecution against her. She defended the memory of her husband, explained how Violette had tried to steal household monies. But simultaneously she pleaded for the court’s indulgence. Psychiatric experts claimed that Violette showed no signs of madness: she was simply ‘perverse’ and therefore responsible for her actions. Jacob was disgusted. Violette fainted after the prosecution had presented its case.
In order to save her from the guillotine, her defence attorney attacked the antiquated ideas of the psychiatrists who sent mad women to prison rather then placing them into care. He described the ravages of syphilis. Overcome by remorse, Violette Nozière asked for the tribunal’s mercy and thanked her mother for having pardoned her. She did not sway the tribunal in the least. The verdict was a frightening one: according to tradition, she would be executed in the Place de Grève, having been led there barefoot, her face covered with a black veil.
Since women were no longer guillotined in 1934, the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the president, Albert Lebrun.
In retrospect, Jacob Jardine realized that when he met Sylvie Kowalska he was already passionately in love with the idea of the girl revolutionary, this heroine of the new modernity who would enable him to probe the depths of the human psyche. The character of their first encounter determined all the rest.
It was Jacob’s habit in those days to meander through the streets after he had finished his shift at the hospital. He would walk anywhere his feet led him and eventually, almost by accident happen upon one of the cafés where he was certain to find some friends. Preoccupied with the patients he had seen during the day, he played over their respective cases. Sometimes a chance event in the streets, a glimpse of some occurrence would tie in with what he had heard or seen in the clinic and stimulate him to fresh insight. These hours of walking reverie were often his most productive.
One late afternoon in the autumn of 1934 he was strolling through one of those bustling markets which formed the centre of any Paris quarter when he chanced upon a class of school girls trailing in double file behind two nuns. He liked the way the girls’ severe blue uniforms cut a swathe through the rampant colour of the market. Lazily he followed them. They were big girls, he reflected, undoubtedly in their final year preparing for their baccalauréat. Almost women. Yet caught in the time trap of their uniforms, their black cotton stockings and school procession, they seemed inordinately young.
One of the girls caught his attention. She had fallen back behind her fellows. Her golden hair tied in a loose knot captured the fading gleams of the sun. Suddenly she turned. A delicately chiseled profile presented itself to him, a face from a child’s story book, all innocence and susceptibility. Jacob stopped. He knew something was about to happen. With a quick, bold gesture, the girl reached out and in a thrice she had taken a gleaming red apple from a stall and popped it into her pocket. Her features retained their guilelessness. Then, abruptly she turned and looked him full in the face. An air of consummate mischievousness spread over her features. The look made him complicit. But it was no sooner seen than it had vanished and Jacob would have thought he had imagined the whole thing, had she not in darting back to rejoin her file, provocatively lifted her skirt from behind and yes, he was sure of it, waggled her bottom at him.
Astonished, he stood his ground for a moment and then burst out laughing. From a safe distance he followed the little group to its destination, a convent school just a few minutes away. The girl did not turn back once. The doors of the school enveloped her safely. Without thinking, Jacob noted the street and looked at his watch. He had never engaged on this kind of adventure before, but he knew he wanted to see this girl again.
The next day at the same time he deliberately made his way to the very same market and waited. The file of girls did not appear. The depth of his disappointment shook him. He persisted and two days later was rewarded. There were the girls again, orderly in their double file amidst the noisy commotion of the market place. He waited and watched. Again the girl with the golden hair lagged behind her fellows. Just at the moment when she reached the stall which had marked the place of her previous crime, she turned. Jacob’s breath caught. She gave him a bold look, almost as if to announce her act. Then with a minimum of furtiveness, she clasped two shining apples and put them unobtrusively in her pockets. The smile she gave him before turning back to her friends was a brazen challenge.
Jacob felt a rush of excitement such as he hadn’t experienced since his early adolescence when the merest flicker of a woman’s eyes filled him with illicit longings. In confusion, he trailed behind the girls. Then, just as the vast convent doors were swallowing up the first of their number, he made up his mind. Rapidly he tore a sheet of paper from the small notebook he always carried. He scribbled on it: Café du Dôme, Saturday, 5 pm and signed his name. Purposefully, he strode down the street. In front of the wide convent doors, he let the thick tome he was carrying drop. He picked it up, just as his girl, the last, walked past. In rising, he covertly dropped the note into her pocket, just where the apple bulged slightly. As he stood to his full height, he noticed a nun waiting sternly just inside the open door. With the air of a man impatient to reach a destination, Jacob Jardine walked away.
At four o’clock that Saturday, Jacob was already seated on the terrasse of the Café du Dôme. The newspaper he held in front of him, served less as reading material than as a cover: should any acquaintance see him thus preoccupied, he would pass him by. For the last two days Jacob had been counting the hours. Would the girl come? He could think of nothing else. In the Thirties, respectable girls, convent girls, did not take up assignations with strange men. It was a chance in a million.
Tensed, Jacob hoped. Behind the screen of his paper, his eyes continually scanned the boulevard with its crowds. It was a bright day, despite the lateness of the season, and the faces of the passers-by were alight with laughter and sunsh
ine. When his watch showed a few minutes past five, Jacob began to berate himself for his idiocy. Ten minutes later, he had begun to create elaborate schemes by which he would identify the girl and present himself at the convent door with messages from absent parents.
Yet still he sat there, glued to his place, awaiting what he had ceased to expect. A half an hour later, she arrived. Jacob, man of words and trenchant intellect, found himself speechless. Her hair, wild and uncombed. flew around the perfect oval of her face, framing it in an aureole. She was wearing a wide full skirt, which accentuated her slenderness; a blouse with a demure lace collar, but which she had left unbuttoned at the top, so that Jacob without realising it was aware of breasts too full for her childlike stance. It was a style which ran completely counter to the times, but which she made strikingly her own.
Her voice, when it came, surprised him with its deep contralto.
‘Bonjour, je vous ai apporté ceci.’ From the folds of her skirt, she brought out a gleaming apple and placed it obtrusively in the centre of the table. A wide, mischievous, smile spread across her face.
Jacob laughed, picked up the apple and bit into it with delighted complicity.
‘Good, isn’t it?’ she looked at him greedily.
‘Very. Thank-you,’ Jacob was bewitched. He looked into the blue of her eyes and then remembered himself. ‘I’m Jacob Jardine,’ he extended a hand. She took it with a formal grace which immediately changed her aspect.
‘My name is Sylvie,’ she said, offering no other. ‘It is very bad of you to have me meet you here in this way.’ Jacob couldn’t tell whether the flat tone of her comment reproved him or teased.
‘Sylvie. A wood nymph. I should have known,’ he murmured.
Memory and Desire Page 4