Life

by Perec, Georges

  Moreau, 2

  MADAME MOREAU HATED Paris.

  In 1940, after her husband’s death, she took over the factory. It was a very small family business which he had inherited after the 1914–18 war and which he’d run in relaxed prosperity with three cheerful woodworkers at his side whilst she kept the books in big, black-cloth-bound registers with ruled paper and pages she had numbered in violet ink. The rest of the time she led an almost peasant-like existence, busy with the backyard chickens and the kitchen garden, making jams and pâtés.

  She’d have done better to sell up and go back to the farm where she’d been born. Rabbits and chickens, some tomato plants, and a couple of beds for lettuces and cabbages – what more did she need? She would have sat by her fireside amongst her placid cats, listening to the clock ticking, to the rain falling on the zinc drainpipes, and the seven-o’clock bus passing by in the far distance; she’d have carried on warming her bed with a warming pan before getting into it, warming her face in the sun on her stone bench, cutting recipes out of La Nouvelle République and sticking them into her big kitchen book.

  Instead of that, she had developed, transmogrified, metamorphosed her little business. She didn’t understand why she’d done so. She had told herself it was out of fidelity to her husband’s memory, but he would not have recognised what had become of his old workroom with its smells and shavings: two thousand people, millers, turners, fitters, mechanics, installers, electricians, testers, draftsmen, roughers-out, model-makers, painters, warehousemen, treatment specialists, packers, drivers, delivery men, foremen, engineers, secretaries, publicity writers, commercial agents, and sales reps, making and marketing every year more than forty million tools of all kinds and calibres.

  She was tenacious and tough. She rose at five, went to bed at eleven, dealt with all her business in exemplary fashion, punctually, precisely, firmly. She was authoritarian and paternalistic, trusted nothing and nobody save her own intuitions and her own mind; she wiped out all her competitors and took a share of the market larger than anyone had predicted, as if she were mistress of both supply and demand, as if she knew instinctively, on launching each new product, where the real opportunities lay.

  Up until the last few years, until age and illness virtually confined her to her bed, she had divided herself tirelessly between her factories in Paris and Romainville, her offices in Avenue de la Grande Armée, and this luxury flat which was so unlike her. She inspected the shopfloors at a gallop, terrorised accountants and typists, insulted suppliers who didn’t keep delivery dates, and chaired Board Meetings energetically and inflexibly, making all heads bow when she opened her mouth.

  She hated it all. Whenever she could tear herself away, even for only a few hours, she went to Saint-Mouezy. But her parents’ old farm had gone to ruin. Weeds grew wild in the orchard and vegetable garden; the fruit trees no longer produced. Damp was eating the walls, unsticking the wallpaper, warping the doorframes.

  Madame Trévins would help her to light a fire in the fireplace, open the windows, and air the mattresses. She who had four gardeners at Pantin to tend the lawns, flowerbeds, bushes, and hedges surrounding the works couldn’t even manage to find a local man to keep an eye on the garden. Saint-Mouezy, which used to be a sizable little market town, was now a mere juxtaposition of houses restored as second homes, empty all week and chock-full on Saturdays and Sundays with townsfolk who, as they brandished their Moreau hand-drills, their Moreau circular saws, their Moreau portable workbenches, their Moreau all-purpose ladders, laid bare old beams and old stone, hung coachlamps, and rallied to the attack on barns and cartstalls.

  Then she would come back to Paris, don her Chanel two-pieces, and for her wealthy foreign customers would give lavish dinners served in crockery designed especially for her by the greatest of Italian designers.

  She was neither a miser nor a spendthrift, but simply indifferent to money. In order to become the businesswoman she’d decided to be, she accepted without any apparent effort a radical transformation of her habits, of her wardrobe, of her style of life.

  The conversion of her flat was carried out with this aim in mind. She kept just one room for herself, her bedroom, had it completely sound-proofed, and brought up from the farm a high, deep Empire bed and the wing chair in which her father had listened to the wireless. All the rest she entrusted to an interior designer whom she briefed in four sentences: it was to be the Paris residence of the head of a company; a spacious, luxurious, opulent, high-class, and even lavish interior; designed to make a good impression on Bavarian industrialists, Swiss bankers, Japanese buyers, and Italian engineers, as well as on university professors, junior trade and industry ministers of state, and mail-order business managers. She gave him no other advice, expressed no specific wishes, and laid down no budget limit. He would have to do everything and would answer for everything: the choice of glassware, the lighting, kitchen appliances, knickknacks, table linen, colour schemes, door furniture, curtains, curtain linings, etc.

  The designer, Henry Fleury, did more than just carry out his brief. He realised what a unique opportunity he’d been given to effect his masterwork: usually, kitting out a space for living always ends up being a sometimes tricky compromise between the contractor’s ideas and the often self-contradictory demands of his client, but here, with this prestigious decoration of an initially anonymous space, he could give an unmediated and true image of his gifts, an exemplary demonstration of his theories of interior architecture: the reshaping of spatial volumes, the theatrical redistribution of light, and the mixture of styles.

  The room we are now in – a smoking room-cum-library – is fairly representative of his work. It was originally a rectangular space, twenty feet by twelve. Fleury began by making it into an oval room with eight dark, carved wooden panels on the walls: he went to Spain to get them; apparently they come from the Prado. In between the panels he placed tall brass-inlaid Brazilian rosewood bookcases, bearing on their shelves a great number of books all bound in the same tan-brown leather, mostly artbooks, in alphabetical order. Huge, chestnut-brown button-leathered sofas are placed beneath the shelves and fit the curves precisely. Between the sofas stand dainty kingwood low tables, whilst in the middle of the room there looms a heavy, four-leafed, centre-pillar table heaped with newspapers and reviews. The woodblock floor is almost entirely masked by a dark red woollen carpet with triangular motifs in an even darker red. In front of one of the bookcases there is a set of library steps, in oak with brass fittings, which allows access to the upper shelves, and one of the risers of which is studded all over with gold coins.

  In several places, the bookshelves have been made into glass-fronted display cases. That is how some old calendars, almanacs, and Second Empire diaries are shown off in the first case, on the left, together with some small posters, including Cassandre’s Normandy and Paul Colin’s Grand Prix of the Arc de Triomphe; in the second display case – the only reminder of the activities of the mistress of the house – there are a few old tools: three planes, two adzes, a twibill, six cold chisels, two files, three hammers, three gimlets, two augers, all bearing the monogram of the Suez Canal Company and all used during the cutting of the canal, as well as a magnificent Sheffield Multum in parvo looking like an ordinary pocketknife (wider, of course) but containing not just blades of various sizes but a screwdriver, a corkscrew, pincers, pen nibs, nailfiles, and punches; in the third case, various objects which had belonged to Flourens, the physiologist, and in particular the skeleton, red through and through, of the young pig whose mother the scientist had fed for the last 84 days of her pregnancy on food mixed with madder to prove experimentally the direct relationship of mother and foetus; and in the fourth case, a doll’s house, parallelepipedal, three feet high, two feet nine inches wide, and two feet deep, dating from the late nineteenth century and representing a typical English cottage down to the smallest detail: 1 drawing room with bay windows (2 lancets), thermometer affixed, 1 sitting room, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants�
� rooms, tiled kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, hand-tufted Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with pillar-and-claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments, upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three-banner Japanese screen and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre, a bentwood perch with its tame parrot, and hundreds of everyday objects, baubles, crockery, clothes, all reproduced almost microscopically with manic accuracy: stools, lithos, cheap champagne bottles, capes on coat hangers, socks and stockings drying in the scullery, and even two minute copper pot-holders, tinier than thimbles, with greenery sprouting from them; and lastly, in the fifth set of bookcases, on raked stands, there are several open musical scores, amongst them the title page of Haydn’s Symphony No. 70 in D as printed in London by William Forster in 1782:

  Madame Moreau has never told Fleury what she thinks of his work. She will only acknowledge that it is effective, and that she is grateful for his choice of objects, each one of which can easily give rise to a pleasant conversation before dinner. The miniature house is the delight of Japanese guests; the Haydn score allows academics to shine, and the old tools usually set junior trade and industry ministers off onto well-turned phrases on the manual skills and handicrafts of France that live on and of which Madame Moreau is the indefatigable guardian. It is of course Flourens’s red piglet skeleton which is the most successful, and people have frequently offered large sums for it. As for the gold coins studded into one of the stair risers, Madame Moreau has been forced to replace them with imitations after realising that unknown hands have tried, and sometimes managed, to unnail them.

  Madame Trévins and the nurse have taken tea in this room before joining Madame Moreau in her bedroom. On one of the little low tables there is a round elm-bur tray with three cups, a teapot, a water jug, and a saucer in which a few crackers remain. On the sofa beside it, a newspaper has been folded in such a way as to leave only the crossword visible: the grid is almost entirely blank: only 1 Across, ASTONISHED, and the first part of 3 Down, ONION, have been found.

  The two house cats, Pip and La Minouche, are asleep on the carpet, paws stretched out and relaxed, the muscles in their napes quite loose, in the position associated with what is called paradoxical sleep, which is generally thought to correspond to the state of dreaming.

  Beside them, a little milk jug lies broken in several pieces. One guesses that once Madame Trévins and the nurse left the room, one of the cats – was it Pip? was it La Minouche? or did they join forces for this guilty deed? – knocked it over with a sudden pawstroke, but to no avail, as the carpet instantly drank up the precious liquid. The stains are still visible, indicating that this scene took place just a few minutes ago.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Marcia, 1

  THE BACK ROOM of Madame Marcia’s antique shop.

  Madame Marcia, her husband, and her son live in a three-roomed flat on the ground floor right. Her shop is also on the ground floor, on the left, between the concierge’s office and the servants’ entrance. Madame Marcia has never made any real distinction between the furniture she has for sale and the furniture she has to live in, and she is therefore busy for much of the time with carrying furniture, chandeliers, lamps, crockery, and miscellaneous objects between the flat, the shop, the back room, and the cellar. Such swaps, occurring as a consequence of opportunities to sell or buy something (in the latter case, in order to make room for it) just as much as on impulse, or a sudden whim, or a change of mood for or against some object, are not performed in random order, and do not exhaust all twelve possible permutations which could be made between the four locations, as is made clear in figure 1; they strictly follow the schema in figure 2: when Madame Marcia buys something, she puts it in her domestic space, either in the flat or the cellar; the said object may thence proceed to the back room of the shop, and from the back room into the shop itself; from the shop front it may return to (or arrive at, if it began in the cellar) Madame Marcia’s flat. What is ruled out is for an item to return to the cellar, or to get into the front shop without having been in the back room, or to go in reverse from the front shop to the back room, or from the back room to the flat, or, lastly, to move directly from the cellar to the flat.

  Figure 1

  Figure 2

  The back room is dark and narrow, with a lino floor, and cluttered to the point of inextricability with objects of every shape and size. The jumble is such that an exhaustive list of contents is impossible, and we shall have to be satisfied with a description of the pieces protruding from this heteroclite heap with a degree of visibility.

  Against the left-hand wall, beside the door leading from the back room to the front shop, the door whose opening creates just about the only empty space in the room, there is a large Louis XVI roll-top desk, rather coarsely made; the top is open, revealing a green leather writing pad on which a partly unrolled emaki (painted scroll) has been put: it depicts a famous scene from Japanese literature: Prince Genji has got into the palace of the governor Yo No Kami, where, from behind an arras where he has hidden, he watches the governor’s wife, the beautiful Utsusemi, with whom he is passionately in love, playing go with her friend Nokiba No Ogi.

  Further along the wall are six wooden chairs painted willow green, supporting rolls of printed cretonne wallpaper. The roll on top depicts a pastoral scene in which a peasant tilling his field alternates with a shepherd leaning on his crook, with his hat tilted back and his dog on a lead, with his sheep scattered all around him, and who raises his eyes to the sky.

  Yet further along, past the pile of military paraphernalia – weapons, shields, drums, shakos, pointed helmets, knapsacks, belt buckles, frogged wool-cloth hussars’ jackets, leather goods, in the middle of which you can see more distinctly a set of those stubby and slightly curved infantrymen’s swords which the French call briquets – there is an S-shaped mahogany sofa upholstered in flower-patterned cloth, which was given in 1892, so they say, to the singer Grisi by a Russian prince.

  Then, taking up the whole right-hand corner, heaped in shaky piles, there are the books: dark-red folio volumes, bound sets of La Semaine théâtrale, a fine copy of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux in two volumes, and a whole set of fin-de-siècle books in green and gold board covers, including works signed by Gyp, Edgar Wallace, Octave Mirbeau, Félicien Champsaur, Max and Alex Fisher, Henri Lavedan, as well as the extremely rare Revenge of the Triangle by Florence Ballard, which is held to be one of the most surprising precursors of science fiction.

  Then, in disorder, on shelves, on little bedside tables, low tables, dressing tables, church stools, card tables, and benches, are dozens and hundreds of knickknacks: snuff boxes, make-up boxes, medicine boxes, and boxes for keeping beauty-spots in; silver-plated metal trays, candleholders, chandeliers, and torches, desk sets, inkpots, horn-handled magnifying glasses, phials, oil jugs, vases, chessboards, mirrors, small frames, Dorothy bags, sets of sticks: whilst in the middle of the room there rises up a monumental butcher’s stall on which there stands a beer mug with a carved silver lid and these three naturalist’s curios: a huge trap-door spider; an object purporting to be a fossilised dodo’s egg mounted on a marble cube; and a large ammonite.

  Many chandeliers – Dutch, Venetian, Chinese – hang from the ceiling. The walls are almost completely covered in paintings, engravings, and miscellaneous reproductions. In the penumbra of this room most of the pictures are but a vague blur with, here and there, a signature – Pellerin – standing out, or a title engraved on a plate on the bottom of the frame – Ambition, A Day at the Race
s, La Première Ascension du Mont-Cervin – or a detail: a Chinese peasant pulling a cart, a kneeling youth being knighted by his suzerain. No more than five pictures permit more precise description.

  The first is a portrait of a woman, entitled The Venetian Woman. She is wearing a dress of flaming-red velvet with a jewelled belt, and her broad sleeve, lined with ermine, reveals her bare arm, which touches the balustrade of a staircase going up behind her. On her left, a tall column rises to the top of the canvas, where it joins a curving mass of architecture. Below, clumps of orange trees, almost black in colour, are dimly visible, framing a blue sky streaked with white clouds. On the carpeted balustrade there is a silver dish containing a bunch of flowers, an amber rosary, and a casket of old, yellowish ivory, overflowing with golden sequins; some of these sequins have fallen on the floor and lie scattered in a series of shining drops, so as to lead the eye towards the tip of her foot – for she is posing on the last step but one, in a natural attitude and full in the light.

  The second is a pornographic engraving entitled The Servants: a fifteen-year-old boy wearing a kitchen-hand’s cap braces himself against a table, with his trousers round his ankles, as a fat cook buggers him; on a bench in front of the table a liveried valet has unbuttoned his flies and exhibits his erect penis as a serving girl lifts her skirts with both hands and lowers herself onto him. Sitting at the other end of the table in front of a copious dish of macaroni is a fifth character, an old man dressed all in black, who watches the scene with manifest indifference.

  The third is a pastoral scene: a rectangular meadow, on a slope, with thick, green grass and a great many yellow flowers (apparently, common dandelions). At the top of the meadow is a chalet, and at the front door there are two women chatting busily, a peasant woman with a headscarf, and a nanny. Three children are playing on the grass, two little boys and a girl, gathering the yellow flowers and making bouquets of them.