For the last six months he virtually stopped going out altogether. From time to time he would be seen at the baker’s in Rue Léon-Jost (which almost everyone still called Rue Roussel at that time); he would put a twenty-centime coin on the glass pane of the counter, and if the baker-woman raised a questioning eye at him – which happened a few times at the start – he merely indicated by a nod of his head the stick loaves stacked in their wicker baskets and made a kind of scissor gesture with his left hand, meaning he wanted only half a loaf.
He no longer spoke to anyone, and when spoken to replied only with a sort of low grunt which discouraged any attempt at conversation. From time to time he could be seen opening his door a crack to make sure there was no one at the tap on the landing before going to fill his pink plastic bowl.
One day Troyan, his neighbour on the right, coming home around two in the morning, saw that the light was still on in the student’s room; he knocked, got no reply, knocked again, waited a moment, pushed open the door, which was not properly shut, and found Grégoire Simpson curled up like a sleeping child on his bed but with his eyes wide open, fully dressed, smoking a cigarette clasped between his medius and ring fingers, using a slipper for an ashtray. He didn’t raise his head when Troyan entered, he didn’t answer when the bookseller asked him if he felt ill, if he wanted a glass of water, if he needed anything, and it was only when the other man touched his shoulder gently, as if to make sure he wasn’t dead, that he swung himself round all at once to face the wall and whispered: “Fuck off”.
A few days later he disappeared completely and no one ever knew what became of him. The general opinion in the building was that he had committed suicide, and some people even stated that he had done it by jumping under a train from the Pont Cardinet. But nobody ever came up with the evidence.
After a month, the manager, who owned the room, had it sealed by bailiffs; after the second month had passed he had the premises certified vacant by legal officers and threw away the few paltry belongings found there: a narrow bench barely long enough to be used as a bed, a pink plastic bowl, a cracked mirror, dirty shirts and socks, piles of old newspapers, a set of fifty-two stained, greasy, torn playing cards, an alarm clock stopped at five fifteen, a metal stem with a ribbed bolt at one end and a spring-loaded flap at the other, a reproduction of a quattrocento portrait of a man with a face both vigorous and fat and a tiny scar above his upper lip, a portable record player in a grenadine pegamoid case, a fan heater, blower type, Congo model, and a few dozen books including Raymond Aron, Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, dropped at page 112, and volume VII of Fliche and Martin’s monumental History of the Church, borrowed sixteen months previously from the Teachers’ Institute Library.
Despite the sound of his name, Grégoire Simpson was not in the least English. He came from Thonon-les-Bains. One day, well before his fatal hibernation had gripped him, he had told Morellet how as a little boy he had played drum major with the Matagassiers on mid-Lent Sunday. His mother, a dressmaker, made the traditional costume herself: the red-and-white-squared trousers, the loose blue blouse, the white cotton bonnet with a tassel; and his father had bought him, in a fine circular box decorated with arabesques, the cardboard mask which looked like a cat’s head. As proud as Punch and as grave as a judge, he ran through the streets of the old town along with the procession, from the Place du Château to the Porte des Allinges, and from the Porte de Rives to Rue Saint-Sébastien, before going up into the high town, to the Belvederes, to stuff himself with juniper-roast ham and to slake his thirst with great gulps of Ripaille, that white wine as light as glacier water, as dry as gunflint.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Winckler, 3
THE THIRD ROOM in Gaspard Winckler’s flat.
It was there that the picture used to be, opposite the bed, beside the window, the square picture which the puzzle-maker liked so much and which showed three men in black, in an antechamber; it wasn’t a painting, but a retouched photograph, cut from La Petite Illustration or La Semaine Théâtrale. It depicted Act III, scene 1, of Lost Ambitions, a sombre melodrama by a mediocre imitator of Henry Bernstein called Paulin-Alfort, and showed the two seconds of the hero (played by Max Corneille) coming to fetch him at his home half an hour before the duel in which he would meet his death.
Marguerite had found the photograph at the bottom of a box of secondhand books of the kind you could still find at the time under the arches of the Théâtre de l’Odéon: she had stuck it onto canvas, mounted it, coloured it, framed it, and given it to Gaspard as a present on their moving into Rue Simon-Crubellier.
Of all the rooms in the building, this is the one Valène remembered best, this quiet and rather heavy bedroom with its high, dark, wooden skirting board, its bed covered with a mauve quilted bedspread, its turned-wood shelf-stacks collapsing under the weight of unsorted books, and, in front of the window, the table where Marguerite used to work.
He remembered her peering through a magnifying glass at the delicate arabesques on one of those gilded cardboard Venetian boxes with their embossed scallops, or preparing her paints on a minute ivory palette.
She was pretty, to a modest degree: a pale skin dotted with freckles, slightly hollowed cheeks, grey-blue eyes.
She was a miniaturist. She did not often paint original subjects: she preferred to copy or to base her work on pre-existing material; for example, she drew the design of the sample puzzle Winckler had cut for Bartlebooth from prints published in Le Journal des Voyages. She could reproduce miraculously even the tiniest, almost imperceptible details of the minuscule scenes depicted on the inside lids of fob watches and snuff boxes and the cover-pages of Lilliputian prayer books; and she could also restore snuff boxes, fans, candy boxes, and medallions. Her customers were private collectors, curio dealers, ceramics manufacturers wanting to issue copies of prestigious dinner sets (Napoleon’s return from Egypt, Malmaison), jewellers who would ask her to paint (from a photograph of often doubtful authenticity) the portrait of the loved one on the back of a pendant intended to contain a single wisp of hair, and specialist booksellers for whom she would retouch romantic vignettes or the illuminations of hour-books.
Her meticulousness, her carefulness, and her cleverness were extraordinary. Into a frame measuring four centimetres long by three wide, she could get a whole landscape with a pale-blue sky dotted with white clouds, a horizon of softly undulating hills with vine-covered slopes, a château, two roads at the junction of which there galloped a rider dressed in red on a bay horse, a cemetery with two gravediggers carrying spades, a cypress, two olive trees, a river flanked by poplars with three fishermen sitting by the bank and, in a punt, two little characters dressed in white.
Or on the flat part of the enamelled face of a signet ring she could restore a mysterious landscape where beneath a dawn sky, among pale flowers at the edge of a frozen lake, a donkey sniffed the roots of a tree; on the trunk a grey lantern was nailed; in the branches an empty nest was perched.
Paradoxically for such a precise and measured woman, Marguerite was irresistibly attracted to jumble. Her table was an eternal glory-hole, always stacked with great amounts of useless equipment, piled high with heteroclite objects, invaded by a tide of muddle which she had to stem each time before she set to work: letters, glasses, bottles, labels, quill-stands, matchboxes, cups, tubes, scissors, notebooks, medicines, banknotes, small change, compasses, photographs, press cuttings, stamps; and loose leaves, pages pulled out of writing pads or diaries, letter scales, a brass-rimmed weaver’s glass, the heavy cut-glass inkstand, quill boxes, the green and black box of one hundred Republic quills number 705 by Gilbert and Blanzy-Poure and the beige and brown box of one hundred and forty-four rounded quills number 394 by Baignol and Farjon, the horn-handled paperknife, rubbers, boxes of drawing pins and paperclips, nailfiles and emerised cardboard, and the everlasting flower in its Kirby Beard soliflor, and the packet of Athletic cigarettes with the sprinter in the blue-and-white-striped vest sporting a
red number 39 tag crossing the finishing line far ahead of the others, and the keys linked together on a little chain, the yellow wooden ruler, the tin marked CURIOUSLY STRONG ALTOIDS PEPPERMINT OIL, the blue china pot with all its crayons, the onyx paperweight, the little hemispherical bowls, somewhat similar to those used as eye-baths (or for cooking snails), in which she mixed her colours, and the silver-plated assay-dish whose two sections were always filled with salted pistachios on the one side and violet sweets on the other.
Only a cat could move amongst these piles without setting off a landslide, and, as it happened, Gaspard and Marguerite did have a cat, a big red tom they had first called Leroux, then Gaston, then Chéri Bibi, then, in a final aphetism, Ribibi, who liked nothing better than walking amongst all these things without disturbing them in the slightest, ending up squatting quite comfortably in them, unless he settled on his mistress’s neck, letting his paws hang lazily down on either side.
Marguerite told Valène one day how she had met Gaspard Winckler. It was on a November morning in 1930 in Marseilles, in a café in Rue Bleue, not far from the arsenal and Saint-Charles barracks. Outside, a thin cold drizzle was falling. She was wearing a grey suit and a black oilskin, fastened at the waist by a broad belt. She was nineteen, had just returned to France, and, standing at the counter, was drinking a black coffee whilst reading the small ads in the Dernières Nouvelles de Marseille. The café owner, a man named La Brigue but as unlike the character from the plays of Courteline as could be imagined, was eyeing with suspicion a soldier who, he seemed to have assumed in advance, would not have the wherewithal to pay for his café au lait and buttered bread.
It was Gaspard Winckler, and the café owner wasn’t very wide of the mark: the death of Monsieur Gouttman had left his apprentice in a difficult situation; scarcely nineteen years of age, a master of many skills but without a real trade, Winckler had virtually no experience of professional life and had neither a home nor a friend nor a family: for when he was expelled from Charny by the owner of the house Gouttman rented and went back to La Ferté-Milon, it was to discover that his father had died at Verdun, his mother had remarried an insurance agent and was now living in Cairo, and his sister Anne, one year his junior, had just married a certain Cyrille Voltimand, a tiler from the XIXth arrondissement of Paris. And that’s how one day in March nineteen twenty-nine Gaspard Winckler arrived on foot in the capital, which he was seeing for the first time in his life. He traipsed dutifully up and down the streets of the XIXth arrondissement and whenever he met a tiler he asked politely after a Cyrille Voltimand whom he supposed to be his brother-in-law. But he didn’t find him and ended up enlisting.
He spent the next eighteen months at a fortalice between Bou-Jeloud and Bab-Fetouh, not far from the Spanish zone of Morocco, where he had almost nothing to do other than to carve over-elaborate skittles for three quarters of the garrison, a job no worse than another and which had the merit of keeping his hand in.
He had returned from Africa the previous day. He had gambled on the crossing and had been stripped of almost his entire gratuity. Marguerite was also jobless, but nonetheless managed to pay for his coffee and buttered bread.
They married a few days later and went up to Paris. The first weeks were hard, but the two of them were lucky enough to find work fairly quickly: Gaspard at a toyshop overwhelmed by the Christmas rush, and Marguerite, a little later, with a collector of antique musical instruments who asked her to decorate, from contemporary documents, a wonderful spinet that was supposed to have belonged to Champion de Chambonnières, and the lid of which had had to be reconstructed. In the midst of a wealth of foliage, garlands, and tracery imitating marquetry, Marguerite painted in two circles, each three centimetres in diameter, two portraits: a young man with a rather weak face, at a three-quarters angle, with a powdered wig, black jacket, yellow waistcoat, white lace cravat, standing, with his elbow leaning on a marble mantelpiece, in front of a half-drawn, salmon-pink curtain partly revealing a window through which could be seen a railing; and a young woman, beautiful and plump, with large brown eyes and crimson cheeks, a powdered wig with a pink ribbon and a rose, and a white muslin shawl that opened wide at the front.
Valène met the Wincklers a few days after they had moved in to Rue Simon-Crubellier, at Bartlebooth’s flat, where all three had been invited to dine. He felt himself attracted straight away to this soft and smiling woman who looked upon the world through such limpid eyes. He liked the movements she made to push her hair back; he liked the firm but graceful way she would steady herself by leaning on her left elbow before sketching in with the tip of her hair-thin brush a microscopic green shadow in an eye.
She almost never spoke to him about her family, childhood, travels. Just once she told him she had seen in a dream the house in the country where she had spent all her adolescent summers: it was a big white barn overgrown with clematis, with an attic she was frightened of, and a little cart drawn by a donkey answering to the sweet name of Boniface.
Often, when Winckler shut himself in his workroom, they would go for a walk together. They went to the park at Monceau, or followed the track of the inner circle railway along Boulevard Pereire, or went to see exhibitions in the centre of town, in Boulevard Haussmann, Avenue de Messine, or Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Sometimes Bartlebooth took all three to visit the Loire châteaux or invited them to stay at Deauville for a few days. Once, even, in the summer of 1937, when he was coasting on board his yacht Halcyon off the Adriatic shores, he summoned them to spend two months with him between Trieste and Corfu, having them discover the pink palaces of Pirano, the grand hotels of Portoroz, Diocletian’s ruins at Spalato, the myriad Dalmatian islands, Ragusa, which had become Dubrovnik a few years before, and the wild contours of the Boka-Kotorska and Montenegro.
It was during this unforgettable journey that one evening, facing the crenellated walls of Rovigno, Valène declared to the young woman that he loved her, and obtained in reply only an ineffable smile.
Many times he dreamt of eloping with her or fleeing from her, but they stayed where they were, near yet far, in the warmth and in the despair of an insuperable friendship.
She died in November 1943 whilst giving birth to a stillborn child.
For the entire winter, Gaspard Winckler stayed seated at the table where she used to work, holding in his hands, one by one, all the objects she had touched, she had looked at, she had loved, the vitrified pebble with its white, beige, and orange grooves, the little jade unicorn saved from a valuable chess set, and the Florentine brooch he had given her as a present because it had on it, in minute mosaics, three Paris daisies, or marguerites.
Then one day he threw away everything that was on the table, and burnt the table; he took Ribibi to the vet in Rue Alfred-de-Vigny and had him put to sleep; he threw away the books and the turned-wood shelf-stack, the mauve quilted bedspread, the low-backed, black-leather-seated English armchair in which she sat, everything which had her trace, bore her mark, and he kept in the room only the bed and, opposite the bed, that melancholy picture of the three men dressed in black.
Then he went back to his workroom, where eleven watercolours, still untouched in their envelopes bearing Argentinian and Chilean stamps, were waiting to be turned into puzzles.
The bedroom is today a room grey with dust and sadness, an empty, dirty room with faded wallpaper; through the open door that gives onto the broken-down bathroom, you can see a rust-stained, scale-incrusted sink on whose chipped rim a half-drunk bottle of orange pop has spent the last two years going green.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Plassaert, 3
ADÈLE AND JEAN Plassaert are sitting side by side at their desk, a grey metal structure fitted with hanging file drawers. The worktop is cluttered with open ledgers, their long columns covered in meticulous handwriting. Light comes from an old petrol lamp with a cast-iron stand and two green globes. To one side, a bottle of whisky: McAnguish’s caledonian panacea, with a label depicting a jovial wench givi
ng a dram to a moustachioed grenadier in a bearskin hat.
Jean Plassaert is a short and rather fat man; he is wearing a multicoloured Hawaiian party shirt, and a tie consisting of a bootlace with shiny ends held in a plaited leather woggle. In front of him he has a whitewood box copiously provided with stickers, postage stamps, rubber stamps, red wax seals, and from it he has taken five art-déco silver and paste-glass brooches representing five stylised female athletes: a swimmer doing the crawl amidst a wreath of ripples, a skier schussing downhill, a gymnast in a tutu juggling lighted torches, a golfer with raised mashie, and a diver performing a perfect swan. He has laid four of them side by side on his blotting pad and is showing the fifth – the diver – to his wife.
Adèle is a woman of about forty, small, dry, thin-lipped. She is wearing a fur-collared red velvet two-piece suit. In order to look at the brooch which her husband is showing her, she has raised her eyes from the book she has been studying: a bulky guide to Egypt, open at a double-page reproduction of an extract from one of the earliest known dictionaries of Egyptology, F. Rablé’s Libvre mangificque dez Merveyes que pouvent estre vuyes es La Egipte (Lyons, 1560):
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