by Claude Izner
A stout woman with a rosy-cheeked infant plonked herself down on Victor’s right and to his left a young girl wearing a flannelette top, embroidered dress and no hat, sat down and began making eyes at him.
‘I’ve never been to a music hall before,’ she whispered, excitedly. ‘It’s just bad luck that my friend who was supposed to come with me had to return to his barracks. Do you have a programme?’
He shook his head, frowning. The combined smell of cigar smoke, gas and perspiration was overpowering, and the lily of the valley perfume the girl had smothered herself in did not improve matters. He had a sudden urge to leave, but could not face pushing past rows of people.
‘I’ve got one if you want,’ said the woman with the little baby, handing her a cheap brochure.
The girl thanked her. Out of the corner of his eye Victor glimpsed an advertisement extolling the curative virtues of Samo-coca-Kola, and next to it in a box framed by arabesques the name: Noémi Gerfleur.
‘I’m here mostly because of La Gerfleur; they call her the darling of the people. Still, it’s a shame Jeanne Bloch isn’t here, they say she’s a scream as Colonel Ronchonot!’ The girl was addressing the woman, who replied:
‘I’ve seen her! She’s the queen of the café-concert, always ready to hold court. Seventeen stone she weighs, but that doesn’t stop her from playing the parts of young girls. The Galleon they call her, because she’s as broad as she is long. On one occasion her co-star couldn’t get his arms round her and some wag from the audience yelled out: “You’ll have to make two trips!”’
Down in the stalls the spectators hailed young boys clad in black serving glasses of beer and cherry brandy. These were set down on small ledges fixed to the backs of chairs, occasionally spilling on to people trying to reach their seats and causing insults to fly and the general level of excitement to intensify.
‘Start the show! Start the show!’ voices chanted to a rhythmical tapping of feet on the floor.
‘Get that bloody curtain up!’ shouted a youngster from the gods.
As if this were the signal they had been waiting for, the gas lights went down and the curtain rose on a stage where a clown-like soldier in a comic uniform comprised of a greenish-yellow hussars jacket, a pair of red trousers and a shako appeared to the sound of a clarion call. He planted himself centre stage by the prompter’s pit and delivered ‘The Godillots of Tringlot’ in a muffled voice. The audience was quick to show its disapproval and pelted the wretched singer with cherry stones as he wisely beat a retreat into the wings. He was briskly replaced by a man in a diminutive peasant’s outfit and a huge bowtie who broke into a popular song, the chorus of which the audience joined in:
Who loves a little chocolate?
It’s Papa!
And who loves a wee tipple?
It’s Mama!
By the time they’d sung their way through the little boy’s cheese and the girl’s butter biscuits, Victor was bitterly regretting not having some cotton wool to stick in his ears. He was relieved when a Romeo with a handsome moustache appeared and in a warbling voice delivered a repertoire that was entirely devoted to that most ineffable of all mysteries: love. The audience was treated to ‘The Chimes of Love’ and then ‘Love’s First Call’.
The man spouting verse would almost certainly have sent Victor to sleep if his neighbours had not felt a sudden, irresistible urge to eat and drink, probably in order to quell an excess of emotion from the poetry.
And so two new smells were added to the fug of tobacco and perspiration: garlic and verjuice. The bare-headed girl pulled a cured sausage from her bag and offered a slice to Victor, who politely refused. The wet nurse provided wine, and everybody chomped in time to the mournful and disjointed delivery of bad rhyming couplets.
‘Do you know what?’ said the girl, her mouth full of food, ‘that fellow has so much blacking in his hair he could be advertising shoe polish!’
‘Sh! It’s Kam-Hill!’ said the woman with the baby. A man in red coat-tails, a flannel waistcoat, silk culottes and stockings, white gloves and an opera hat, had made his entrance to loud applause. The spectators stamped their feet – those in the stalls banging their spoons against their glasses, and the pianist pounded the keys. Victor tested his powers of concentration by closing his eyes and imagining he was in a concert hall, lulled by the melancholy harmonies of Schumann. But it was no use, ‘One-legged Man’s Jig’ triumphed, and he suffered until the interval, when he was able to take a breath of tepid air outside on the promenade. When he returned, the girl with no hat, who had removed her jacket to reveal a plunging neckline, had occupied his seat next to the wet nurse, with whom she was exchanging artistic observations. Victor insisted she should not get up.
‘You see that skinny lout in the orchestra pit? They call him the Guide to the Tarts of Paris!’ cried the girl.
‘And that other one who looks like an epileptic is a pickpocket – a right show-off, he is, and he’ll pinch your wallet before you can say “strumpet”,’ said the woman with the baby.
Victor slumped down in his seat, determined to nap, but the bellicose tones of a singer of patriotic songs from Alsace with her hair in two thick coils woke the baby, who wailed indignantly as she belted out the words:
Be on your way for this nipple is French,
No German’ll taste the milk of this wench
The wet nurse promptly unbuttoned her bodice, exposing an opulent bosom, the mere sight of which silenced the baby.
At last, Noémi Gerfleur, the star of the show, for whom everyone was clamouring, appeared on stage.
‘She looks like a demi-mondaine,’ the girl with no hat observed.
‘More like a courtesan,’ corrected the wet nurse.
La Gerfleur had a penchant for pseudo-Spanish costumes. Beneath her enormous hat she sported a curly black wig and rather violent make-up. Her pendants and bracelets sparkled with each step, and as she sashayed across the stage, or tossed an occasional rose from a basket into the front row, her mantilla slipped off her shoulders. The rest of the time she stood, her gloved hand furiously waving a black lace fan that matched her black-stockinged legs – more and more of which appeared with each new verse and with every sway of her hips.
‘Higher, higher!’ the crowd cried.
‘Give us a gander at those silk stockings!’ shouted a boy sitting near Victor.
‘Get your knickerbockers off!’ bellowed another.
La Gerfleur signalled to the orchestra to stop playing and walked downstage to scold the audience:
‘For God’s sake shut up, will you! Put some oomph into your catcalls or belt up! Do you really think I’m going to strain my vocal chords for a bunch of idiots like you?’
The theatre fell silent, the conductor raised his baton and the piano began a syncopated tune.
‘And now I shall sing for you “Crime of Passion”,’ La Gerfleur announced.
D’you see that gentleman scurrying?
Where d’you think he’s ahurrying?
He’s going to where his lover dwells
To sweet young Sophie he loves so well
‘They say she owns a coach and two and diamonds as big as a bottle stopper given to her by…’ the girl with no hat began.
‘Sh!’ interrupted the wet nurse.
But why does he look so dismayed?
His eyes are filled with dread;
Oh misery! He’s been betrayed
Another’s in her bed.
‘…one of her lovers was a Russian Grand Duke,’ the bare-headed girl continued, turning to Victor. ‘She combs the Monte Carlo casinos and…’
Up the umpteen flights of stairs,
Up he runs and then he’s there!
Outside the room he knocks, no answer,
Then in he bursts and shoots the bounder.
But it is she, his beauty who falls
And now he’s rolling on the floor.
Ha Ha Ha!
‘Is it true that she is called Noémi Fourcho
n?’ Victor asked.
‘Whatever gave you that idea? What an ugly name!’
D’ you see that gentleman scurrying?
Where do you think he’s ahurrying?
Terrified, he’s going to confess
To the commissioner himself, no less,
Rue Buci, ‘Yes, sir,
I was mad about her, intoxicated,
I loved her more than I could a wife.
I killed her and my rage abated;
Now I will pay for it with my life.
With one hand over her heart and the other holding her fan up high, La Gerfleur kept her audience spellbound. Eyes staring, pupils dilated, it was as though she sought to hypnotise her spectators, who sat motionless.
Arrest me for I am the killer;
A bullet I fired at her breast.
The commissioner turned whiter,
Said he: I loved Sophie the best!
And slumped in a heap on his desk.
Well, well, what a jolly old mess!
La Gerfleur raised her arms, allowing her mantilla to slip from her shoulders, and the men in the audience gaped at her armpits and at her bosom spilling out of her shimmering dress.
D’you see…
D’ you see that gentleman scurrying?
Where do you think he’s ahurrying?
Oh Lord! He’s hung himself from a rafter,
Thus ends this tale of the sweet hereafter.13
A deep sigh followed the final note. There was a moment of silence before the audience awoke from its trance. People began banging their beer glasses on the little wooden ledges in a frenetic rallying cry and erupting into loud cheers. La Gerfleur hiked up her skirts, curtsied and blew kisses to her public. She was about to leave the stage, exhausted, but the applause and cries of encore obliged her to take another curtain call. She forced a smile, her brow covered in beads of sweat and the kohl round her eyes running. The curtain went down.
‘Well! The café-concert’s not a patch on this. La Gerfleur was unforgettable!’ exclaimed the girl with no hat, turning to Victor, but he had already left.
Victor wandered towards the box office, but instead of walking out he went down a gloomy passage that opened off the auditorium and was strewn with pasteboard props and wicker chairs. To his right a steep staircase led down to the dressing rooms below stage. He let himself be guided by the smell of grease paint and patchouli oil and the rank smell emanating from the row of slop buckets at the far end of a narrow corridor. As he passed a door he heard a woman’s rasping voice cry out:
‘Well, you can’t claim to have earned your wage tonight! You were sloppy. Take your money and clean yourself up – you’re covered in blacking!’
Through the crack of another door he glimpsed Romeo busy rehearsing a scene of jealousy with the soldier, while the comedian nonchalantly grilled a herring on the iron frame of a gas lamp.
‘Hey! You’re smoking us out! Do you want to get us sacked?’ yelled the soldier.
Victor cleared his throat and carried on towards the ladies’ dressing rooms, where he was greeted by a small commotion.
A dresser was energetically pushing back a group of five or six male admirers blocking the doorway to La Gerfleur’s dressing room.
‘She told you she’s changing. Are you deaf? Go on, get out!’
Just as the men were about to beat a retreat, a bellboy arrived with an enormous bouquet of roses. Through the door, Victor glimpsed a haggard woman in a petticoat and camisole, her blonde hair flattened against her head, tearing open a tiny envelope. She read the card inside, a horrified look on her face; then she cried out before falling to the floor in a faint. The men crowding the doorway didn’t move, assuming it to be an act. But when the dresser cried out: ‘Madame! Madame! What’s wrong with you?’ they rushed forward as one.
Victor managed to slip in behind them and saw that he had no hope of reaching La Gerfleur, who was now laid out on the settee and completely surrounded. He glanced around the dressing room, taking in pots of cold cream, clothes draped over a screen, the floor strewn with pieces of cotton wool caked in grease paint, a fan, a black silk stocking and a card, which he retrieved.
To the Jewel Queen, Baroness of Saint-Meslin, a gift of ruby red roses in fond memory of Lyon – from an old friend.
He read the note without understanding its meaning and slipped it in his pocket. Suddenly the dresser lost her temper and began pushing everybody out, shouting:
‘You’ll be the death of her!’
Back outside, amid the hubbub of the boulevard, Victor felt as though he had woken from a strange dream. He ambled past cafés, where artists and revellers celebrated their common victory over ennui with vast quantities of beer and absinthe. He strolled for a long while, unaware that he was exhausted and soaked to the skin, the copy of Marot in one hard, and La Gerfleur’s card in the other.
Chapter 5
Sunday 15 November
A rat, disturbed by the noise of footsteps, scurried between the casks piled up on the pier of the wine port at Quai Saint-Bernard. It hesitated, worried, at the edge of the dark water, and then scurried as far as a row of trees. Its long tail, illuminated in the trembling flame of a street lamp, narrowly missed the trajectory of a stone. The rat fled.
‘Dirty rodent,’ muttered Basile Popêche, continuing on his way towards a clock tower, ‘any minute now, Paris will be overrun with rats!’
A lion in the Botanical Gardens roared as if in agreement.
‘Ah, that must be Tiberius; he’s sleeping badly at the moment. I think his teeth are bothering him.’
Basile Popêche turned off into one of the five roads leading down to the river, all bearing the names of wine-growing regions – Burgundy, Champagne, Bordeaux, Languedoc, Touraine – whose low buildings divided into wine cellars marked the edge of the wine market. Gripped by fear and cold at the sight of the deserted market, shrouded in darkness, he stamped his feet as he passed a warehouse where a storm lantern burned, giving off a light that was almost friendly.
‘What time must it be? Five o’clock? Five thirty? This is where we usually meet…Polyte is late!’
He started at the sound of muffled footsteps, and made out the shadow of a cart crossing one of the alleys on its way to a wine cellar. The noise of the horses’ shoes on the road was equally muffled and ghostly. Head thrown back and eyes closed, Basile savoured the heady bouquet of alcohol. He cried out when someone tapped him briskly on the shoulder.
‘Only me, don’t panic!’
He recognised the figure of his friend Polyte Gorgerin, hat pulled down low, his breath in a steaming cloud before him.
‘Sorry I’m late, had to deliver some Beaujolais. Come on, let’s go. Be careful where you put your trotters – there’s red wine spilled everywhere and it’s as slippery as glass!’
As he did each Sunday at dawn, Basile Popêche advanced cautiously over the scantily lit avenues bordering what looked like a military camp, where casks emitting a sour odour stood. He came to collect his weekly ration of cheap wine courtesy of Polyte, an old regiment mate, and he returned the favour each week with a side of meat diverted from the rations of the wild animals. His doctor had forbidden him to drink, given the poor state of his kidneys, but he paid no heed to that, convinced that wine was not only necessary for his happiness, but would also dissolve his kidney stones.
Barrels of wine, shaken up in transport and gone mouldy, stood to one side in an enclosure surrounded by bushes. Polyte had set up a little trade that permitted him to pad out his monthly takings. He sold this mediocre plonk cheaply to the owners of the drinking dens of the Latin Quarter who, for a modest price, would dole it out to their loyal customers when they came to drink a jar at the counter.
This Sunday morning several bar owners, cans in hand, were waiting to profit from the windfall. Polyte was greeted with exclamations:
‘So, are we going to get it or not, this grape juice?’
Polyte pushed his way impatiently through the grou
p to reach a yellow cask with iron bands sitting beneath a street lamp.
‘Don’t fret, it’s good stuff. You’ll be able to wet your whistle, and tell me what it’s like!’
He put a quart jug under the copper spout and opened the tap. Red liquid started to flow, tinkling against the metal, then faltered, diminished to a dribble and gurgled to a halt.