by Claude Izner
‘If you wear braces, you’ll have to get used to doing without them, and the same goes for laces,’ continued the man with the Légion d’Honneur. ‘Let’s go, quietly now.’
He spoke in a neutral tone, staring at a point just over Felix Charenton’s shoulder. Felix turned round and saw surging out of a hidden entrance a heavy-set individual dressed in white.
‘My jewels! Where are the jewels? God Almighty! You’re mad! Let me go!’
Restrained by the heavy-set fellow, he thrashed about and bucked, in the grip of a terrible panic that twisted his guts.
‘Help! Help me! Stop thief!’
Dr Rambuteau had heard enough to convince him to administer his new patient a radical treatment.
‘Nurse, shower him.’
‘To be continued…Oh, misery. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happens. It’s so well written you can really believe in it. Apparently Felix Charenton is based on an actual person, and he’s had a relapse. It’s not surprising, he was pushed over the edge, poor man. He was sent to the asylum because he completely lost his mind! All those cold showers would be enough to addle anyone’s brain!’
‘Well, yes, but it wouldn’t do Joseph any harm to shave once in a while; it’s a question of cleanliness. He’s letting himself go. Don’t you think there’s a strange smell in here? Good Lord, what’s that stink?’
A strange, rangy fellow stood at the door to the bedroom, a bowl in his hands.
‘Excuse me, are you Madame Pignot?’
‘Yes, that’s me, but what do you want? It’s normal to knock before entering.’
‘Your son sent me, a nice young man. I went to see him at the bookshop to discuss the death of my cousin, Basile Popêche. Monsieur Pignot told me you were suffering with your joints, so I didn’t hang about. I went straight off to find Pulchérie.’
‘Pulchérie? Who on earth’s that?’
‘A lovely little goat who’s just had a kid and who I nourish on rosemary, so that her milk is healing for rheumatics. I’ve brought you a bowl. You have to drink it all down right to the last drop. I’ll bring you some every day. It will sort you out in no time at all.’
‘I’d like some too!’ cried Madame Ballu.
At lunchtime Victor did not want to annoy Germaine, so he forced himself to sit down with Kenji and Iris and eat the goose sweetbreads with turnip. Conversation was limited to the sales made that morning and the drop in temperature, and other subjects less sensitive than the sudden increase in the size of the family. Then Victor took his leave, and went through the apartment to exit by the outside staircase. He came across Madame Ballu and stopped to speak to her, struck by her worried expression.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, Monsieur Legris, it’s just that I’m worried about Euphrosine. I’ve just come from her and her knee is very painful – her old rheumatism playing up again; she won’t be able to pull her cart any more. She’s lucky to have such a devoted son. Joseph goes home each lunchtime to prepare her a meal. When I’m old and decrepit there’ll be no one to look after me, seeing as how that imbecile Ballu kicked the bucket before we’d had time to make an heir…’
‘You’ve got plenty of time to work it out – you’re the youngest of all of us!’ said Victor, continuing down the stairs.
‘You say that, you say that, but I have my aches and pains and they’re not all in the mind!’
Tasha’s wrist was becoming stiff, so she laid her paintbrush to one side and stepped back to study Nicolas Poussin’s Moses Saved from the Waters, hanging in the Louvre, which she was trying to reproduce. She pressed her finger on a yellow drape of her painting to accentuate a fold. She was quite pleased with her work. Thanks to Victor she was now associated with the Natanson brothers and had visited La Revue Blanche to attend the first exhibition of a very young artist, Édouard Vuillard. Through him she had met a painter from Bordeaux, Odile Redon, whose strange compositions she had admired and whose advice she thought about constantly. According to him, art should be the servant of the unconscious mind, should strive to reproduce the interior world of the artist, putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible. Redon had encouraged her to distance herself from the impressionists, whom he reproached for simply letting nature speak for itself, and to study the old masters, whose work was continued by Ingres, Delacroix, then Gustave Moreau and even Degas. She had spent time in the halls of the Louvre dedicated to French painting and had discovered an affinity with the severe charm and tempered gravity of Poussin.
Inspired by The Childhood of Bacchus she had sketched a female nude, which had much impressed Victor by the modernity of the pose, and was now launched on an entire canvas.
‘That figure of the women bent over the baby in its basket is very touching. Could you not undress her a little?’
Victor was standing behind Tasha, leaning eagerly towards the easel. She threatened him with her paintbrush.
‘I forebade you to come!’
‘What were you afraid of? That I would encounter one of your many admirers? Is the abominable Laumier anywhere near?’
‘No need to worry about him. Since Gauguin left for Tahiti in April, Laumier is inconsolable and never leaves his studio.’
‘No doubt he’s churning out another pictorial theory. So what was it you were afraid of?’
‘That you would distract me. For once I am half-satisfied with what I have done…I think I’m on to something. I think I’ve opened the door to one of those secret chambers of the mind Kenji is so keen on. That woman, that child in the water, I’m going to transpose them to modern times, to a wash-house perhaps, and paint them in my own way. No doubt it’s a little too impressionistic for Redon…’
‘Redon? Who’s that?’
‘…but too bad; I’m sensitive to the interplay of light. I’ll reduce the depth, that will make it more dreamlike and symbolic than my previous works, while at the same time remaining true to life. A blend of styles. What do you think?’
‘I’m happy that you have found your own way. I think I have also found mine and that gives me confidence. I’m going to dedicate my photographs to children at work, not for the aesthetic effect, but to bear witness to a reality that amongst many other things will contribute to a deeper understanding of the society in which we live.’
‘That’s wonderful, Victor! We must celebrate that!’
‘I’ve already planned it. My furniture has been delivered. This evening I am moving in officially to my bachelor apartment. I am inviting you to dinner at Le Grand Hôtel. Afterwards if you have nothing better in mind, we can spend a chaste evening by the fire discussing painting and photography…’
‘And you can also tell me all about the thrilling investigation you have been involved in, unintentionally, I am sure…’
The caretaker in charge of guarding the new gallery of French artists in the Denon Pavilion turned away as he passed a couple whose loving embrace was really rather shocking. The nudity displayed on the canvases surrounding him prompted him to hurry into the next gallery, where the sight of Charles Le Brun’s Battles of Alexander the Great restored his equilibrium.
Parisian Nightlife in the 1890s
The 1890s saw the heyday of the cafés-concert and nightclubs, which embodied all the modernity and daring of belle-époque Paris. There were many such venues, to which both Parisians and visitors to the city flocked in the evening, mostly concentrated in and around Montmartre, the hub of artistic life in the city.
Founded in 1881 by Rudolph Salis, Le Chat-Noir, the first-ever cabaret, began life as an informal artistic salon. Artists, musicians and writers were invited to Salis’s home to discuss their ideas and perform their work, amongst them Claude Debussy, Paul Verlaine, Erik Satie, Aristide Bruant and Caran d’Ache. It quickly became a fashionable nightspot, where the bohemian world rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The cabaret gave rise to a journal also called Le Chat-Noir, with contributions from Salis’s regulars. It was successfully publi
shed on a weekly basis for over ten years.
Aristide Bruant, immortalised in a poster by Toulouse-Lautrec, went on to open his own cabaret, Le Mirliton, which became the home of satire and was particularly famous for Bruant’s songs in which he made fun of the upper class members of his clientele.
Perhaps the place that most symbolises the Paris of that era is the greatest café-concert of them all, Le Moulin-Rouge, whose fin-de-siècle incarnation lives on in the art of Toulouse-Lautrec. Built in 1889 by Joseph Oller, it still stands today on Boulevard de Clichy in the neighbourhood of Pigalle. It was famed for its spectacular music hall, which included many different kinds of entertainer, including the extraordinary Pétomane who, amongst other tricks, could fart the tune of La Marsellaise at will. But it is as the home of the cancan for which Le Moulin-Rouge is best known. The dance had first emerged in dance halls much earlier in the nineteenth century and was originally performed by men, and then by courtesans during the Second Empire. Yet it was at Le Moulin-Rouge with a chorus line made up of professional dancers that the cancan took on the form by which it is still known today. Respectable members of society would come along to be shocked at the flying splits and extraordinary high kicks of legendary dancers such as La Goulue, Jane Avril and Nini Pattes en l’Air. And the tradition continues to this day at Le Moulin-Rouge, where visitors can still see regular performances of the outrageous cancan.
Also by Claude Izner
Murder on the Eiffel Tower
The Disappearance at Père-Lachaise
Notes
1 This catastrophe left forty-four people dead and more than a hundred injured.
2 Situated on the left bank up until 1957 on the site now occupied by the Jussieu Campus of the University of Paris.
3 Now called Gare d’Austerlitz.
4 The river that used to cross the fifth and thirteenth arrondissements of Paris. Today it is channelled underground.
5 Le Carrefour des Écrasés – the crossroads at Rue Montmartre and Boulevard Poissonnière.
6 The Salon des Indépendents was founded in 1884 by Georges Seurat and welcomed the work of all artists, in contrast to the Salon des Beaux-Arts, which had very strict admission policies.
7 Her real name was Louise Weber (1869–1929).
8 On 15 March 1891, every region of France aligned its time with Paris, which became the official time of the country.
9 In 1891, during a May Day demonstration in the little town of Fourmies in the Upper Loire, soldiers fired on a crowd, killing nine people.
10 (1602–1674). A Japanese representative painter of the early Edo Period, most famous for his folding screens and hanging scrolls.
11 See The Père-Lachaise Mystery, Gallic Books.
12 Drinking fountains scattered throughout Paris, fifty of which were donated to the city by British philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace in 1872.
13 Song by Maurice Marc.
14 See Murder on the Eiffel Tower and The Père-Lachaise Mystery, Gallic Books.
15 French journalist (1833–1902), who was a theatre critic and the author of a number of novels.
16 Her real name was Lucienne Beuze. Her nickname means literally ‘drainage grille’.
17 A popular figure of the Latin Quarter during the 1890s. He was a bohemian and autodidact, who supported himself doing odd jobs, and became the right-hand man of the poet Verlaine, selling off his mementoes of the poet after Verlaine’s death in 1896.
18 A drinker of liquefied ether, a nineteenth-century practice that fell out of favour when the gas was reclassified as a poison.
19 A language constructed by a German Roman Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, in 1879–1880, after he dreamt that God wanted him to create an international language.
20 French painter (1864–1951), known for his lithographs, etchings and watercolours.
21 A singer whose real name was Léon Fourneau; his name was first ‘latinised’ to Fornax, and then made to sound Russian by inversing the letters: Xanrof.
22 Play (and novel) by Alphonse Daudet.
23 See The Père-Lachaise Mystery, op. cit.
24 Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, naturalist and biologist who had a profound influence on the work of later naturalists, including Charles Darwin.
25 French writer (1829–1890). She contributed to the Journal de la Jeunesse and the Bibliothèque rose.
26 Xavier de Montepin, 1881. Jules Mary, 1886.
27 The policeman hero of the novels of Émile Gaboriau.
28 Alain-René Lesage (1668–1747): Le Diable Boiteux.
29 See The Père-Lachaise Mystery, op. cit.
30 Impossible. (Author’s note.)
31 See The Père-Lachaise Mystery, op. cit.
32 Alexandre Dumas the elder: Ange Pitou (1851).
33 Novel by Karl-Joris Huysmans (1879).
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE MONTMARTRE INVESTIGATION. Copyright © 2003 by Éditions 10/18, Département d’Univers Poche. English translation copyright © 2008 by Gallic Books. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Izner, Claude.
[Carrefour des Ecrases. English]
The Montmartre investigation: a Victor Legris mystery / Claude Izner; translated by Lorenza Garcia and Isabel Reid.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-312-38376-3
1. Booksellers and bookselling—France—Paris—Fiction. 2. Paris (France)—History—1870-1940—Fiction. I. Garcia, Lorenza. II. Reid, Isabel. III. Title.
PQ2709.Z64C313 2009
843'.92—dc22
2010021165
First published in France as Le carrefour des Écrasés by Éditions 10/18