Red Heaven

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s probably true. How come you’re so interested in this book, though, and that period? There isn’t any obvious connection to life out in the wilds of the Trans-Siberian line.’

  He bridled, took a step back and began to turn. ‘I don’t think my story from so far away would be of any interest to you,’ he said in a bitter voice.

  ‘Go on,’ I said: ‘Try me.’

  A handful of other hotel guests had come in, and were gathered round the buffet, talking, and casting odd glances in our direction.

  ‘I’ll tell you, then,’ the waiter said, almost hissing at me, his voice dropping low: ‘I’ll tell you. A little anecdote: mine—my story. It could almost be from Chekhov’s pen. There was one person who showed me all these things: my grandmother—and if I’m anything at all today, I owe that to her, only her. She was a scholar: she came from Petersburg. In her heart she was a true European, and she wanted me to be one, too. Even on the banks of the Amur and Ussuri rivers! Can you imagine? She loved me very much: she used to take me out, when I was a boy, every afternoon in the summertime, once school was over. We would walk from our apartment all the way to the arboretum, and sit together there, for hours on end, underneath the magnolia vines and walnut trees, reading—reading to each other, making our own world of books between us. That’s how things were for me, then, in that wild east you like to talk about, with the wolves and savages. What do you make of that?’

  More than you might imagine, I wanted to say in answer; I formed the words inside me, I was about to speak them—but he had turned his back, he wheeled away from me and headed to the tables full of other guests.

  Weeks went by. I travelled further, then left the East and drifted into other tasks, but I found my thoughts returning to this brief exchange at the Metropol; to the tall student and his scornful eyes and hurt expression; to the book, also, and its reappearance in my life after so long—and the idea came to me that I could measure out the chapters of my existence, which seemed to be blurring almost indistinguishably into each other, by means of my successive encounters with the Princesse de Clèves. So I was struck, when I came back to my apartment early one morning a few months later, and saw the usual pile of magazines and periodicals just inside the door. I picked up the one on top: it was the new issue of a journal I always read through at that time in reverential fashion, as though its pages were a point of entry to worlds of seriousness and enlightenment far beyond my reach. There, prominently displayed, was a long article devoted to Madame de Lafayette. It was by the critic Roger Shattuck, whose ideas were invariably cast in crystalline and balanced prose. He was an author I admired, and always followed, in great part because of the calm and distanced manner of his writing—and it seems very likely that this perspective mirrored, somehow, one of the formative experiences of his early years. As a young military cargo pilot in the closing days of World War II, he made an overflight of the destroyed city of Nagasaki, passing low over the wreckage and the ruined dwellings, little of which remained beyond ghostly outlines imprinted on the scorched surface of the land below. All through his life he tried to set down his impressions of that day, in vain, the words would never come to him—but the tone of clarity and warmth that suffused his later writings may have been that mission’s truest legacy. The piece of his that I had lighted on was called ‘The Pleasures of Abstinence’. Disregarding the title, I read straight through it there and then, bleary-eyed and jet-lagged in the hallway, surrounded by my cases and equipment, and grasping not so much the essay’s argument as the scale and grandeur of its central thesis, which was sketched out, at first, in the most glancing, allusive fashion, only to be illustrated and amplified in a set of fine-grained readings from the novel’s text.

  We must beware standard accounts, says Shattuck—it is his opening salvo—and the version of the Princess he proceeds to give is anything but conventional. On the surface, the book is a familiar kind of love story—fierce emotions, self-dissolution in the transports of the heart—but as it unfolds, the Princess moves from indecisiveness to insight, she finds resolve, she is no longer merely an object of desire, she makes herself into a heroine. From the outset she has been wary of the force of love, which lures its victims from their proper and contracted role in life. She feels its strength: it tempts her, she trembles before it, she is on the verge of being swept away—then a still moment comes. The Princess looks inward. She sees herself: she is astonished at what she has done. At that moment she breaks from the storyline: she is no longer a character in a plot controlled by others. She is aware; she is alone. She decides both to honour the memory of her dead husband, who truly loved her, and to preserve her own love for Nemours, to keep it safe ‘in the amber of the past’.

  In this reading of the book, the Princess does not act: her act lies in reflection. She stands for something rare, both in life and the dream of life one finds in novels—passion joined with lucidity. It is a clean precis: the heart’s disorder redeemed by the descriptive art. How simple that schema seemed to me then, how persuasive. I read on, until it dawned on me that the essay’s true heroine was not the Princess, but the author of her story. Madame de Lafayette performs a renunciation of her own in the pages of her narrative. When the final set-piece scenes draw near, the degree of resolution in her storytelling shifts. All has been precision; suddenly, all is vague. Shattuck explains: ‘A confident author knows when to renounce the lifeblood of narrative: words.’ And so it is: once the Princess has turned away from Nemours, and has fixed on her course, she looks into her heart again, and all is murk and chaos there: not only do her emotions fight each other, they cannot be described. Madame de Lafayette has withdrawn from her story. At this juncture, her style is to suggest, rather than to tell: to renounce her own art, to be discreet, to fall silent, to stand aside.

  And with this, Shattuck’s task is nearly done: he has redefined a book and outlined a new theory of the imagination; he closes with a few sentences that point far forward in time, to the Cubists, and the Impressionists, and the world of modern literature—to a world of art in fragments. His ideas remain in my thoughts to this day: a faded photocopy of his final page has travelled with me from continent to continent, I have pored over it in times of happiness and sadness, and its words still seem fresh: ‘Someone told me as a child how to see a star at night,’ he says: ‘Don’t look directly at it; look slightly to one side of it’—and it often seems to me that this indirection works, in life as much as in art or astronomy. I think back to the time when I set out on my own version of the trail he first blazed for me, a trail which led him, in his search for literary parallels, from seventeenth-century France to nineteenth-century Massachusetts, and on; and I wonder if, unknowingly, I have pursued something very like his method—for as the years passed, I became increasingly convinced that the way to know writers is not to immerse oneself in their works, or even in their hesitations and their silences, but to read swiftly, then glance away, and seek to know them further through the texture of their lives: to follow in their footsteps, to move through their landscapes, to look out onto the sights they once saw. Often this is a simple enough undertaking: authors have their shrines and memorials, and the country of their fiction, they have their house museums, they have their well-marked burial sites. With Madame de Lafayette things are different: scarcely any traces of her world are left today. Her husband’s family mansion in the Auvergne is dedicated to the memory of the revolutionary Lafayette, not to her; the gilded salon she presided over in the Rue de Vaugirard in Paris has long since disappeared. How, then, to find her? Where?

  For some while I felt the best plan would be to get my bearings through the record of her friendship with Madame de Sévigné, almost every day of whose adulthood is documented in punctilious detail: and there are Sévigné monuments aplenty strewn through France; in Paris, where the Musée Carnavalet shows her quarters and makes much of her Chinese lacquer writing desk; at the Château des Rochers near Vitré in Brittany; at the
pavilion in Vichy which bears her name; at Grignan, her daughter’s palace high above the valley of the Rhône—but many of these places are little more than facades, sites of nostalgia, rebuilt, refashioned in recent times to conform with our prevailing image of the past. The realm of Madame de Lafayette’s writings is also hard to reach, though the Princesse de Clèves is as fixed and grounded in place and time as any novel: almost every scene and every conversation unfolds in a precise setting; the particular passageway or gallery or stairwell is routinely specified by the careful author—to no avail. We cannot follow. The ballroom in the old Louvre Palace where the Princess and Nemours first encounter each other has been rebuilt, the royal castles of Saint-Maur and Meudon are long gone. As for the country retreat of Coulommiers, a house so lovely it was called the castle of enchantment, nothing but a ruined portico remains. The pavilion where the Princess makes her confession to her husband, the formal avenues and gardens, the river promenade—all have vanished into the realm of fiction, they endure only in words. Almost the only backdrop still intact is the most overwhelming of them all, the royal palace at Chambord in the Loire Valley, which has just been completed at the midpoint of the novel, when the young King ascends to his throne: here Nemours forms his plan to track down the Princess; here the Prince suffers in his suspicions, and sends out a trusted servant on his rival’s trail; here fever takes hold of him and his life ebbs away. Chambord is also the preferred location for cinematic treatments of the novel, indeed it is the visual emblem of the French Renaissance—and the building has a great deal in common with a stage-set to this day, so much so that it seemed the natural choice of destination for a journey when the Princesse de Clèves came into my thoughts again.

  It was already autumn when at last I had a chance to drive out. It was early in the morning, there were mists along the river, the day was cool and damp. By the time I reached Saint-Dyé on the Loire, the preoccupations that were with me when I first turned off the Périphérique had all vanished, the world seemed very clear around me, and that clarity was matched by my state of mind, I was both alert and calm, I felt poised and balanced in myself. As I drove, stray snatches of memory would surface inside me, only to be replaced by fresh impressions and images, by views from far away and long ago: I had the sense of hearing words and phrases I barely recognised, exchanges from old encounters and half-completed conversations; trivial things, the hum and rustle of the self at rest. How strange our condition is, I thought, caught as we are, captive to a flux of internal sounds and signals that murmur to us constantly, while we believe ourselves to be masters, in full control of our ideas, and pay no heed to this dark, tumultuous, all-inundating tide. In front of me at last I could make out the gateway to the Chambord parklands, but as I drew near, and saw the long tailback of tour buses, the prospect of a slow trudge through a touristic mausoleum seemed suddenly unbearable: I turned back, at speed, reached the autoroute again and headed west, thinking I would fare much better somewhere quiet. The exit signs came flashing by—Amboise, the suburbs of Tours, the city itself, Montjoyeux, Chambray—then, just as I was accelerating past a long flotilla of slow-moving trucks, I caught sight of another turn-off marker, the sign for Chinon and Azay-le-Rideau. I spun the wheel, and forced my way into the line of traffic, and through, onto the slip road, narrowly avoiding a police patrol car, sure at last where I was going: Azay, the dream castle that I had seen in childhood, and would now see again. The road ahead had narrowed; it ran straight as far as the horizon line. I drove on, feeling solemn and uplifted, as though it was a question of a romantic rendezvous, and I was bound for revelations, great truths about the past. The fog had lifted from the river, there was pale sunshine, a strong wind was blowing, whipping the clouds across the sky. Here was Azay-le-Rideau: the marketplace, the pathway through the wooded gardens, the bridge across the river leading to the chateau. Leaves were tumbling from the treetops in cascades—copper-coloured, russet, mottled greenish-brown, dark burnt-red—they pirouetted in the wind as they fell. And here was the entrance, the door ajar. I went inside. There was gentle lighting in the hallway. The ticket counter was unattended. I could hear no voices, no sound at all. I waited for a few minutes, listening. I paced through the rooms on the main floor, tentatively, looking for signs of life. I climbed the great staircase, vaguely wondering if I had any recollection of having seen it before—but what distinguishes one stone ornamental staircase from another? The silence, in such a setting, was oppressive; it made it hard to look. I forced myself to concentrate: on the tapestries, the portraits in their rows, the coffered ceilings, the furnishings of each room in turn, the recessed windows with their view onto the lake—I was studying everything intently: so intently I failed to notice a young woman standing in the doorway behind me, watching me. She made a slight noise. I turned.

  ‘Is this the library?’ she said, a doubtful expression on her face.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said: ‘It looks like one, with all these shelves and cabinets.’

  ‘Are you from the management?’

  ‘Do I look as though I might be?’

  ‘No,’ she said: ‘To be truthful, you don’t. You look like a fairly standard kind of European visitor, just passing through.’

  I felt it might be best to ignore this judgement. ‘So where is everyone?’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps they decided to take the day off,’ she said, and laughed a little. ‘It’s not exactly peak season. What brings you here?’

  ‘It’s a complicated story.’

  I felt a little adrift in the conversation. The woman was elegantly dressed: her manner was quite sharp.

  ‘Well—are you in a hurry for some reason? Tell me. I’d like to hear.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ I said.

  ‘Go on. Don’t you like telling stories, just for the pleasure of it? There’s no danger you’ll be betraying any secrets. We won’t ever meet again, you can be sure of that.’

  And she gave a smile to indicate the astronomical remoteness of such a possibility.

  ‘Please,’ she finished—this with an encouraging gesture of the hands.

  I reached for an explanation, and realised how strange and flimsy the chains of cause and connection that had brought me there would sound; how what I would be describing was a thread of my life.

  ‘It has to do with a book,’ I said: ‘I came across it when I was quite young. Do you know it? The Princesse de Clèves—by Madame de Lafayette.’

  ‘Of course I know it! I don’t think there’s a single woman of a certain social standing or educational attainment in the whole of France who wouldn’t be familiar with it! We used to study it in school. We had to learn the speeches of the Princess off by heart.’

  ‘And they were useful, in adult life?’

  ‘Very!’

  She began reciting from the speech the Princess makes, proclaiming her innocence to her husband, and laughed again at this little flight of rhetoric, and broke off.

  ‘I loved that book too, when I was a young girl,’ she said, with sudden fervour: ‘It’s full of air, and grace, and movement—like a ballet, like a figure in a dance. It gave us an image, an ideal to live by. Literature is much more beautiful than life, isn’t it?’

  ‘Some people would say the idea was for literature to mirror life,’ I said.

  She raised her eyebrows, and frowned a little.

  ‘Realism!’ she said: ‘In Azay-le-Rideau, of all places. God save us! Although I suppose Balzac did like it here, when he made his visits. Come downstairs with me: I want to show you something.’

  I followed. She led the way to one of the main salons, and stood in front of the marble fireplace.

  ‘Do you know what happened here—right here?’ she asked.

  ‘Many things, I imagine.’

  ‘I’ll tell you. It’s not just a pleasure palace. It’s had a history. In the war of 1870 the Prussian Second Army made this the headquarters for their Loire campaign: Prince Friedrich Karl was stationed here. He was a gifted fie
ld commander, he was the victor of Königgrätz and Spicheren, he had just triumphed at the siege of Metz. But of course he was a German, he had an instinct for destroying things of beauty—I’m sorry: you’re not German, are you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I didn’t really think so. In any case, Friedrich Karl was dining in this very room with his staff officers one night when the chandelier from the ceiling above them fell onto the table!’ She clapped her hands for effect. ‘It was a dreadful crash. He was quite convinced there had been an attempt on his life. He told his men to set fire to the chateau. They barely managed to persuade him that it was an accident. Can you imagine?’

  ‘Easily enough,’ I said.

  ‘And have you found something of what you were looking for? Did you really think you’d find the Princess here—or Madame de Lafayette?’ ‘In a way,’ I said.

  I tried to explain. I told her my idea, but in the explanation it made no sense: the past as active, as present all around us, if only we could turn our minds towards it; if only for a few moments we could slip through some side gate beyond the well-defended fortress of our selves. She listened for a while, then clasped her hands together in dramatic fashion.

  ‘Astonishing! You’re not a realist. You’re a true romantic. Time has no meaning for you; death’s not real!’

  ‘I was talking about memory,’ I said: ‘That’s all. Not time, not death. We remember what’s gone. Aren’t books a way of remembering, too? Don’t they keep impressions for us of the past? And maybe places are like that as well, and they preserve the imprint of what’s happened, and we can sense what they know.’

  ‘So—if there’s a book that you love, or a time you love, you can bring it to life if you long for it enough, if you pick over its bones and traces enough. Why, you could almost meet Molière, or Racine, or even Madame de Lafayette along the way! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You really have some ideas, don’t you! Too much imagination!’