by Robb, Graham
In July 1917, when the sirens had sounded, he had climbed to the balcony with some of the other diners to see the first German planes over Paris since January 1916. The searchlights from Le Bourget had lit up the celestial dogfight, and he had watched the constellations of stars and planes rise and disintegrate, replicating with breathtaking accuracy the apocalyptic firmament in El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz. He had walked home blissfully in the dark while the Gothas dropped their bombs. One night, the maid had found little splinters of metal in the brim of his hat, and exclaimed, ‘Ah, Monsieur, you didn’t come home in the car!’, and he said, ‘No. Why? It was much too beautiful for that.’
On 30 January 1918, feeling the urge to hear some music unmediated by the théâtrophone, he accepted an invitation from the Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld to attend a private performance at her home in the Rue Murillo of Borodin’s Second String Quartet. At the end of the evening, he was leaving the house when the sirens began their mournful warning. It was half-past eleven. A squadron of Gothas, taking advantage of the unusually clear skies, had flown high over the French defences north of Compiègne and were dropping their bombs on the north-eastern suburbs. His usual chauffeur had been unavailable, and the old man who had replaced him was unable to start the Renault. Since Borodin’s poignant and stately notturno was still playing in his mind, and since he did not wish to repeat the farewell ceremony, he stood by the car while the chauffeur fiddled with the engine. Now and then, people rushed past, heading for the nearest Métro station, which was less than four hundred metres away.
Having hit their targets in the suburbs, the Gothas were now flying over Paris. Some of the explosions were clearly audible, and it was possible to tell on which quartiers the bombs were falling. At last, the engine coughed and rattled. Marcel climbed into the seat, and they set off slowly down the Rue Murillo.
They had crossed the Rue de Monceau and were heading along the Avenue de Messine when the engine stuttered and the car lurched to a halt. They were still close enough to take shelter in the Métropolitain, at Courcelles or at Miromesnil, but the chauffeur was busy with the engine, and Marcel himself had never felt the slightest fear during air-raids, and had never once even visited the basement of his building–and wouldn’t have known how to get there–because of the damp air and the dust.
Fire engines rattled along the boulevard. He thought of Parisians crowded together in the darkness, like Christians in the Catacombs, and of things that certain friends of his had said: that, in the black night of the Métropolitain, when the bombs were falling, men and women satisfied their desires without the preliminaries of etiquette. He had written a passage on the subject for the last volume of his novel:
Some of those Pompeians, as the fire of heaven rained down on them, descended into the corridors of the Métro, knowing that they would not be alone there; and the darkness that irradiates everything like a new element abolishes the first phase of pleasure and offers direct access to a domain of caresses that is normally attained only after a certain length of time.
He had promised himself that, one night or day, he would witness those ‘secret rites’ for himself.
Six or seven streets away, towards Saint-Lazare, he heard the screeching glissando, then the sound of windows imploding and a building rushing to the ground. He waited by the car. The chauffeur turned the crank in vain. A squeak of metal, imitating the interval of E and A sharp, and he might have heard the beautiful notturno as though it had been playing all along and he had only to be silent to hear it. Borodin had composed his second movement as though in anticipation of the telephone, with interruptions and expectant pauses, and the cello that seemed to fade like a distant voice, but then continued on its way. It was the sound of regret and its remedy, a slightly faltering serenity, like that of someone unexpectedly able to breathe in a place of danger and confinement. The bombs were a symphonic accompaniment, a reminder of tribulations overcome. They were a celebration of the knowledge that his life’s work would be completed in time.
The engine roared into life. A few moments later, they were parked in front of his home at 102, Boulevard Haussmann. He climbed out of the car. A bomb exploded barely five hundred yards away in the Rue d’Athènes. He tried to usher the chauffeur into the hall and offered him a bed for the night in the drawing room. But the man, it seemed, was hard of hearing. ‘I’m off back to Grenelle,’ he said. ‘It was just a false alarm. Nothing fell on Paris.’
Next day, in bed, he read in the newspaper that when the sirens had sounded, hundreds of people had rushed out to take shelter in the Métro, but had found the doors closed. The Prefect of Police had decreed that, from now on, during air raids, every station of the Métro would remain open throughout the night.
THE LAST VOLUME of the novel to appear in his lifetime–Sodome et Gomorrhe II–was published in the spring of 1922. He knew that it would take time for his readers to become accustomed to the new idiom: at first, the novel would leave them feeling frayed and disoriented. He had once said that he did not write novels that could be read ‘between one station and the next’. Yet his readers had evidently kept up with modern developments and were eager for innovations. He was more pleased than he would have thought when he learned that from the very day of publication, Parisians were reading Àla recherche du temps perdu in buses and trams, and even in the Métro, oblivious to their neighbours and so engrossed in the novel that when they reached the end of a sentence, the station had passed, and they had to cross to the other platform to wait for the train that would take them back to their destination.
THE NOTRE-DAME EQUATION
TO THE SMALL NUMBER of questing spirits whose daily perambulation in Paris was a divinatory walk through a sacred labyrinth, and whose indoor activities–despite fumes in the hallway and strange lights under the door–were a complete mystery to their neighbours, the change, which was both subtle and profound, appeared to have occurred at about the time of the First World War.
Their ancient science expressed only its most basic precepts in words, and so they would not have been able to offer much in the way of evidence. If they had been willing or able to convert their knowledge into the simple currency of fact, they might have adduced some apparently insignificant phenomena: an alteration of the light that fell on certain buildings at certain times of day, a modification in the nesting habits of birds or an imperceptible shift in the anatomical geometry of Parisians as they walked along a street or looked to the sky to see what the weather was going to do. They might have hinted at something more devastating than the annihilation of a million soldiers and civilians. But no one would have believed them anyway, and it was only when modern science had progressed to a point where the insights of the two disciplines became mutually comprehensible that one of those questing spirits (the subject of this story) tried to warn his contemporaries. By then, the world was once again on the brink of catastrophe, and although the ancient science proved its practical worth in unexpected ways, few people had any use for its wisdom.
As for the rest of the population, only those who had emerged alive from the horrific crucible of war had any inkling of the change. Paris had sat out the conflagration like a medieval citadel, suffering little more than a chipped turret and a dented portcullis. It was this near-total preservation of the city that alerted some people to the fact that the capital of France had disappeared, along with the old world, and been replaced by an almost perfect copy of itself.
If any single event had the power to reveal the change to ordinary eyes, it was the great Peace Conference, which, from January 1919 to January 1920, turned Paris into a gaudy bazaar of foreign dignitaries. Delegates came from east and west to redraw the map of the world and to share the spoils of war. Many saw their hopes squashed and smeared across marble floors by the patent-leather boot of international diplomacy. While Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando held stately discussions in sumptuous hotels, ‘flooded after sundown with dazzling light
, and filled by day with the buzz of idle chatter, the shuffling of feet, the banging of doors, and the ringing of bells’,* other emissaries, from countries whose names were known only to scholars, envied the waiters and chambermaids who had access to the tables and beds of the mighty, and as they laid their glittering robes of state on the dusty coverlets of cheap hotels, felt themselves shrivel up into illegible footnotes in the history of Europe.
Little attempt was made to sustain the illusion of lasting peace. Recently installed dictators sought to confirm the advantages they had gained by the massacre of neighbouring populations. Others, whose star was in the descendant, blew vigorously on the embers of their ambitions, and quietly pondered future policies of assassination and deceit. Mortified to be assigned to the depressing Hôtel des Réservoirs and to be forced to carry their own luggage, the German mission observed how much influence attached to the House of Rothschild, and was struck by the bitter conviction that the war had been staged by Jews and Freemasons, and that the United States of America had intended all along to play the role of deus ex machina.
Though their fortunes varied enormously, victors and vanquished alike took part in the same unconscious conspiracy to revive the glories of the past, and to behave as though the capital of Europe had never seen her luxury grow dim. In the ballroom of the Hôtel Majestic, while the pavements outside were rutted with frozen snow as sharp as steel, the British delegation held an extravagant party at which ‘the latest forms of dancing were to be seen, including the jazz and the hesitation waltz’. At such events were policies discussed that would decide the destinies of millions. Men who were called upon to exercise the power of rational thought with purity and precision pored over dinner menus as long as treaties. They whirled their unidentified foreign partners across the floor and fell prey to the collective madness. Many of those who observed these spectacles of wild dissipation as they passed in the street, begging for relief from cold and hunger, gave voice to the sentiment expressed by Cicero: ‘Quam parva sapientia regitur mundus!’*
Yet even the conquerors were strangely muted in their exultations. As Dr E. J. Dillon, an eye-witness and participant, observed, ‘the smile of youth and beauty was cold like the sheen of winter ice. The shadow of death hung over the institutions and survivals of the various civilizations and epochs which were being dissolved in the common melting-pot.’ Less than two hours away by motor car, black hordes, whose limbs stuck out of shell-ploughed fields, were a ghastly scene from a medieval tarot, convincing those who made the journey from Paris out of curiosity that nothing would ever change, that dominions would continue to flourish and decay, and that the means would always be found, in spite of everything, to prevent any conspicuous diminution in the sum total of human misery.
WHEN THE DELEGATES of the Peace Conference had returned to their homelands and places of exile, they left behind them an atmosphere of half-reality in which preposterous things were strangely plausible. It rose like a miasma from the Seine, drifted past the fluted columns of the Assemblée Nationale, and crept along the corridors of power. Parliamentary debates went on as before, but now Truth wore a garb that made her fiendishly difficult to identify. Thus it was that a group of republican députés, moved by the pleas of the exploited people of Poldavia, took up their cause against the capitalist oppressor and were about to petition the Foreign Ministry when the true status of Poldavia was revealed, and the letters signed by Lineczi Stantoff and Lamidaëff of the Poldavian Defence Committee were found to have been written by a member of the extreme-right Action Française movement. Only then was the name Lamidaëff seen to be L’Ami d’A.F. and the exotic syllables of ‘Lineczi Stantoff’ to contain the words ‘l’inexistant’.
Radiant particles of wisdom were always surrounded by clouds of ignorance. A few men, such as the enigmatic figure whose intervention in the affairs of the world is the basis of this true story, realized that the Great War and its political consequences were a distraction. Or rather, he saw that the ruination of Europe, perpetrated in the name of a cause that remained obscure, was merely a side effect of the confusion that had entered men’s minds. The war to end all wars was just the most recent of the ‘violent storms and tempests that attend the collision of the volatile and the incombustible, the Universal Solvent and the lifeless body’, when, in layman’s terms, the material composition of reality itself evolves new configurations that elude the control of the civilized mind.
There was surely some cruel significance in the fact that the change had manifested itself in a city that had been the refuge of wisdom since the end of the Dark Ages. Even before the war, the humming hive of laboratories and lecture rooms had also been a magical place where people came in search of non-existent treasures. More than a century after its disappearance from the Sainte-Chapelle, when the sans-culottes had waged their mindless war on gullibility, there were sightings of the Holy Sponge of the Passion, which Louis IX had purchased for an exorbitant sum from Baudouin II, Emperor of Constantinople, in 1241. According to some lovers of the city who claimed to remember this as a golden age, Paris was a treasure house where manuscripts of unknown ancient texts, maps of vanished continents and authentic sacred relics could be bought at flea markets for next to nothing. They were remembering a time when everything had been at once believable and incredible. Every day at Les Invalides, veterans with wooden arms and legs persuaded visitors to wait, sometimes for hours, to see the invalid with the wooden head, who had been there just a moment before and had probably gone for his shave but would be back directly. At the Bibliothèque Nationale, librarians were often importuned by bogus readers poking about in the flower-beds, looking for Cleopatra’s mummy, which, having been deposited in the archives by Napoleon Bonaparte, was said to have been removed from the cellars when her fragrance began to spread through the stacks, and to have been buried in the inner courtyard one rainy evening in 1870.
Most troubling of all, the very embodiment of mortal beauty had been veiled with suspicion and was no longer the object of unquestioning devotion. In August 1911, Da Vinci’s masterpiece, La Joconde, disappeared from the Louvre. An exhaustive search turned up the frame but not the painting, which had gone home on the bus with the Italian carpenter who had made the glass case that was supposed to protect her from anarchists and vandals. She spent more than two years in a garret, smiling enigmatically at her abductor and sharing the warmth of his stove, and was only recovered when the carpenter tried to sell her to the Uffizi. But in the meantime, rumours had spread of an American collector who commissioned perfect copies of stolen paintings and then pretended to restore the originals to the grateful museums. The new science of fingerprinting proved its worth, and photographs were presented that showed every crack and wrinkle of the original painting, yet no one could quite summon up the conviction that the recovered Mona Lisa was the real one. The more means there were of determining authenticity, it seemed, the more doubt was cast on the artefact. And even if it was the original Mona Lisa, how was one to judge her timeless beauty, since even men with long experience of such things had recently admired, at the Salon des Indépendants, an Adriatic Sunset painted by Lolo the donkey from the Lapin Agile in Montmartre?
Reality itself fell into decay, and in that darkness, luminous spirits such as Marie Curie and Henri Poincaré, who alone appeared to understand the muddled workings of the universe, became the objects of religious veneration. Others, to whom mathematical equations were meaningless hieroglyphs, longed for the old-fashioned certainty of a sacred miracle. Every day, hundreds of pilgrims queued at the Chapelle de la Médaille Miraculeuse in the Rue du Bac, where the Virgin Mary had commanded a young novice to have a medallion struck–the medallion, bearing the Virgin’s image, to be reproduced as many times as required, and each one to be as genuine as the next. Unfortunately, the market in fake medallions flourished as never before, and even those glinting, tangible icons of cosmic truth were contaminated with doubt.
Sceptics might have sneered at what they call
ed ‘superstition’, but how could anyone be expected to distinguish fantasy from reality when things that happened in broad daylight in front of large crowds were called into question? The Tour de France–the great sporting symbol of national unity that began and ended in Paris–should have been immune from the corrosive effects of incredulity. It seemed to represent a simple application of human will and elementary mechanics. Yet even those who witnessed it could not trust the evidence of their eyes. Some of the riders were known to have boarded trains and to have pedalled away from quiet stations in the night. Others were thought to have shared the impossible burden with identical twins. In 1904, the first four riders to finish–who ever after asserted their innocence–were disqualified for cheating, and the victory went to Henri Cornet, who was only twenty years old and who, for a reason that has been lost to history, was known as ‘Rigolo’ (‘the Joker’). Some of those who had actually seen the riders struggle into Paris on flat tyres or on foot, with a mangled bicycle frame around their neck, firmly believed that the Tour de France was a lucrative fiction, cooked up every July by the journalists of L’Auto, who had been seen drinking in the back room of a café at Montgeron, writing Homeric reports of fantastic exploits in the Alps.
IN THAT AGE OF rampant unreality, when the supposedly deranged Surrealists of Montmartre and Montparnasse were simply the faithful chroniclers of what remained of reality, it might be thought that the sleepless seekers after truth who studied the ancient science of Hermes were suffering a crisis of confidence. Yet even one of the more conservative estimates puts the number of practising alchemists in post-war Paris at about ten thousand. Since so much trade and manufacture had moved out to the suburbs, this would make alchemy one of the city’s leading industries between the wars.