Now, her whole mien no more changed after another great war than those of her daughters parading the Grands Boulevards, quickly restored with cosmetics after their own brief battles, murmuring, like them, —Vous m’emmenez? . . . Paris prepared to celebrate an anniversary. It was her two thousandth anniversary, and that not one of birth, but of the first time, under another name, when she was raped: a morsel for a monarch, Lutetia succumbed after a struggle, and later on, like her daughters parading now between the Madeleine and the Café de la Paix, took a more gaudy name for her professional purposes, shrining the innocence of the maiden name in history.
Thus brilliant in flowered robes, like those Greek law decreed for courtesans, Paris soon gained the ascendancy, soon stood out like those prostitutes of Rome who, it was said, “could be distinguished from virtuous matrons only by the superior elegance of their dress and the swarm of admirers who surrounded them.” As fashions have originated with courtesans throughout the ages, she soon became their arbiter. And since she was, like the better class of whores in ancient Greece, a trained entertainer, no more opprobrium attached to distinguished men visiting her than fell to Socrates visiting Aspasia: statesmen and generals came too, as Pericles came to Aspasia, and even after she had ruined him, and found herself accused of impiety, the great man appeared at her trial as her advocate, only to find his eloquence to fail him in court: “he could only clasp Aspasia to his breast and weep.”
Other lands were not slow to credit her reputation as the author of all civilized innovations in the western world, and as much as five centuries ago the English, Italians, and even Turks, readily acknowledged that civilization had been enhanced with syphilis by the French. Paris exiled her overcivilized members across the river to Saint Germain des Prés, which had now once more become a haven for those crippled by novel and contagious disease. They behaved in this sanctuary very much as they had then, prohibited, as they were in the fifteenth century, “under pain of death, from conversing with the rest of the world.”
On the terrace of the Flore, a passably dressed man who had compounded a new philosophy sat surrounded by some of the unshaven, unshorn, unwashed youth who espoused it. Four ruthlessly well-organized Hollanders, in the picturesque dress of their native land, sang Red River Valley from the sidewalk, and passed a cute wooden shoe among the captive audience. Someone whispered, —I’m actually going to join the church, the Roman Catholic. Someone else warned that the Pope and the whole works was going to Brazil. Someone else said that the Polar Icecap was growing, and would soon tip the earth over. Across the street on the terrace of the Brasserie Lipp, two pin-headed young men in gray flannel compared shiny green passports, thumbing forty-one blank pages. They were with two square-shouldered girls, whose small breasts were attached quite low to accommodate the fashion which the dresses imposed. One of the girls said, —I think my conçerage is returning all my mail marked ankonoo because I only gave her a thousand francs poorbwar. Behind them, another young man in gray flannels said he had known one of the girls, she was on the Daisy Chain at Vassar. On the terrace of the Reine Blanche next door, a golden-haired boy said, —I just want to say that being in Paris is a big fat wonderful thing . . . and beside him a youth whose plume of hair stood uncombed with painstaking care laid a hand on his and said, —Be-t tout nô ônelé etheur boïze frem dthe younaïtedd stétce in Paris is laïke kemming tout a bagnkouètt and bring yoûrze ône lennch.
On the terrace of the Royale Saint Germain, Hannah was told that a friend of hers was coming up from Italy, Don . . . what-was-it? And she responded, —Hey diddle diddle It bends in the middle, can you buy me a beer?
—I heard they hung one of Max’s pictures upside down at his show.
—So what, Hannah said and she sounded morose. —Nobody noticed it until today, it’s a real compliment to the coherence of the design. She was sitting at a table with an Australian sculptor who made leather sandals, a colored girl in the Stuart tartan, and a professional Mexican, who looked blank. Hannah was staring at a ribbon of newspaper, with a note scribbled in the margin.
—Who was that guy Charles that Max was talking about? He said he finally made it? under a subway? that he held up the IRT for twenty-five minutes . . .
—Will you shut up about it? Hannah responded, to amend her tone with, —and buy me a beer?
The Australian sculptor who made leather sandals said that Beethoven’s duet for viola and cello sounded to him like two bulky women rummaging under a bed. Behind him a girl said, —Of course I like music, but not just to listen to.
—And you know how he paints them? He climbs up a ladder with a piece of string soaked in ink, and he drops it from the ceiling onto a canvas on the floor.
—We’ve just bought a lovely big Pissarro . . .
—My uncle had one, it was so big he couldn’t park it anywhere.
—Max got good write-ups on his show. The critic in La Macule said . . .
—Why shouldn’t he? Hannah interrupted. —They came around asking for a ten per cent cut on anything he sold if they gave him good reviews, sure he said yes, any good publicity agent charges ten per cent.
—Look, is it true what I heard about Max? that his mistress is the wife of . . . (and here the name of a well-known painter was whispered in Hannah’s ear) —. . . who slips him her husband’s unfinished canvases that he’s discarded and forgotten about, and Max touches them up and sells them as originals?
—My uncle finally smashed it up one night, somebody on a motorcycle thought he was two motorcycles and tried to go between them.
—And then he told me he spent two days in bed with this real high-class whore he picked up in the Café de la Paix, after he told her he couldn’t pay in francs, all he had was dollars, and he flashes this roll of tens and twenties and fifties, so she paid all the bills at the George Sank and gave him a terrific time for a couple of days and then rolled him, he said he’d like to see her trying to change Confederate States money in the Banque de France. What’s this, a review of his book?
Hannah pushed the ribbon of paper forth saying, —The poor bastard who wrote it sends it over to him. Read it, you can see he misses the whole idea. Somebody in the Trib compared it to Nightwood.
—Here he comes now, isn’t it?
Hannah looked up, to see Max approach, smiling; to ask, —Hey, can you buy me a beer?
At the next table a girl said, —Plagiary? What’s that. Handel did it. They all did it. Even Mozart did it, he even plagiarized from himself, just look at the wind instruments in the dinner scene with Leporello. Someone said he’d been knocked down by a priest riding a bicycle with a red plush seat in the Rue Zheetliquer; someone said she had been knocked down by a nun on a bicycle in Rue Dauphine street: someone with a beard said he had never seen either a nun or a priest on the left bank, and added, —I just got a new holy man myself. —A what? —You know, an analyst. Have you been up to the exhibition of paintings by nuts up in the Saint Anne hospital? We got a nice section, the ones by American nuts. Some of them are dirty as hell.
And someone said, —Nothing queer about Carruthers . . . to conclude, once for all, the story of that subaltern and his mare.
—Marecones, muttered the man in the sharkskin suit.
—Wie Eulen nach Athen bringen . . .
—Marecones y nada mas.
There, on the terrace of the Reine Blanche Rudy and Frank held hands under the table, and talked about the wedding banquet: Caviar Volga, consommé Grands Viveurs, paillettes, homard au whisky, cœur de Charollais Edouard VII, perdreau rôti sur canapé . . . champagnes, Mumm 1928, Château Issan 1925 . . . —And in the ceremony we just told him to leave out that vulgar part about the bodies of man and woman clinging to each other. They said afterwards that I was quite dewy-eyed.
—Sonny’s terribwy upset, so jealous! He trwied to do away with himself, did he tell you?
—How?
—By hitting himself savagewy in the temple with a fountain pen. But where was Big Anna? I
s that one jealous too?
—No baby, Big Anna telephoned from some absurd place in Italy. They were going to drive up in some nameless person’s new Renault, and they were somewhere in the Fremola valley when it didn’t go right, so they opened the hood to look at the engine, and there was nothing in there but an old tire, they must just have dropped the engine right out. So they just left it there, it was the only thing they could do. In the Saint Gotthard Pass, it was the only thing they could do.
—Rudy has the sweetest flowered toilet bowl, but he lent it to someone before we found this place on the Quai d’Orsay, and they just won’t give it back. They’re growing something in it, and we want to use it.
Across the river, up Montmartre, that hill whose name had been so many times ransomed since Saint Denis showed up carrying his head, an immense lopsided Negro in epaulettes guarded a bar where a heaving hunchback played an accordion like a beast lovemaking, a girl heaved as though about to be sick, and her girl friend said enticingly to a lone stranger, —She dancing, wonderful dancer. You dance? —No. —You pay me drink? —No. —You ingliss? —No. —You swiss? —No. —You jermn? —No. —You hollandais? —No. —You dance? —No. —You pay me drink? The hunchback would go on heaving over his accordion, the girl over the bar, the huge doorman at the door, but they would not see Arny again, stumbling in from his hotel in Rochechouart with his shirt on inside out and the hem of his coat pinned up, for even Henry’s Hotel was no longer standing: the day had been a sunny one, and Arny, finishing a bottle about breakfast time, put it empty in the windowsill and sat down to try to write a letter. —Dear Maude, I am just trying to figure things out . . . it commenced, and got no further, for he was soon asleep over it, his head down on his folded arms. The sunlight filled the room, and the wallpaper looked like it was going to descend and devour him. Still he slept. The sun caught the bottle, which drew its light and heat to a sharp point on the bedclothes. Arny woke to find himself engulfed in smoke. Before he could stand, it was flames. He got to the window, where there was a sign pasted, possibly by some jester: On est prié de n’ouvrir pas ce fenêtre parce que le façade de l’hôtel lui compter pour se supporter . . . Arny did not read French, even when it was written by an American. With some effort he opened the window, smoke billowed out, and the façade of Henry’s Hotel collapsed.
In the more fashionable part of town below, tourists continued to stroll the Grands Boulevards, marveling at French cooking, côte de veau, côte de porc, entrecôte, biftec, bistek, pommes frites, pommes frites. The two small-headed youths had brought their young ladies back to the right bank for supper, and they advanced up the Boulevard des Capucines like the horses in a chariot quadriga, stallions on the outside. —Why don’t you go up ahead, Charley, see if one of them will approach you, pretend you’re not with us, go ahead, I want to see how she does it . . . None did. They came on, spavined stiff with formality, spaved and gelded, to a small restaurant whose small sign said, Son menu Touristique 400 francs, You Speack English. —Hors d’oeuvres veryay pertoo, puis boeuf à la sale anglaise. —Comment, m’sr? —Boeuf à la sale anglaise. —Comment? —Ici, damn it . . . He pointed to the menu and repeated. —Ahh oui, boeuf salé à l’anglaise, oui m’sr . . . —That’s what I said, damn it, I mean Christ, he added when the waitress was gone, —they can’t even understand their own language.
But on most hands the French were still being taken at their own evaluation. They were still regarded as the most sensitive connoisseurs of alcohol. Barbaric Americans, the barbaric English, drank to get drunk; but the French, with cultivated tastes and civilized sensibilities, drank down six billion bottles of wine that year merely to reward their refined palates: so refined, that a vast government subsidy, and a lobby capable of overthrowing cabinets, guaranteed one drink-shop for every ninety inhabitants; so cultivated, that ten per cent of the family budget went on it, the taste initiated before a child could walk, and death at nineteen months of D.T.s (cockeyed on pernod) incidental; so civilized, that one of every twenty-five dead Frenchmen had made the last leap through alcoholism.
They were still regarded as the arbiters of fine art, and Commissioner Clot of the Sureté Nationale could prove it by pointing to the walls of his office which were festooned with evidence: the best modern French painters brought such high prices, changed hands so freely, were so much easier to copy and, most ingratiatingly, had no histories, that no one need bother producing “old masters.” Deluged as he was even now with the work of someone who was buying originals, making and selling (perfect) copies, and selling the originals later elsewhere, Commissioner Clot remained confident of his prey: “If forgers would content themselves with one single forgery, they would get away with it nearly every time . . .”
To the end, the world’s most exemplary models of free men (as their vigorous succession of governments, and singular adroitness of tax evasion, witnessed); of thrift and provident husbandry (with three or four billion dollars’ worth of the world’s gold dead and interred in back yards); of sophisticated modernity (one had only to dial Odéon 8400 to get the time, the dissection of the latest minute scarcely understandable but, badly worn as it was, recorded by a famous French comedian); and still the favored child of the Church . . .
—Well she says she got athlete’s foot in one of the baths at Lourdes, said someone entering the Louvre; as an Italian coming out observed, to no one, that the sculptures of Michelangelo he had just seen inside were placed —coll’ arte ben conosciuta di tradimento francese.
Back on the left bank, the philosopher on the terrace of the Flore had been superseded by a blond woman with a fake concentration camp number tattooed on her left arm, who was supervising a discussion on Suffering. To one side, a chess game progressed with difficulty, for there was argument as to which tall piece was the king, which queen. An American who had been motoring in North Africa said, —Don’t laugh, it isn’t funny. We hit one. There are about thirty-five a day in Casablanca, they just don’t understand machines. It cost me thirty-two thousand francs to get my car fixed, I should have hit him square. They even found his teeth in the muffler.
One end of the Deux Magots was honoring a painter who had been discovered by an American fashion magazine: until 1916, he had painted nothing but bottles. His artistic revolution came in 1930. He discovered white.
Max had left the Royale. —How does he make it, does he work somewhere? —He lives out in a suburb called Banlieu, Hannah said, —he paints pictures for a well-known painter who signs them and sells them as originals. —But they are originals . . . Twelve Arab children sold peanuts from the tops of baskets and hashish from the bottom. Someone said there was a town in France called Condom. Many of the young men wore beards. —I never did understand Italian money while I was there, it was like confetti, rarther expensive confetti . . . Hannah said she had to go to work. She read her poems aloud in a local cave, naked. —I’m studying art here on the GI bill, one of the beards said, —I’ve found a school where all you have to do is register. Someone recited the Malachi prophecy concerning the Papacy. —There are only seven more to go, counting this one. —Do you think Paris is worth a Mass? someone asked, clutching a book titled Les cinq fontaines ensanglantées. —Nostradamus predicts it will last until 3420. AD that is.
On the terrace of the Reine Blanche, the blond boy said, —Next week he’s promised to take me to Paris . . . —But baby, this is Paris. Rudy and Frank had left, to return to their new flat overlooking the Pont d’léna with some of their gay party, all of whom stopped in the foyer to admire the large painting which had been a wedding present from a well-known artist. It portrayed a tall man standing, and a youth reclining at his feet, gazing up at what, upon close inspection, proved to be no more than a tear in the tall man’s trousers. Then one of the guests started to open the drapes at the long windows, and was stayed immediately from it. —Because Rudy just looked and looked for months for a place just like this, overlooking the water, and the very first night we were here, standing
right here in this very spot looking out at the lights and the Seine, a girl went out on the bridge and took her shoes off and jumped, right before our eyes, and that’s just ruined the view ever since for both of us . . . Then Frank was excused to write a letter home to Ohio, while the rest sat down to friandises served on modern Finnish glassware, to light cigarettes from match books stamped Rudy and Frank, and talk of Copenhagen. —Dear Mummy, Frank wrote, in the bedroom, —I know you will understand why I want to be with him always, Mummy. I know you will understand when I tell you that I love him the way you loved Daddy . . .
—“Time is a limp . . .” Hannah read under the pavement, her words rising despumated on the smoke and desultory commingling of languages, —emmerdant . . . —les americains, alors . . . while the city might seem to try to sleep out this great gap of time, asking, —Hast thou affections? —Yes, gracious madam. —Indeed! —Not in deed, madam . . . yet have I fierce affections, and think what Venus did with Mars . . . The thirty-third person leaped from the Eiffel Tower (though unofficial figures had it nearer a hundred), this time from the 348-foot second platform, and after a twenty-year investigation the Friends of Cleopatra found that the remains in her grave, in the library garden of the Louvre, were not that queen at all, but the body of an Arab soldier killed in a Paris café brawl, and the mummy, looking like a tight bundle of rags, gone to a mass grave eighty years before, and all joy of the worm. —Et toute nue . . . quelle envahisseuse! —“Time is a limp . . .” she commenced again.
Behind the clattering bastion of saucers, the aging image of the wigless father of her country read on, and someone said she could sit like that all night, because she wore a Policeman’s Friend. Someone on the terrace of the Deux Magots said a balloon race had begun that afternoon in the Bois. Someone read the message on a card from a friend touring the Holy Land, —I’ve just visited the Wailing Wall, and had a good cry. In the men’s toilet downstairs, someone scrawled Vive le Pape over the urinal.
The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Page 127