In those days, for the last time, there was still freedom to fuck standing up and cheap, and Madame Herote put it to good use. One Sunday an auction room appraiser with time on his hands sighted her shop and went in; he’s still there. He was slightly gaga, and gaga he remained, but nothing more. Their happiness aroused no interest in the neighborhood. In the shadow of the newspapers with their delirious appeals for ultimate patriotic sacrifices, life went on, strictly rationed, larded with precautions, and more trickily resourceful than ever before. Those are the heads and tails, the light and shade, of the same coin.
Madame Herote’s appraiser invested money in Holland for his better-informed friends, and for Madame Herote as well once they became intimate. Her stock of neckties and brassieres and almost-chemises attracted customers of both sexes and brought them back time and time again.
Any number of national and international encounters took place in the pink shadow of those curtains, amid the incessant loquacity of Madame Herote, whose substantial, talkative, and overwhelmingly perfumed person would have put the most bilious of males in a lecherous mood. Far from losing her head in these miscellaneous gatherings, Madame Herote turned them to her advantage, first in terms of money, since she levied a tithe on all sentimental transactions, but also through her enjoyment of all the lovemaking that went on around her. She took pleasure in bringing couples together and as much or more in breaking them up by means of tale-telling, insinuations, and out and out treachery.
She never wearied of fomenting happiness and tragedy. She stoked the life of the passions, and her business prospered.
Proust, who was half ghost,, immersed himself with extraordinary tenacity in the infinitely watery futility of the rites and procedures that entwine the members of high society, those denizens of the void, those phantoms of desire, those irresolute daisy-chainers still waiting for their Watteau, those listless seekers after implausible Cythereas. Whereas Madame Herote, with her sturdy popular origins, was firmly fastened to the earth by her crude, stupid, and very specific appetites.
Maybe, if people are so wicked, it’s only because they suffer, but years can elapse between the time when they stop suffering and the time when their characters take a turn for the better. Madame Herote’s impressive material and amatory success hadn’t had time yet to soften her rapacious instincts.
She was no more hateful than most of the shopkeeping ladies about, but she took so much trouble convincing people of the contrary that one doesn’t tend to forget her. Her shop was more than a meeting place, it was a kind of secret gateway to a world of wealth and luxury, in which, much as I had wanted to, I had never set foot until then, and from which I was promptly and embarrassingly ejected after one furtive incursion, my first and last.
In Paris the rich live together. Their neighborhoods adjoin and coalesce, so as to form a wedge of urban cake, the tip of which touches the Louvre and the rounded outer edge is bounded by the trees between the Pont d’Auteuil* and the Porte des Ternes. That’s the good part of the city. All the rest is shit and misery.
At first glance the rich neighborhoods don’t look so very different from the rest of the city, except that the streets are a little cleaner. But if you want to go deeper in your excursion, to get inside the people who live there, you’ll have to rely on chance or on intimate connections.
Madame Herote’s shop could give you some little access to this preserve, through the Argentines who came in from the privileged neighborhoods to buy shirts and underwear and flirt with the unusual selection of ambitious, theatrical, musical, and well-built young friends whom Madame Herote deliberately gathered around her.
I, who, as they say, had nothing to offer but my youth, became too much interested in one of them. Little Musyne they called her in her crowd.
In the Passage des Bérésinas, the shopkeepers all knew one another, it was like a provincial village wedged for years between two Paris streets, in other words, everybody slandered and spied on everybody else as much as was humanly and deliriously possible.
What the shopkeepers mostly talked and complained about before the war was the petty, desperately thrifty life they all led. Among other sordid hardships, the chronic complaint of those shopkeepers was being obliged by the prevailing gloom to light their gas at four in the afternoon because of their showcases. But inside the shops, the selfsame twilight made for an atmosphere conducive to off-color suggestions.
Nevertheless, a good many of the shops were being ruined by the war, while Madame Herote’s, thanks to the young Argentines, to officers with per diem allowances, and to the advice of her friend the appraiser, enjoyed a prosperity on which, as you can easily imagine, the whole neighborhood commented in the most vitriolic terms.
It was just about then, for instance, that the famous pastry shop at 112 lost its best customers. The latest mobilization was to blame. So many horses had been requisitioned that the ladies with the long gloves, who had dropped in regularly at teatime, would have been obliged to walk. They stopped coming, and they never came back. Sambanet, the music binder, was suddenly unable to resist the urge, which had long tormented him, to sodomize a soldier. A bungled attempt one night did him irreparable harm with certain patriotic gentlemen, who accused him forthwith of being a spy. He was obliged to close up shop.
Then Mademoiselle Hermance, at No. 26, who had hitherto specialized in the sale of a certain mentionable or unmentionable item made of rubber, would have been doing all right under the prevailing circumstances, if she hadn’t found it so unconscionably difficult to procure her “merry widows,” which were made in Germany.
In short, it was only Madame Herote who, on the threshold of a new era of lighter-than-air democratic lingerie, found an easy way to prosperity.
Plenty of anonymous letters were written from shop to shop, and they didn’t mince words. Madame Herote preferred for her entertainment to write to highly placed persons, so demonstrating that a virulent ambition was the cornerstone of her character. She wrote several to the Premier, for instance, just to convince him that he was a cuckold, and some to Marshal Petain* in English, with the help of a dictionary, to drive him crazy. But what’s an anonymous letter? Water off a duck’s back. Every day Madame Herote received a whole packet of these unsigned letters, which didn’t smell good, I assure you. She’d be pensive, upset, for about ten minutes, but then she’d recover her composure, she didn’t care how or by what means, but she got it back good and solid, for there was no place for doubt in her inner life, and still less for truth.
Among her customers and protégées, there were several young ladies from the entertainment world—actresses and musicians—who came with more debts than clothes. Madame Herote gave them advice, and it helped them no end. One of them was Musyne, the most attractive of the lot for my money. Musyne was a musician, she played the violin, a very shrewd little angel, as I was soon to learn. Implacable in her determination to succeed here on earth and not in heaven, she was doing all right at the time of our first meeting in an adorable, exceedingly Parisian, and now completely forgotten little act at the Variétés.*
She’d appear with her violin in a kind of impromptu prologue in melody and verse. A charming, complicated genre.
Smitten as I was, my days became a frenzy, dashing from the hospital to the back door of her theater. I was seldom alone in waiting for her. The ground forces would snatch her away in a twinkling, the flyers had an even easier time of it, but undoubtedly the seduction prize went to the Argentines. As more and more soldiers swarmed to the colors, their cold-storage meat business assumed the proportions of a tidal wave. Little Musyne made a good thing of those profiteering days; she knew what she was doing, since then the Argentines have gone out of existence.
I didn’t understand. I was being hornswoggled by everything and everybody, women, money, and ideas. I was a sucker, and I didn’t like it. I still run into Musyne now and then, every two years or so she crosses my path, as people one has known well tend to. T
wo years is the time it takes to perceive at one glance, a glance as sure as instinct, the ugliness that can come over a face, even one that was delicious in its day.
For a moment you hesitate, then you accept the face as it has become, with its repugnant cumulative disharmony. What can you do but acquiesce in this slow, painstaking caricature which two years have etched, but accept the passage of time, that portrait of ourselves. Then we can say that we’ve really recognized each other (like some foreign banknote that one hesitates to accept at first sight), that we hadn’t taken a wrong turn, that each on his own we’d traveled the right road, the inevitable road to decay, for another two years. That’s all there is to it.
When she ran into me like that, I frightened her so with my big head it looked as if she wanted to run away, to avoid me, to turn aside, anything … Obviously, as far as she was concerned, I stank of a whole past. But I’ve known her age for too long, and try as she will she absolutely can’t escape me. She stands there, evidently put off by my existence, as if I were a monster. She, so sensitive, feels obliged to ask me crude, stupid questions, the kind that a housemaid caught stealing sugar might ask. All women are domestics at heart. But possibly she imagines this revulsion more than she feels it; that’s the only consolation I can find. Maybe I’m not really repulsive, but only give her the illusion that I am. Maybe I’m an artist in that line. After all, why wouldn’t there be an art of ugliness as well as beauty? Maybe it’s a gift that needs to be cultivated.
For a long time I thought little Musyne was stupid, but that was only because I was vain, and she had run out on me. Before the war, you know, we were all a lot more ignorant and conceited than today. A little nobody like me was much more likely to take rubbish for rainbows than he would be today. I thought being in love with somebody as adorable as Musyne would give me every kind of strength and virtue, especially the courage I lacked, just because she was so pretty and such a gifted musician. Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.
Dozens of Madame Herote’s cousins had made the supreme sacrifice, so she never left her passage except in deep mourning. To tell the truth, she seldom went out, because the appraiser was pretty jealous. We gathered in the dining room behind the shop, which with the coming of prosperity had taken on the appearance of a little salon. There we would chat and pass the time in a pleasant, well-behaved kind of way under the gas jet. Little Musyne at the piano would charm us with classical pieces, only classical music was thought fitting in those sorrowful times. We’d sit there for whole afternoons, side by side, the appraiser in the middle, musing over our secrets, our fears and hopes.
Madame Herote’s maid, whom she had hired only a short time before, was always bursting with impatience to find out when this one would finally make up his mind to marry that one. In her village free love was unheard of. All those Argentines and officers and slippery-fingered customers filled her with an almost animal terror.
More and more often Musyne was monopolized by the South American customers. What with waiting for my angel, I soon got to know the caballeros’ kitchens and servants very well. Naturally the valets took me for a pimp. In the end everybody took me for a pimp, including Musyne and, I’m pretty sure, the regulars at Madame Herote’s shop. There was nothing I could do about it. Sooner or later people are bound to classify you as something.
I wangled another two months’ convalescent leave, and there was even some talk of a medical discharge. Musyne and I decided to go and live together in Billancourt. This was actually a subterfuge to ditch me, because she took advantage of its being so far away to come home less and less frequently. She was always finding some pretext for spending the night in Paris.
The nights in Billancourt were soft and sweet, enlivened now and then by those childish airplane or zeppelin alarms which provided the civilian population with thrills and self-justification. While waiting for Musyne, I’d walk as far as the Pont de Grenelle,* where the darkness rises from the river to the overhead Métro tracks, with their strings of lights traversing the darkness and their enormous metallic hulks, hurling themselves like thunder at the flanks of the big buildings on the Quai de Passy.
There are neighborhoods like that in big cities, so stupidly ugly that you’re almost always alone there.
In the end Musyne was showing up at our so-called home only once a week. More and more often she’d spend the evening accompanying some lady singer at the house of some Argentine. She could have made a living playing at the movies, and it would have been a lot easier for me to call for her, but the Argentines were lively and paid well, while the movie houses were dismal and the pay was wretched. Life is made up of those little preferences.
To complete my misery, the Theater of the Armies came along. In no time Musyne got to know dozens of people at the Ministry. More and more often she went off to entertain our soldier boys at the front and stayed away for weeks on end, serving up sonatas and adagios to the troops. The front seats in the orchestra would be occupied by top brass, well placed to admire her legs, while the soldiers, seated on wooden stands behind their commanders, had to make do with melodious echoes. After the performance, of course, she would spend exceedingly complicated nights in the hotels of the army area. One day she came home as happy as a lark, brandishing a certificate of heroism, signed if you please by one of our glorious generals. With that diploma she became a real success.
It made her ever so popular with the Argentine colony. They feted her, they were mad about my Musyne, oh, what an adorable little front-line violinist! So rosy-cheeked and curly-headed, and a heroine to boot. Those Argentines knew which side their bread was buttered on, their admiration for our glorious generals knew no bounds, and when my Musyne came back to them with her authentic document, her pretty phiz, and her nimble, heroic little fingers, each tried to love her more than the next, they tried to outbid each other, so to speak. The poetry of heroism holds an irresistible appeal for people who aren’t involved in a war, especially when they’re making piles of money out of one. It’s only natural.
Ah, jaunty heroism! Strong men have swooned away! The shipbuilders of Rio offered their names and their shares to the adorable young thing who feminized the warlike valor of the French so charmingly for their benefit. Musyne, I have to admit, had managed to outfit herself with a delightful little repertory of war adventures, they were wonderfully becoming, like a jaunty little cap. Sometimes she amazed me with her skillful touch, and listening to her I had to own that when it came to tall stories I was a clumsy faker compared to her. She had a gift for locating her fantasies in a dramatic faraway setting that gave everything a lasting glow. It often struck me that when we combatants spun yarns they tended to be crudely chronometric and precise. Her medium was eternity. Claude Lorrain* was right in saying that the foreground of a picture is always repugnant and that the interest of an artwork must be seen in the distance, in that unfathomable realm which is the refuge of lies, of those dreams caught in the act, which are the only thing men love. The woman who can turn our despicable nature to account has no difficulty in becoming our darling, our indispensable and supreme hope. We expect her to preserve our illusory raison d’être, but on the other hand she can make a very good living while performing this magic function. Instinctively, Musyne did just that.
The Argentines lived in the Ternes area and on the fringes of the Bois, in small private houses, resplendent and well fenced-in, which were kept so delightfully warm in that wintry weather that when you came in from the street your thoughts suddenly took an optimistic turn, you couldn’t help it.
In my jittery despair, I had taken to waiting for Musyne in the butler’s pantry as often as possible, a stupid thing to do. Sometimes I waited until morning, I was sleepy, but jealousy kept me awake, and so did the quantities of white wine the servants poured out for me. I seldom saw the Argentine masters of the house, I heard their songs and their blusteri
ng Spanish and the piano which never stopped but was usually being played by other hands than those of my Musyne. What, meanwhile, was she doing with her hands, the slut?
When she saw me at the door in the morning, she made a face. I was still as natural as an animal in those days. I was like a dog with a bone, I wouldn’t let go.
People waste a large part of their youth in stupid mistakes. It was obvious that my darling was going to leave me, flat and soon. I hadn’t found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me … and plenty of other people … twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.
So as I warmed myself in the pantry with the servants, I was unaware that the people dancing over my head were Argentine gods, they could have been German, French, or Chinese, that didn’t mean a thing, the point was that they were gods, rich people, that’s what I should have realized. Them upstairs with Musyne, me downstairs with nothing. Musyne was thinking seriously of her future, and naturally she preferred to do that kind of thinking with a god. I, too, was thinking of my future, but in a kind of delirium, because my constant companion was a muted fear of being killed in the war or of starving when peace came. I had a death sentence hanging over me, and I was in love. A nightmare, to put it mildly. Not far away, less than seventy miles, millions of brave, well-armed, well-trained men were waiting to settle my hash, and plenty of Frenchmen were waiting, too, to pump me full of lead if I declined to be cut into bleeding ribbons by the opposite side.
A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there’s a war. When other people start thinking about you, it’s to figure out how to torture you, that and nothing else. The bastards want to see you bleeding, otherwise they’re not interested! Princhard was dead right. In the shadow of the slaughterhouse, you don’t speculate very much about your future, you think about loving in the days you have left, because there’s no other way of forgetting your body that’s about to be skinned alive.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 8